Sci-Fi TV Series 1950–1990s

Out There

1951–52 CBS
12 half-hour episodes

B&W

This is before my time, and I’ve never seen an episode, and I’ve been unable to determine whether copies of the show still exist.

Aired stories by several of the big 1950s sci-fi authors: Heinlein, Bradbury and Sturgeon.

One reads that its success was doomed by a very poor time slot: Sunday afternoons.

See The Classic TV Archive.

Tales of Tomorrow

1951–53 ABC
85 half-hour episodes

B&W

This is before my time. I’ve only seen public-domain copies.

The acting is very good, live stage plays for TV. Some themes are old monster shows re-done, such as Frankenstein. Other themes form the basis for later sci-fi and horror shows. Lovely old electric organ theme music.

Science Fiction Theatre

1955–57 Ivan Tors Productions,
78 half-hour episodes

color (first season), B&W (later seasons)

This is before my time. I have seen only a few public domain episodes.

The episode introductions are in science documentary format, with host Truman Bradley giving science and history background for the theme, usually with some electronic or science gadget, joined, sometimes, by real scientists, followed by a story portrayed by actors. In each episode, Bradley emphasizes that the story is fictional.

The science-babble and gee-whiz stuff gets a little thick. As silly as much of the dialog is, it is clear that real scientists were consulted… on occasion.

Established actors such as: Basil Rathbone, Vincent Price, new actors such as DeForest Kelley (“Bones” of Star Trek).

Sci-fi themes, for example: inheritance of memory, space flight, Moon landing, flight to Jupiter and Mars, alien abduction, Egypt’s pyramids built by levitation, time travel, etc.

This series is peculiar, in that it switched from color to black and white, in order to cut costs.

“Science has a hard time separating fact from fiction…of course our story is fiction, but it might offer a possible explanation.”

The Twilight Zone

1959–63 CBS
156 episodes, mostly half-hour, season 4 was one-hour

B&W

Twilight Zone wasn’t a sci-fi series per se. Rather, it was a collection of short stories, tales of the supernatural, unnatural or plain weird. Many episodes had sci-fi themes — the distinction between “weird” and “sci-fi” being blurred, of course, in the setting of deepest darkest Twilight Zone.

Besides varying in setting, the episodes vary greatly in production quality. Most are wonderful in some way, by being really scary or weird stories, or by fantastic acting, or by simply excellent, classy execution. I love the late ’50s feeling.

Don’t expect glorious special effects or mind-bending science. With few exceptions, these are stage plays of short stories, made with a very small budget — which was expended mostly on great actors.

Several other TV shows of the late ’50s and early ’60s were anthologies of stories of the strange or unnatural. I list some purely sci-fi ones here, but some such as Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (1959–61) treated only supernatural topics.

Serling was far more concerned with the psychological and social aspects of sci-fi — in the few episodes that depict aliens, they are deliberately ridiculous (or else, they’re people). Androids (never by that name) appear in some episodes, but they too are just adorned people.

In a half dozen or so episodes, a flying saucer familiar from Forbidden Planet appears, (once showing its real dimensions: about 7′ across). The one future car is just the one from that same movie. And yes, “Robby” the robot of that movie gets his chops in too, in a couple of episodes (in one, he has an alternative head). The episode “The Little People” depicts a classic rocket ship with fins.

Perhaps the most famous episode is “To Serve Man”. I remember this vividly, because when the alien appeared, it was too much for my five-year-old bravery: I went to the bathroom at the far side of the house, turned the water on, and plugged my ears. Here, the brief view of a flying saucer is instead a Harryhausen animation, a clip from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. The aliens’ makeup jobs are the most ambitious ever used in the series, and it is, ultimately, a black comedy.

Besides space travel, aliens, particle beam weapons, various episodes treat:

• time loops
• time travel (more often accidental than scientific)
• alternate realities
• alternate universes (crossing into)
• parallel universes
• various alien visitors
• telekinesis
• suspended animation
• robots and androids
• flying saucers
• particle beam weapons (“Two”)
• replicators
• invisible walls
• post-holocaust world
• dystopia
• Earth doomed by natural catastrophe
• child with godlike abilities to transform things
• mental telepathy
• suspended animation
• flat-screen TV(!)

Star Trek drew very heavily from TZ: Each of Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Scotty (James Doohan), Sulu (George Takei), and many familiar extras and guest stars, and many of the situations explored in its multiple generations. Besides, some mood music of TZ was very thinly re-worked for Star Trek.

Lost in Space? Dr. Smith (Johnathan Harris) plays significant roles in several episodes, Will Robinson (Billy Mumy) showed his natural talent in a couple of very serious and scary episodes.

Bewitched? Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), (the 1st) Darren (Dick York), Endora (Agnes Moorhead), and Larry (David White) were each the star of a TZ episode.

(By the way, Serling himself refers to Twilight Zone as “TZ”.)

How about the ’60s Batman’s Alfred (Alan Napier), and Chief O’Hara (Stafford Repp) — and first Catwoman (Julie Newmar) as the Devil — with cute horns!

Get a load of Nancy Kulp — Jane Hathaway of The Beverly Hillbillies, playing a far more serious character than really belongs in a comedy. There’s also Raymond Bailey, who played Mr. Drysdale.

Famous old movie stars: Ed Wynn, Burgess Merideth, James Whitmore, Buddy Ebsen, Buster Keaton, Mickey Rooney, Estelle Winwood, Lee Marvin, Gary Merrill, Cedric Hardwicke, Gladys Cooper, Joan Blondell, William Demarest, Sterling Holloway, Jackie Cooper; many others
Famous new movie/TV stars: Charles Bronson, Anne Francis, Jack Klugman, Dennis Weaver, Carol Burnett, Robert Redford, Roddy McDowall, Robert Duvall, Martin Landau, Patrick Macnee, Cloris Leachman, Doug McClure, William Windom, Keenan Wynn, Burt Reynolds, Richard Kiel, Donald Pleasence, Telly Savalas, Richard Basehart, Robert Lansing, Mariette Hartley, Michael Constantine, George Lindsey, Morgan Brittany; gobs more
Famous guest stars: Don Rickles, Jonathan Winters
Familiar supporting actors: an absolute parade

This is a list of episodes that involve some sort of sci-fi theme. (Of course, the gray area is very broad, as broad as the Twilight Zone!)

