Quantum Leap: what if it had been made 20 years earlier?

Bellisario making ST? Sorry, no. He has very little genre experience under his belt, all tending more toward fantasy than SF (Battlestar Galactica, Tales of the Gold Monkey, QL), and the rest of his body of work is detective and lawyer shows and that dreadful Airwolf thing from the '80s. And there tends to be a religious undercurrent in his work that's very different from ST's secular humanism. In one episode of his short-lived Tales of the Gold Monkey with Stephen Collins, the lead character fell gravely ill while flying his plane, it was plummeting toward a watery death, and the leading lady prayed and the plane miraculously levelled out. Yes, the heroes were saved by actual divine intervention. And QL was constantly implying that God was directing Sam's journey.

No. I would've said so if he had been. You know, you can find these things out for yourself online at sites like Wikipedia, IMDb, and Memory Alpha for ST in particular.

 

Funny you should say that

I had Dean Spockwell as 1 of my candidates to play Sam in my Thread Initiating Post

If Spockwell's Sam on my '69-'73 QL, who'd be good to play Al back then?

 

Not "Spockwell"! Stockwell! Stockwell!

And I don't think anyone would've cast Dean Stockwell as a heroic lead character in 1969. He was more a character actor, and I think he was generally cast as fairly disreputable characters.

 

And, as far as I remember, it was a bit of a feather in Quantum Leap's cap that a 'movie character actor' like Stockwell had signed up for a TV series at the time.

 

Didn't you hear? You've become the official family historian of the Bennett clan? Even those not actually called Bennett!

 

I beg to differ

 

Dean Stockwell was making something of a comeback at the time along with Blue Velvet, Bevery Hills Cop II and Dune, he had a problem an addiction for a while before that.