Speaking of Space: 1999

[dewline]

Since the subject came up by association with the late Barry Morse last posting.

Looking back, I can state my current opinion of the show pretty quickly: great spacecraft design, cool VFX for the time period, bad scripts, good actors trying to hold it all together as best they could in spite of the scripts.

Fair assessment or not?

Comments

[mommimus-prime.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd say that's fair. I really remember watching the first episode and being blown away and then dying a little inside as the show played out. And I was just thinking of the show yesterday when the public radio classics show played Holst's Mars because of one episode that used that piece while sending founts of bubbles through the set. It has been seared into my brain.

[(Anonymous)]

"Space Brain", I'm guessing? Sounds like how the episode wrapped up in terms of visuals to me.

You can tell that I really bought into it: I have the Moonbase Alpha Technical Notebook, tattered relic that it is nowadays.`

[mommimus-prime.livejournal.com]

That would be the one.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right. I always thought that the premise was absurd (moon gets blasted out of orbit after nuclear waste blows up on the dark side), but otherwise the show, or the few episodes that I saw of it, anyway, was pretty decent. (Fun fact: Martin Landau was offered the role of Spock before Leonard Nimoy, but turned it down.)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the idea that the moon would survive a good-sized chunk of it being converted into a fusion motor - if I understood what little physics there were correctly - seems absurd on the face of it.

Sidebar: I noticed there's a Landau quote in the Toronto Star coverage of Morse's death.

[daytonward.livejournal.com]

Yep, pretty fair assessement, and I say that as an unabashed fan of cheesy SF shows from the 60s, 70s, and 80s

The Eagle still totally rocks, by the way. :)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Yep. The only problem I have with it is they never bothered to nail down where the washroom was supposed to be. A common idiocy of space operas in those days, I know, but still, it gnaws at me. :-D

[steve-roby.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of Space: 1999 as the show that got to me before my BS detector kicked in. I was 12 when it premiered and though I thought the basic premise was, shall we say, poorly thought through, I really liked the show in general. It had an atmosphere unlike any other SFTV series. (One recent writer pointed out that the show works a lot better if you think of it as horror rather than SF.) The BS detector kicked in at some point during Battlestar Galactica's original run; that was when I came to the conclusion that just because there's a science fiction series on TV it doesn't necessarily follow that it's any good.

So... Space: 1999. Watched every episode, got the 30" Eagle spacecraft, bought all the books that were available in Canada (meaning I didn't find the US-only The Edge of the Infinite or the UK-only Earthfall until many, many years later), and got a few of the comics. (The BS detector had started forming -- I knew the comics were no good.)

But I still really like it, despite its flaws. I bought the DVD megaset, and I have the recent novels and a couple of recent nonfiction books. I can point out everything that's crap about it as easily as anyone who dislikes it can, but I don't care. Between the cast, the set and spacecraft design, the outstanding music (in the first season, at least), and the sheer strangeness of many of the stories, I still enjoy it.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Sounds about right.

As for the comic books...well, the 4-colour stuff from Charlton had one good thing going for it: it was some of the earliest work John Byrne ever did. For good, and for ill.