• “Time Enough at Last” Burgess Meredith
• “Third from the Sun” Fritz Weaver, Edward Andrews, Joe Maross, Denise Alexander, Lori March
• “And When the Sky Was Opened”, Rod Taylor, James Hutton, Charles Aidman
• “I shot an Arrow into the Air” Dewey Martin, Edward Binns
• “Elegy” Cecil Kellaway, Jeff Morrow, Don Dubbins, Kevin Hagen
• “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” Claude Atkins, Garrett Atwater, Jack Weston
• “People Are Alike All Over” Roddy McDowall, Susan Oliver, Paul Comi, Byron Morrow
• “The Mighty Casey” Abraham Sofaer, Jack Warden, Robert Sorrels
• “The Rip Van Winkle Caper” Simon Oakland, Oscar Beregi, Jr., Lew Gallo, John Mitchum
• “The Invaders” Agnes Moorhead
• “The Prime Mover” Buddy Ebsen
• “A Hundred Yards over the Rim” Cliff Robertson, John Crawford, Evans Evans, John Astin
• “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” John Hoyt, Jean Willes, Jack Elam
• “The Obsolete Man” Burgess Meredeth, Fritz Weaver
• “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” Don Rickles, Burgess Meredeth
• “The Lateness of the Hour” Inger Stevens, John Hoyt, Irene Tedrow
• “Eye of the Beholder” Maxine Stuart, William D. Gordon, Jennifer Howard
• “Two” Elizabeth Montgomery, Charles Bronson
• “Death Ship” Jack Klugman, Ross Martin, Fredrick Beir
• “The Midnight Sun” Lois Nettleton, Betty Garde, Tom Reese
• “It’s a Good Life” Billy Mumy, Cloris Leachman
• “Once upon a Time” Buster Keaton, Stanley Adams, Jesse White
• “To Serve Man” Lloyd Bochner, Richard Kiel, Susan Cummings
• “No Time Like the Past” Dana Andrews, Malcom Atterbury
• “Parallel” Steve Forrest, Jacquelin Scott
• “On Thursday We Leave for Home” James Whitmore, Tim O’Connor, James Broderick, Paul Langton
• “The Fugitive” James Pat O’Malley, Nancy Kulp
• “The Little People” Claude Aikins, Joe Maross
• “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” Andy Devine, Howard McNear, Dabbs Greer
• “The Trade Ins” Joseph Schildkraut, Alma Platt, Noah Keen, Theodore Marcuse
• “The Gift” Nico Minardos, Paul Mazursky, Vito Scotti, Geoffey Horne, Edmund Vargas
• “I Sing the Body Electric” David White, Veronica Cartwright, Josephine Hutchinson
• “Uncle Simon” Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Ford, Ian Wolfe, (part of) Robby the Robot
• “Probe 7, Over and Out” Richard Basehart, Antoinette Bower
• “The Long Morrow” Robert Lansing, Mariette Hartley
• “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” Collin Wilcox, Suzy Parker, Richard Long, Pam Austin
• “Black Leather Jackets” Lee Kinsolving, Shelley Fabares, Denver Pyle, Michael Conrad
• “From Agnes — with Love” Wally Cox, Raymond Bailey
• “Stopover in a Quiet Town” Barry Nelson, Nancy Malone
• “The Fear” Peter Mark Richman, Hazel Court

“It’s been said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things: science fiction — the improbable made possible, fantasy — the impossible made probable. What would you have if you put these two different things together…”

My Favorite Martian

1963–66 CBS
107 half-hour episodes

B&W (75 episodes), color (32 episodes)

A martian anthropologist (named Exigus 12½) is surveying Earth, when his spaceship is hit by a U.S. X-15 space plane, and he has to crash. A reporter, Tim, finds him and takes him home, and proceeds to pass him off as his uncle Martin, supposedly until the ship can be fixed.

It’s a sitcom, most of the humor arising from the pretense about uncle Martin’s nature.

Martin can raise little antennas at the back of his head, go invisible, levitate things remotely with his finger, rearrange molecules (to make a thing turn into another), travel in time, etc. So, the series covers many standard sci-fi situations, comedically.

It was a thin premise for a comedy, and their material was likewise limited. I think it only went on so long because of the public’s interest in things spacey.

The Outer Limits

1963–65 ABC
49 one-hour episodes

B&W

Like its predecessor The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits was an anthology of short story plots, but in contrast, its themes were of decidedly sci-fi content.

The monsters intentionally scary — some were good enough to reappear in later sci-fi shows. (Notably, the horta of Star Trek began here as a giant microbe.)

Also, the actors Shatner, Nimoy, Doohan and Whitney of Star Trek each played in The Outer Limits episodes.

Although the sets and special effects are often very cheesy, they’re much more elaborate than anything in Twilight Zone, or any other series of the period.

While the acting in many episodes is very good, and the mood really is very creepy, the script often provides far too much sciencebabble as explanation. The scripts are mostly much less sophisticated than those of its predecessor. The “control voice” narrator, which, even at the time, strained for eeriness, really is a distraction — a sophomoric answer to Serling’s episodic remarks.

One of my favorite episodes was “Behold Eck!”, about a two-dimensional alien and an optician(!) who makes lenses that allow him to see it — partly because I know of no other sci-fi discussion of 2D beings, and partly because I never saw an optician portrayed as a hero genius.

