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James Doohan's pre-Trek scifi show: Space Command (1953–54)!

Maurice

Maurice

Snagglepussed
Admiral
I don't think this has ever been posted here before.

The first original dramatic series for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) was this half hour science fiction show, which counted amongst its regular cast James Doohan in the role of Phil Mitchell. Notice he refers to a "space warp drive", so that term goes waaay back. :)

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Like so many old TV shows this series is believed lost, and only this Nov. 11, 1953 episode is known to survive. I'd looked for it for years with no luck other than a short short clip. But apparently someone uploaded it to YouTube two years ago today (but with a title that made it difficult to find). This episode's story concerns humankind's first encounter with an alien spacecraft. It's a crude kinescope so the image quality ain't great, but it's fun to hear our familiar engineer with his native accent and not his faux brogue.

Apparently a very young William Shatner appeared in a couple of those lost episodes. Sigh.
 
Maurice said:
Notice he refers to a "space warp drive", so that term goes waaay back.
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To at least c. 1930, John W. Campbell's Islands of Space. And of course it's derived from the General Theory of Relativity, which defined gravitation as an alteration of the topology of spacetime (AKA a warping of the fabric of space).


Man, that lighting guy must've had a great agent to get billing in the opening credits.

If they've only gotten as far as Proxima Centauri, why are they surprised they haven't found aliens yet? It's the closest star to our own! That's literally right there in its name! (Although I've never heard it rhymed with "Noxzema" before.)

"Used to Earth's nine [planets]?" Isn't Earth one of those nine (or rather, eight)?

Writing tip: Generally not a good idea to devote the first 1/6 of your story to how bored the characters are that nothing is happening.

Well, no wonder they couldn't find any planets if they didn't have their scanners turned on!

How is it that they organized this whole mission to search for alien life yet didn't make any advance plans about what to do when they found it? And captain, if you're afraid of giving the wrong impression and being attacked, you shouldn't have ordered your crew to arm weapons already!

The live-TV flub of the officer reporting "We found a planet" when he meant "alien ship" actually worked pretty well in-story, to show he was flustered.

Aww, let's forget that whole "Historic first contact with advanced aliens" thing and devote the rest of the episode to an engine malfunction!

Admit it, folks, I'm not the only one who expected Phil to say "The engines can't take much more of this," am I?
 
Maurice said:
I don't think this has ever been posted here before.

The first original dramatic series for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) was this half hour science fiction show, which counted amongst its regular cast James Doohan in the role of Phil Mitchell. Notice he refers to a "space warp drive", so that term goes waaay back. :)

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
​

Like so many old TV shows this series is believed lost, and only this Nov. 11, 1953 episode is known to survive. I'd looked for it for years with no luck other than a short short clip. But apparently someone uploaded it to YouTube two years ago today (but with a title that made it difficult to find). This episode's story concerns humankind's first encounter with an alien spacecraft. It's a crude kinescope so the image quality ain't great, but it's fun to hear our familiar engineer with his native accent and not his faux brogue.

Apparently a very young William Shatner appeared in a couple of those lost episodes. Sigh.
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Considering the opening has that modern Canadian PG logo on it, it looks like this might’ve been aired as part of a modern TV series, which may be the reason for the different name.
 
I suspect that rating was put on there when it was re-broadcast at some point recently after being pulled out of an archive.

The name AVSEQ01 just looks like the auto-generated default filename of a digitizer Audio Video SEQuence 01.
 
Warped9 said:
What an odd little program. Not much happens.
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TV was slower-paced back then. It's unclear how many episodes the show had -- the sources say it aired once a week for around 51 weeks in total, but they also say there were 150 episodes made. Perhaps it's a typo. Either way, they needed to stretch out the story to fill a lot of episodes, so they took their time moving it forward. Even today, serialized shows often have slow starts, only gradually laying the foundations for their seasonal arcs.

Plus, all that space stuff we take for granted today was still a novelty on TV at the time, so just showing the mechanics of a spaceship maneuvering and firing rockets and activating scanners and so forth was probably more exciting to the kids watching than it is to us jaded adults 2/3 of a century later.
 
I vaguely recall seeing a brief clip or perhaps just a blurry picture of Doohan from this before.
I love sci-fi of that era.

Kor
 
Television was paced differently then, yes, especially live TV. Compare this show to Tom Corbett Space Cadet or Space Patrol or Captain Z-Ro (24 surviving episodes of which are here (LINK)).

Sadly, there's not enough available information about the show to really know what its typical episode format was. One episode is too small a statistical sample from which to draw any meaningful conclusions.

I don't think Phil Mitchell (Doohan) was the engineer or he'd have been the one climbing down to manually work the relays.

I researched this show some years ago. I'll dig up my notes on my desktop and see if I have another other information,
 
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So I did some more digging through my old research notes, etc., and based on that I corrected the Wikipedia article on the series appropriately, notably to fill in more of the series format, and identifying more of the characters (LINK). One source claims Doohan's character was an engineer, but it's the only one that does so, so I did not include that.

So anyway, it looks like the young space lieutenant Frank Anderson (Robert Barclay) is the main character and junior member of the crew of the space ship XSW1, with Phil Mitchell (Doohan), and captain Steve Cassel (Harry Geldard). In this episode we only see two of the Space Command Earth characters, Dr. Joseph Edmunds (Andrew Anthony), and Ilene Morris (Aileen Taylor) at communications. They call Dr. Fleming, (Austin Willis), but he does not appear here.
 
@johnnybear I wouldn't have a problem with that situation except:
1. The definition the IAU passed is heliocentric* (and so we have the term exoplanet,)
2. Jupiter fails the 'orbit the sun' part of the definition (the Sun-Jupiter barycenter lies outside the Sun), and,
3. The definition was voted on on the last day of the conference, when less than 500 (424) of the 2500+ attendees were still there and the resolution barely passed (Trans-Neptunian objects classified as dwarf planets, 237 to 157.)

*(IMO, the definition should fit all worlds in all systems and not carve out arbitrary exceptions for our system.)
 
Warped9 said:
What an odd little program. Not much happens.
Click to expand...

That's why Rocky Jones is my favorite of the 50's sci-fi. It's slower than what we're used to, but no where near as slow paced as the live stuff of the time. Also, it was filmed rather than broadcast live and the FX are amazing for early 50's t.v. Really should be considered a trailblazer for sci-fi t.v. when it comes to FX.
 
Spock's Barber said:
GR would have laughed at the space ship belching out fumes. He told Matt Jeffries to design a starship that looked powerful AND didn’t emit smoke and flames.
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Maurice said:
In 1953 I bet he wouldn't. :)
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In 1953, I bet the fumes were made from tobacco and nicotine too - hence the craze of everybody wanting to be special effects designers, cuz it's cool! :cool: :devil:
 
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