Another is “Soldier”, which depicts infantrymen in a future war zone, transported to the present time. There is way too much explanation to keep it creepy, but the future scenes are great, and so are some ideas explained by the soldier.

Also check out: “The Invisible Enemy”, about the scariness of travel to Mars, with Adam West (Batman), Bob DoQui (the first portrayal of a black astronaut, to the best of my knowledge), and also Ted Knight of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Dr. Who

1964–89, 2005–present, BBC Studios
862 episodes over 26 seasons
half-hour, three-quarter hour, one-hour, depending on season

B&W (up to 1970), color (from 1970)

This longest-running of the sci-fi series is more than I can discuss in any detail. I’ve seen only a fraction of the episodes. (The studios destroyed a lot of the early episode tapes, for the stupidest possible reasons). I’ll talk about why it works.

Vehicle: the Tardis is a time machine, but more than that, so much more. And just for fun, on the outside its appearance is “stuck” as an old British police telephone booth, but it’s much, much bigger on the inside than on the outside.

The Doctor’s weapons: only his genius! (And a bunch of other gadgets.)

Aliens, androids, robots, entities, etc. made weekly appearances. Notably, the homicidal robot “Daleks” (particularly scary as their scariness was left to the viewer), were a recurring menace.

The show isn’t so much based on a premise, as a person: the Doctor himself is the main draw, a cross between an understated super-hero and a mad scientist, whose purpose of course is ever to save the universe. In the Tardis, he can go anywhere, and to any time he likes, for any adventure imagination would allow. He has some limitations: for example, he’s not exactly immortal — but if he gets killed, or his actor gets bored or laid off, he switches bodies.

It’s just fun.

The Dr. Who series has been reborn as of 2018. I only saw a couple of episodes. I liked them very much.

Space Patrol

1963–4 National Interest Pictures (UK)
39 half-hour episodes

B&W, marionettes

This was a marionette show, the brainchild of the prolific Roberta Leigh. It followed the better known U.S. show of the same name, and the U.K. marionette show Fireball XL-5 of the Andersons. Leigh had previously worked with the Andersons on TV puppet shows.

The show’s curious electronic music, I read, is also Leigh’s invention. The story is, she put some gadgets together from parts she bought herself.

Time frame: 2100.

Primary space vehicle, Galasphere 347, is driven by “meson power”. They go really fast, but not faster than light — so a trip to Pluto still requires months. The captain always switches to robot control for landing: the same scene of a robot walking to strange percussive electronic music always follows. (No other scenes involve this particular robot.) When exploring planets, the crew rides “hover jets”. Alien species appear in different sorts of ships, but none is a boring rocket.

These galaspheres consist of a torus with a middle axial section; the inside has various compartments, one of which is a “freezer” which they enter for extended trips. The crew wears space suits outside the craft, in space and on planets with no atmosphere.

Aliens: most action takes place in our solar system (unfortunately consistently referred to as “our galaxy”). The crew consists of a Martian and a Venusian as well as a captain. These appear to be nothing but people with funny voices. They meet (intelligent, not always nice) life forms on each other planet, as well as one from another star. An annoying talking parrot (a “gammadictum”) from Mars is a repeat character. Some planets have intelligent plants.

Various weapons, often dreamed up by “Professor Haggarty”.

Robots are common, sometimes being treated as persons, sometimes as servants. (In one episode, they revolt.)

World Space Patrol is a scientific military thing. Rules the “galaxy” (by which they mean solar system).

Character development is relentless (one is always hungry, one is very precise, one talks too much…) At least they thought about it. The dialog is silly and badly dated, but often deals with grown-up interpersonal issues. The mood of every episode is work-a-day: a running joke is how much leave the crew should get versus what they really get. A couple of woman characters are pretty and sensible in their subordinate positions. Another running gag is that women talk too much.

The themes are mostly simple adventure in various places in space, while saving the “galaxy” (solar system) from bad guys. And while the hero aspect is very pronounced, the story lines aren’t usually simple hero-villain.

This series is different from many contemporaries, in that at least some scientific facts are somewhat accurately applied, and some imagination was evident in its aliens and gadgets.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

1964–68 ABC
110 one-hour episodes

B&W (32 episodes), color (78 episodes)

Note: David Hedison played in the science fiction film The Fly.

Date: 1970s (barely the future — only 2 years away when the series ended!)

Ship: nuclear-powered super-submarine Seaview, with very cool flukes, very roomy inside.
Shuttle: nuclear-powered Flying Sub
Weapons: The subs both sported lasers, and could “electrify” their hulls.

Lots of sea monsters, aliens, ghosts, etc. visit. Time-travel is a recurring theme.

The series derived from the silly and confused 1961 film by the same name, the direct offspring from a 1959 film The Atomic Submarine, which also featured a nuclear sub thwarting a giant monster. That film mooshed up space themes (Van Allen belts) with the secret agent theme (a secret submarine), and the always-popular salvation of the world (using nukes).

While the mood of the episodes remained darkly and militarily serious, they quickly devolved into a weekly monster show, with many episodes centered around some guy in a scary rubber suit shaking the submarine model around in a swimming pool — too pathetic for anyone over ten.

Lost in Space

1965–68 CBS
83 one-hour episodes

B&W (29 episodes), color (54 episodes)

Date: 1997

Mission: From United States, to scout out Alpha Centauri with a view toward colonization. Mission glitch: an evil stowaway saboteur.

Vehicle: Jupiter 2. A basic flying saucer, nuclear-powered. It looks (and sounds) cool in flight, but is prone to crashing, and in later episodes, just sits. Questions about gravitation and light speed do not arise.

Robot: “The Robot”, by the same Robert Kinoshita who created “Robby” for Forbidden Planet (which sibling comes to visit in at least one episode). Too good a character to lose, the initially sinister robot stays on to the end.

Weapons: laser pistols and “rifles”. (Now that I think of it, why does a laser need rifling?)

It started out as a creepy space opera with a deadly robot, but lightened by a “Swiss Family Robinson” motif. The family wandered through space, meeting danger everywhere, constantly thwarted and exposed by betrayals of saboteur-cum-coward Smith, incomprehensibly tolerating him. (Well, without him, they wouldn’t have been “lost”, which would have left them merely “in space”.)

The over-the-top Dr. Smith completely up-stages the rest of the cast from the start. By the third season, it was all Smith, the boy, and his robot — the rest became familial backdrop. The younger sister had a few cute episodes of her own, while the older sister, perhaps in need of no further development, got none; the second-in-command was forever peeved at being so completely written out.

It worked for a while as cute children’s entertainment. The series suffered throughout from confusion about its audience, and overall in plot and tone. The scary robot became the lad’s funny puppy, and the young lad had softened the evil doctor’s hard heart, rendering him a greedy cowardly boob of uncertain gender affinity. By the end, Mom and Dad were no longer watching: it was just for kids; the Jupiter 2 was grounded, and the increasingly silly aliens had to come to visit.

The writers never showed any enthusiasm whatever for the science aspect of sci-fi, which bugged a portion of the young adults who formed the apparent target audience.

This was too confused a show to draw coherent parables from — the principles were simply American family values of the time.
Maybe one: Fruits can’t be trusted in space, either — but they’re good with kids.

The Time Tunnel

1966–67 ABC
30 one-hour episodes

color

Date: 1968 (slightly in the future)

Besides the prop of the tunnel itself, there isn’t much here in the way of special effects. A few scenes made for the pilot flashed by at the beginning of every episode, but nothing ever comes of them.

The main sci-fi premise is that of time travel, but its narrowness doomed the show to a limited future.

So the two main guys are forever popping around famous historical periods, hiding their true identities, being caught by authorities or bad guys, escaping, trying to get back to the present and on the way generally messing with history. A couple of times they pop into the future and mess with aliens. The psychological hook is the lost-child sensation — this is all I remember of it.

Besides this, it had the super-secret government mega-project angle, with a U.S. Senator pushing them to prove the expensive technology, and thus getting them into all their troubles. This, along with the door to something else, predates the modern series Stargate.

Both male leads are alphas (maybe one a capital alpha and the other a cute lowercase alpha). They each occasionally get girls, only to regretfully leave ’em in the past!

If I am to draw a parable from this, it might be:
If only the gummit would give us lots more money and keep their hands out of it, we could fix the past, and make it all hunky-dory!

Raumpatrouille Orion

1966–67 Bavaria Atelier GmbH, by order of WDR
7 one-hour episodes

B&W

Premise: Humanity on Earth lives at the bottom of the ocean, to protect against increased solar activity. Otherwise, people have colonized many planets, moons, and planetesimals. There are no more nation-states.

Mission: to protect Earth from alien threats, as part of the Galaktischer Sicherheitsdienst (GSD).

Aliens: F.R.O.G.S. “Feindliche Raumschiffe ohne galaktische Seriennummer“ (hostile spaceships without galactic serial numbers) Slender, shimmering light-beings, humanoid in shape.

Vehicles: Raumkreuzer Orion VII and VIII, basically flying saucers, with curious thorn-like details. Take off from an ocean whirlpool, travel faster than light (“Hyperspace”). Also “Lancets”, which are smaller saucers with a semi-spherical top covered with clear plastic bubbles, and usually used as escape vehicles.

FROGS ships are dart-like, flying in tight formation, but frequently making instantaneous shifts in position.

Weapons: “Lichtwerfer“ (light-thrower), a laser gun (to which FROGS are immune). “Overkill”, a super-bomb; useful for blowing up planetoids.

Very cool futuristic décor, making much use of clear plastic, with a preference to rounded forms. An object that is in fact a clothes iron is the centerpiece of one of the control panels.

Computer: “Electronic brain”, of whom one asks pressing questions.

Robots: “Alpha Android” a floating submarine-like object, not very android at all, which often makes a mess of things.

McLane is forever breaking orders, so as to save the Earth. He gets no end of grief from General Wamsler and other upper-echelons, but he is clearly going to get all the girls.

Oberst Villa speculates as to the motives of the FROGS, but is later captured and brainwashed by them.

Star Trek

1966–67 Desilou,
1968–69 Paramount Television
78 one-hour episodes

color

Note: Majel Barrett-Roddenberry played in many episodes as Nurse Christine Chapel but in the pilot episode was “Number One”.

Date: 2266+

Premise: The United Federation of Planets maintains a fleet of faster-than-light starships, “To seek out new life and new civilizations”. “Star Fleet” is a military outfit, which also protects the Federation from dangers from space. The main setting is one of those starships.

Vehicle: A proper starship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, carrying a crew of hundreds, cruising at speeds faster than light by means of warp drive, which used antimatter as fuel, and engines that somehow involve trilithium. Various alien cultures have their own starships with different capabilities. Sometimes, stranger vehicles appear.

The terms “warp drive” and “warp factor” represent an attempt to rationalize faster-than-light travel against the theory of relativity. The idea (in other science-fiction literature) is that the starship somehow “warps” space-time, to circumvent all the paradoxes of travel at such speeds. Most episodes treat “warp speed” like nothing but a fast speed, though, and often, the starship “stops” in space. The writers didn’t seek scientific consultation regularly. (We’re making family entertainment here, Jim! Not science education!) Still, this showed more attention to physical detail of the issues of interstellar travel than had appeared in previous sci-fi film or TV series.

Other transportation: the transporter, which conveniently disintegrates things on one end, and re-integrates them on the other (usually). Various space shuttles, also capable of warp speed over short distances.

Weapons: radiation-beam phasers, could be set to stun or kill or just make the enemy disappear in a glow, are both hand weapons and part of the starship arsenal. The Enterprise also fires explosive photon torpedoes. Alien groups have their own kinds of weapons. The Klingons pack disruptors, which are much like phasers but make a different noise.

Shields: The Enterprise could raise defensive shields to defend itself to some extent from most weaponry. The shields drew a lot of energy, and precluded the use of the transporter.

Computer: a semi-intelligent device, built into the Enterprise, usually interacted with the crew verbally. Arrays of large boxes, recognizable as computers to viewers in the ’60s, sometimes represent it. Little solid blocks of colored plastic, called tapes, represented a means of data transportation by hand. (These get points for not being immediately outdated.)

Other gadgets: various sensors and scanners, hand-held tricorders with a battery of sensing equipment, hand-held communicators for inter-personal talk and for contacting spaceships. The Romulans had a “cloaking device” to render their starships invisible.

Robots: appeared rarely, and usually in the form of androids, and rather than being an everyday affair, usually formed the theme of the episode.

Aliens: almost as many species as there are episodes. Most common are “Vulcans” (Spock is a Vulcan). Klingons, Romulans, Tellurites, Andorians appear in many episodes. Occasionally they’re inhuman monsters, but usually they’re latex-makeup humanoids. In many episodes, they are crucially non-humanoid however, and often only “take human form”.

Star Trek is the archetype of sci-fi TV. So much is said about it, and almost everybody knows what it’s about,

At least five spin-off series followed in the ’90s and 2000s, and at the time of this writing, a fourteen films of the Star Trek franchise, besides a short-running TV cartoon spin-off in the ’70s. Even more TV spin-offs began to appear in the late 2010s, but these increasingly diverge from the world created in the original. Aside from the franchise, there have been several fan productions.

Why it worked:

A layered cast chemistry. The base trio, central to every episode: the choleric, playboy Captain Kirk, the aloof alien first officer Spock, and the seriocomic medical officer McCoy. The next cast ring consisted of the beautiful, exotic, communications officer Uhura, the excitable first engineer Scotty, and the super-competent navigator Sulu and boyish Chekov (who appeared in later episodes), have lines in most episodes, and sometimes major parts. Some other characters appeared a few times, notably Nurse Chapel (who had played “Number One” in the pilot, to be written out as too sexually progressive), and Yeoman Rand, a super-cute understudy to Kirk (who perhaps leaned too far the other way).

A future world: The notion of a starship was better developed in this show than ever before (or in fact, since); with this as a means of visiting distant places in space, the premise got a plausibility that hadn’t existed before. Previous sci-fi shows had spaceships somehow wandering into planets all over the place, often accidentally, or else, planets wandering to us.

(Kids who learned the planets of the solar system knew how limited the possibilities were in our vicinity. Kids of my generation also knew the difference between “solar system” and “galaxy” and “universe”, and some of us were disappointed to hear them conflated.)

Exploration of social ideas: the crew is racially and sexually mixed (especially with Uhura holding an important position.) This drew some criticism, and possibly speeded the demise of the series, but it certainly caught people’s attention.

Flexibility: The premise placed the crew so that many sci-fi themes occurred naturally: besides aliens etc., time travel etc., and all manner of strange encounters.

A relatively well-thought-out fictional world, including good reasons for their being in space (so often a dizzy afterthought in sci-fi)

The mission to seek out new life was the underlying reason for their being there, and although the episodes often strayed from that mission, the excuse was always available.

The elaborate but relatively sensible starship sets, with features such as the automatic sliding doors, the transporter, and relatively comfortable living environment lent credibility to the world.

This only happened because of Roddenberry’s broad vision of that world, and the corporation giving him enough control to execute it. Roddenberry himself had the military background to understand how tight, professional interactions feel (the crew of the Enterprise reflected these qualities). He was a seasoned script writer as well.

I think Star Trek was still going strong to the end — it was killed by corporate shortsightedness. One suggestion is that the Moon landings had rendered space fantasy passé. The landings were happening at the same time — and themselves got some anti-science political backlash. There is plenty of evidence that viewer interest was still strong. Looking back at it, the writing was still strong too, and there was plenty of material to explore, but the strain put on production by its dwindling budget and weekly pace is obvious. On the other hand, it was killed at the top of its game — not the worst way to go.

There were better and worse episodes from the start, and the final season strikes me as being the weakest of the three. Even in that season, I found a few episodes to be very good.

From my perspective, the show’s time slot moved to 10 PM, which was after my bed time. Moreover, I was dismayed by episodes with a more romantic or sexual nature, which were beyond me at the time. Now, I read this as another failure of executives to comprehend their audience.

Parables. This show was chock-full of parables, including ones about:

• race relations (usually played out by alien relations)
• sex relations (some progressive, some not so much)
• treatment of developing societies,
• the imperative of curiosity,
• reason vs. emotion,
• military bravery, decorum and duty.

In contrast to the parables told in most space sci-fi films, in this series, we do belong out there, and the aliens are no more scary than we are (largely because they’re caricatures of ourselves).

A repeatedly stated principle in the show is the Prime Directive: That no “pre-warp” culture may be exposed to the existence of extra-planetary civilizations or their technologies, to avoid altering the culture’s natural development. It is a thought-provoking idea in itself, but importantly serves to explain why we haven’t yet encountered aliens, if they’re all zipping around in starships as depicted in the show.

Non-sci-fi romantic ingredients, which annoyed me as a kid, were perhaps inevitable, but some of them were interesting. As alpha male and interstellar playboy, Kirk regularly got the (often alien) girl, but owing presumably to the greater alphabet of the cast, both Spock and McCoy occasionally scored, and even Scotty and Chekov got girls once each. (Sulu not.) The unrequited attraction of Nurse Chapel for Spock surfaces in several episodes. Significantly, Uhura had a few anti-romantic scenes, once flirting musically with cold Spock, once using her wiles on an anti-Sulu, and once (unwillingly?) kissing Kirk.

The Invaders

1967–68 ABC
43 one-hour episodes

color

Premise: UFO sightings and alien abductions stories are real, and extraterrestrials from a dying planet (in another galaxy) are infiltrating society to make the world their own.

Vehicles: a flying saucer, modeled after famous UFO photos, shaped like a lady’s hat, with flashing lights and eerie sounds. In some episodes, the outside glows purple and orange as though fluorescing in black light. Inside, well, they look like any other sci-fi gadgets of the era. There is some explanation that their spacecraft have limitations, so they can only arrive in small numbers.

Aliens: almost always appear disguised (imperfectly) as humans. (Their pinkie fingers stick out at odd angles.) When killed, they glow red and burn up. Humorless, and real sneaky.

Alien equipment: installations all over, have lots of strange devices, including mind-reading chairs, spinning crystals for mind control.

It’s a paranoid nightmare, where the good guys who know the truth are few and far between (and called “Believers”), while everybody else thinks they’re kooks, or else… is one of “them”. A direct forerunner of The X-Files.

The writing isn’t bad, and the actors are some of the best of the time.

I had almost forgotten the creepy foghorn theme music.

Parables:
The prettiest guy is the good guy. The next-prettiest guy…better check his pinkie.
“They” never say “they”’re sorry.
“They” are in fact out to get you, and “they” may be from outer space, and it is highly likely “they”’re commies too.

Land of the Giants

1968–70 ABC
51 one-hour episodes

color

Date: 1983

Premise: A fast airplane (an almost spaceship) encounters a space storm and somehow ends up on another planet (an alternate Earth?) whose people are many times bigger (supposedly 12 times, but the ratio changes from one scene to the next).

These “giants” are often not nice, and have a vaguely totalitarian government, but otherwise, it’s just the U.S. of the ’60s, scaled up.

Of course, this was a very shaky and narrow idea from the start. The writers didn’t know where to go with it (neither would I). It didn’t grab me as a child, and still doesn’t.

UFO

1970–1971 ATV, ITV
26 episodes

color

Date: 1980

Premise: a super-secret armed force, SHADO, Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization, on land, at sea, and on the Moon, battle to protect Earth from an alien invasion, which is ongoing, secretly.

The location of the main headquarters is beneath a film studio (thus conveniently explaining all the fancy cars and outfits required by the beautiful and shapely combatants).

Vehicles: A submarine with a rocket aircraft mounted on its nose, a space station, a Moon base that launches rockets that are essentially fighter jets that launch missiles from their noses, various tractor-crawlers on the Moon and on Earth.

The UFOs (being pronounced “yufoes” rather than spelled out), despite traveling at the speed of light to Earth, are flimsy, dizzy affairs, that readily disintegrate in the atmosphere, or blow up when targeted by interceptors. However, they can hide longer underwater (hence the many underwater scenes).

Aliens: mostly show up in wave after wave of UFOs. I don’t think their origin is ever discussed. They are basically humanoid — most of their appearance (skin coloration, weird eyes) turn out to be effects from their space travel equipment. They are here to harvest human body organs, and to carry out this harvesting, heroically sacrifice themselves, dozens at a time. (It may be that the bodies altogether are those of human abductees.)

The Andersons, who were famous for their marionette series Thunderbirds, got a bigger budget for this series. In their own right, the models and special effects really are lovely. In a sense, the show revolves about these models (and variety of colorful sets and sexy futuristic fashions). While the toys were very much fun, and much better props than in concurrent adventure shows, there is a discordance between their colorfulness and the very serious tone of the show. Somehow, the toys are quite concrete, while the story line is terribly dusky and mysterious.

Despite the apparent targeting of younger viewers, many subthemes were of adult nature, and involved marital or sexual relations and drug abuse.

The glittery, colorful, skin-tight fashions went well with the decor and toy spaceships, very much in the direction of the marionettes of the Andersons’ children’s shows. The women look outright Barbie-like.

The fashions, overstated early ’70s styles, looked kind of silly even at the time, and are now ridiculously dated. The theme music was very solidly ’60s spy show stuff, already dated by the time the show aired.

While the alien invasion is the overriding fixation of all episodes, the nature and origin of the aliens remains a mystery throughout, so really the main question remains unexplored. While many standard fantasy themes play out (besides alien abduction, identity swapping, time travel, etc.), they all revolve about the alien invasion.

Somehow the central cast never really gelled either, it’s basically a main guy and everybody else.

This is another series that exhibits confusion as to its audience. It was too silly for most adults, too sexy for family viewing, too cute for young adults, too serious for kids.

Timeslip

1970–71 ATV, ITV
26 half-hour episodes

Taped in color, except for two later episodes. The management displayed their managerial acumen by wiping the tapes; except for the final episode, only B&W television recordings survive.

Children’s show about time travel. Never saw it.

Space 1999

1975 ITV / RAI
48 half-hour episodes

color

This was a follow-up to UFO, using the props from the lunar scenes, but with an unrelated plot — or rather, sans the plot of UFO.

Premise: nuclear waste carelessly piled on the far side of the Moon explodes, sending the Moon careening into deep space, along with a populated base. Then they meet lots of exotic space folks. Uh…right.

The premise was so flimsy, there was no fear of losing logical cohesion, and so what transpired was — just whatever, kind of in space. Make it dark and atemporal, maybe nobody will notice. It was like Lost in Space, less any cuteness whatever, with sets from UFO less the action imperative, with fashionable psychedelia, less any guidance from imagination or science or common sense.

The producers experimented with variations in the tone and cast, as though that were the problem.

This series was unwatchable, even by a teenager in desperate need of sci-fi.

The Six Million Dollar Man

1975–78 ABC
99 one-hour episodes

color

Steve Austin is a former astronaut, saved from death after a crash by receipt of bionic implants (in the sum of six million dollars), incidentally providing him super strength and speed and senses. The irony is, he hates it, and just wishes he were just a normal awe-inspiring, sexy astronaut again.

Sort of to pay it off, or for love of country, or something, he works for a super-secret government spy organization to do good and combat evil, and gets into most of the usual super-spy and sci-fi messes.

Lowest common denominator stuff, solidly popular.

Spin-offs: The Bionic Woman; several TV movies.

The Bionic Woman

1976–78 ABC then NBC then CBS
22 one-hour episodes

color

See: The Six Million Dollar Man for most details, except: Sommers is female, and was a top tennis star nearly killed in a skydiving accident.

This is more or less a spy show, with the superhero element.

The pickin’s were slim in the ’70s. New ideas were regarded passé.

Battlestar Galactica

1978–79 ABC
17 three-quarter-hour episodes (two of them 2-part)
1980 as Galactica 1980
10 three-quarter-hour episodes

color

Date: unclear (They finally find Earth, but it’s in the 1960s, so either space colonization had happened long ago and been forgotten, or some time-travel occurred.)

Robots: malevolent civilization of Cylons.

Vehicles: starships, eponymously, Battlestar Galactica, space fighters: Vipers by the good guys

The Cylons mount a sneak attack on human space colonies, meaning to wipe out the human race. A few humans escape in star ships, led by Battlestar Galactica, in search of the lost planet Earth. The Cylons give chase, and episode after episode, they are shot down in identical scenes by the fighter pilots of the Galactica! — who then get the girls!

In temperament and diction, the Cylons are the Daleks of Dr. Who. The battles were the same romantic resetting of WWII air battles presented in Star Wars.

The show employed one amusing detail: namely, peppering their speech with invented words. Mostly they were just as dumb as science-words from bad 1960s film, but a few words possibly entered the English language here: a strong curse word they used was frack, which is now a verb used in the oil industry.

Galactica broke little new ground, in new science or social ideas, in special effects, or even in style. It was formulaic entertainment.

My story about this show: in my gigantic men’s dorm at Texas Tech, there was a TV room for the less-well-to-do’s. We all heard about Galactica, and filled the room for the pilot, hoping that on that night there would be no football (which had unquestionable priority at TTU). The pilot wasn’t bad, but kind of stupid. No one spoke as we filed out of the room (none of us knew one another). The second episode half-filled the room. It was really stupid. The third episode I started watching with a couple other guys. Somebody came in and changed the channel to sports. Nobody objected. I doubt anybody watched any further episodes — just too embarrassing.

Years later, I watched a few episodes elsewhere, and was dismayed by how far the silliness had gone. It had become just about these two cute guys zooming off to blow up the robots. And then I heard the voice of Jonathan Harris, as “Lucifer”, the smart robot — in a gut-wrenching twist of TV irony, Dr. Smith had returned, bumbling and conniving as ever, as his nemesis, a robot.

After the first episode, for me, this became an unwatchable waste of time.

Parables:
The enemy are a bunch of soulless machines, bent on destruction.
“All in a days’ work, ma’am!”

Mork & Mindy

1978–82 ABC
95 half-hour episodes

color

Spin-off of Happy Days.

Setting: contemporary Boulder CO., sometimes planet Ork.

Spaceship: egg-shaped capsule, exited by cracking open.

Aliens: Robin Williams was reportedly the only alien who auditioned for the role. Orkans are “the white bread of the universe”. Jonathan Winters also works wonderfully as the alien child who grows young. To wrap up each episode, Mork reports back to planet Ork to superior Orson.

More genuine sci-fi happened in this most popular spin-off of Happy Days than in many of the action sci-fi shows. Space travel, levitation — no problemo. Time loops — whenever you need one, need one, need one…

Fonzie: “Don’t men date women on your planet”?
Mork: “Hard to tell, parts are interchangeable.”

Æon Flux

1991–91 Colossal Pictures, MTV Animation
15 episodes
seasons 1 & 2 were shorts only a few minutes long.
season 3 was half-hour.

color animation

Date: 7698

City-states Bregna and Monica, which share a common border, but not common principles.

Besides being set in the future, various episodes involve different science-fiction themes, including robots, mind control, human cloning, time travel, really icky medical operations… and on and on.

This is a very wildly twisted dreamworld of remorseless assassins and spies, psychiatrist dictators and sadistic doctors. The spidery acrobat Æon is ever fouling up the layered plans of evil dictator Trevor. Or is she? Do they even know?

3rd Rock from the Sun

(1996–2001) The Carsey-Werner Company
139 22-min. episodes

color

The premise is that four extraterrestrials have taken human form and arrived to study humanity. They have little by way of special powers (well, one is a “radio”) — except by accident. For instance, it escaped their notice that most humans can’t converse fluently in all the world’s languages. On the other hand, they are exquisitely ignorant of human bodies and behavior. And they share a morbid dread of Jell-o — I don’t think the reason is ever made clear.

The people who wrote this were steeped in science fiction stories. It pokes fun at every aspect of science fiction, primarily, that of alien invasions. In between, there are some thoughtful perspectives on what it means to be human.

That they called their fearless, terrifying leader “the big giant head” was hilarious for a long time. But wait for when the big giant head arrives for an inspection.

There is no episode of this program that failed to get a convulsion out of me. Often, I was spewing tears.

Farscape

(1999–2003) 9Network
The Jim Henson company
88 half-hour episodes (50 min. in season 1, 44 min. in seasons 2-4)

color

A cheesy genius engineer man-hunk son and his dad launch an experimental faster-than-light spacecraft, piloted by the son. He immediately gets lost in space. This part is, of course, very familiar. (It might be fun to list the shows and films that start with a similar premise.)

The best thing in this series is the lush population of aliens. Most are just people (or people with latex), but many, including a couple of the regulars, are muppets. These are very well done. It works — I was able to accept them as characters easily.

They cover a lot of newer sci-fi ground: right away, we’re introduced to the biological spaceship Moya (called a Leviathan), which is conjoined to an interesting sentient arthropod, simply called Pilot.

The storylines are pretty choppy — mostly typical TV fare. There’s lots and lots of technobabble. It’s mostly action-adventure in space.

The writers made a fair attempt at rendering most of the threats faced by the crew complex… most are not simply evil space monsters. (Some are.) One main (tired, old) subtheme is that the human makes an enemy of a powerful (human-looking) alien immediately on getting into space, from whom he is forever on the run run run. (Until that gets too tiresome, and they have to somehow redeem the antagonist — and bring in a new one.)

One detail that sticklers for reality may appreciate: the aliens don’t “speak English”. Everybody has a virus doodad injected into them that allows them to understand the other’s speech. It’s a detail, but they play with it in some episodes.

It tends to be very colorful, lushly so. Curiously, the background color, the color of space, is dark and dust brown.

The most annoying shtick is 1990s U.S. references, let fly by the main human guy. The aliens, and I, mostly don’t recognize the referent. I suppose the writers thought this would be funny, and they were wrong, because they aren’t funny people.

In one episode, the protagonist dreams Looney-Tunes versions of other characters. This is cute, inasmuch as it was unexpected, and it resembles a familiar cartoon that made us laugh. In itself, it is funny only because of the frenetic humor of the original cartoons. Looked at that way, it seems cheap. And then, what does this have to do with the science fiction theme? Thumbs down.

The next annoying shtick is the heaping of sexual and romantic scenes between the human guy and various sexy female aliens. One ends up on top of another in nearly every episode, often several times in one episode. It doesn’t stop there, though. The various aliens start having romantic and sexual relationships. There are episodes that are chock-full of it. Sure, sex was a shtick of many previous sci-fi shows, but they really ramped it up in this one, to the point of interfering with whatever story there might have been.

The annoyance doesn’t stop there. Most episodes feature almost constant backbiting, if not outright conspiracy and treason among the principals — usually ending with some sappy resolution. The dialog of many whole episodes consists of endless, juvenile, one-upmanship.

To emphasize the drama of the melodrama, every episode features a scene where one character hollers another character’s name in horror. To emphasize the melo of the melodrama, most episodes involve dreadful, protracted speeches about somebody’s true feelings. Such emphasis often occurs several times in a single episode.

The development of the series blurs the line between a typical series and a serial. The cast of characters grows, and many episodes end with a character in grave peril, relieved by dramatic salvation in the next; main characters disappear in one episode, to re-join in later ones. The drone of emotional intrigue resembles a soap opera, more than a classical serial.

Usually it’s easier to write for the bad guys than the good guys. When the bad guy’s dialog is even stupider than the good guys’… Well, that is the case here. They mess up the easy part.

Some episodes are fun. At worst… well, every series has its stinkers. This series has an awful lot of stinkers — ones I had a hard time looking at. For all its initial novelty, the show was quickly dumbed down so badly that it failed even as entertainment, and any sci-fi had walked off the set.

In 2004, there was a continuation miniseries Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. The main characters who appear to die in the last episode of the series get reconstituted in the first episode of this. Are spoiler alerts required for cheap tear-jerkers?

Firefly

(2002) Mutant Enemy Productions,
20th Century Fox Television
14 episodes (45 min.)

color

Premise: an explicitly wild Western in space. Ex-rebels from a civil war join a mercenary and other outlaws in an environment of usually hostile Alliance agents, a plethora of bad guys and crazies, and rightly-feared mutants, called “reavers”.

These are stories of the humanity-in-space variety. There are no aliens — only humans — inhabiting many planets, zooming about in many starships.

There are no robots, and although there is a lot of fancy electronics, nothing like a computer or artificial intelligence. Weapons are usually traditional firearms and knives.

Vehicles: our heros’ ship is a cargo spaceship of “Firefly” class, named Serenity. They talk about “gravity drive” — but there is no suggestion of faster-than-light speeds. Alliance ships are titanic, and resemble modern city centers with skyscrapers. There are also trains that hover over their track. Reavers zoom around in smokey ships “without radiation containment”, decorated with the bodies of their victims.

The space scenes were the most realistic I had ever seen, for the starkness of dark and light in space, sense of scale, and so forth. It’s quite beautifully done, much better than anything that preceded it. This is mostly CGI — the best of the time.

The writing is even better. The characters are all rich, and (mostly) very believable, even likeable — often, very bad characters are fully formed. The dialog is just wild, peppered with curious replacements, things that sound sort of western, but aren’t, and whole phrases in mispronounced Mandarin Chinese.

Attention to detail is everywhere. For instance, somebody has painted little flowers on the bulkheads in the dining room. At a fancy ball, guests dress in a mixture of various time periods, styles that never existed, with little bits of CGI filling out the sci-fi backdrop.

We still have to take all the usual action-adventure nonsense — the cliffhangers and Mexican standoffs and deeds of derring-do. But some of them are very inventive. And at least the good guys are (very) imperfect.

Despite some (perhaps subjective) weaknesses, this series is delicious.

The story is, Fox management killed it, despite its promise, because they disapproved of the class of people it depicted. (It is silly to expect anything but moronic behavior from that crowd.) The series ends very abruptly.

A film version, Serenity, assembled from pieces of the series, followed in 2005.