Has anyone else watched the 1977 TV show based on the 1976 TV movie? There are some interesting differences, of course, for the sake of shifting this to a weekly tv format. I'm more amazed at how loosely they tie in general sci-fi stuff with "Runners"(tm) and yet most of it remains enjoyable despite the show being quick to stray. Yes, post-nuked Earth has a lot of splintered civilizations, which have power and other amenities -- sometimes used to great effect. I'd expect more devolved cavemen sorts than having too many sci-fi entrapments... I'm even more amazed in how many sci-fi tropes are used, many of which clearly coming from 1966's Star Trek, but manage to put in a clever spin and/or rearrangement at some point that most of them make the same tropes 'their own'. Spoilers of varying degrees follow, which are not much worse than the tag scenes prior to each episode on the DVD. Late-70s TV had a knack of spoiling the episode before running the credits... ...which are Dr Who on speed. The slit-scan backgrounds look cool, but the cartoony throwing of the logo with the awkward "pew pew" sounds alone would turn off viewers. Especially if they just saw "Star Wars" a couple months earlier. Spoiler-time: Spoiler "Man Out of Time" - written by David Gerrold under a pseudonym (Noah Ward, love those phonetics...) - is also a high point for the series, and certainly beats TNG's season 5's "A Matter of Time" (despite it having some successful innovations on the trope as well.) This one pretty much resolves what "Sanctuary" is, if one considers how words can change meaning over time. There's also no time paradox, with Gerrold and script editor being very mindful of what to do with it - thankfully! "Capture" makes rather decent use of "man hunting man", even if it was a trope overdone by the end of the 1960s (even Gilligan's Island shoehorned that in, and not to bad effect either...) While not perfect, there's more in its favor than not. Some acting of key scenes in "Capture" sells the trope's chilling nature a lot better and rescues it just enough to get around some cliches. The board with numerous ankhs pinned to it ranks up there with the key dialogue for the "this is creepy" factor. I wish that was more consistent, but it's engaging enough... "The Collectors" is pretty much the zoo keeping aspect of "The Cage" contrived. It's still a fun watch given how it handles the plotting, and in 1977 most people who weren't Trek fans wouldn't have noticed as TOS was in constant reruns, to the point someone even back then would make a comparison too. A little tighter editing could have had them sell the idea of their capturing Runners for their own use more effectively. "The Innocent" is a decent tale on love refused, though it glosses over a few things... and the robots are a little too camp at times, which also feels out of place. "Half-Life" also has some overt Star Trek roots - but the good vs evil theme and the replication device made me think of Red Dwarf's "Demons and Angels", and "Logan" was more popular in the UK so I wouldn't be surprised it if was an influence... but it's an enjoyable trope in all cases. I read synopses for later episodes. Some do get back to the premise of the Domed City and all, but usually there's just as passing reference in these episodes and that's that. Definitely worth a watch. Especially if you like "The Orville", which also re-uses sci-fi and Trek tropes, but unlike "The Orville", "Logan" is light on the humor. Which is good because when it does use humor, it doesn't always work...
I saw it in first run and a number of times since. I did a recap/review series of it on my Patreon a while back. Quite a few changes. They basically inverted the thematic/moral stance of the original novel by establishing that a secret cabal of old men actually ran the oppressive society. And they pretty much abandoned the hedonism of the movie's city in order to give Logan and Jessica more conventional TV-friendly mores. Pretty characteristic of '70s SFTV, to throw in a bunch of different genres. In this case, though, it kind of makes sense. If the City of Domes was as advanced as it was, it stands to reason that there could be other isolated enclaves at a similar level. Well, D.C. Fontana was Logan's Run's story editor, but those tropes didn't originate with Star Trek. ST itself drew heavily from the prose science fiction of earlier decades. Not spoiling, teasing. A spoiler is something that gives away the ending or ruins some important surprise. Teasers show you just enough to whet your interest so you want to stick around and see how it plays out. As I understand it, the before-the-show teasers of the '70s were meant to grab viewers before they could change the channel to something else. Not many people had VCRs back then, so the start of the hour or half-hour was the time when people would get up and flip the dial on the TV to see what else was on that they might want to watch. So that was when shows had to compete to catch the viewer's eye and make them want to stop changing channels. (I hesitate to call it channel-surfing, since there were typically only 4-6 channels counting local stations. Channel-wading?) I don't think the pew-pews sounded quite as weird to '70s audiences as they do to us. And while that part hasn't aged well, I rather like the theme aside from that. Although it's incongruously lush and romantic for a show about people fleeing a murderous post-apocalyptic dystopia. Not just a high point, but the high point by a substantial margin, a truly excellent story. I don't know why Gerrold was so dissatisfied with it. And no, it wasn't meant to resolve what Sanctuary was, because the search for Sanctuary was the ongoing driver of the series, and they couldn't resolve that any more than Gilligan's Island could rescue the castaways. The episode came right out and established that the word "Sanctuary" could mean different things to different people, and that this was a Sanctuary but not the one the Runners sought. Riffs on The Most Dangerous Game were a dime a dozen in '70s and '80s TV, but "Capture" was worthwhile for its focus on the Logan-Francis relationship. Also, Mary Woronov was pretty sexy and menacing. Again, Star Trek has no exclusive claim on the alien-zoo concept. The Twilight Zone did it in 1960 in "People Are Alike All Over," and Pierre Boulle's Monkey Planet (the basis of Planet of the Apes) did it in 1963. Heck, you can trace it back to Gulliver's Travels, arguably. Now, this one I do consider a Trek knockoff, since it's basically D.C. Fontana redoing "Charlie X" with a gender flip. I found it mediocre. Again, not a trope exclusive to Star Trek. It's basically Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde combined with split-screen effects, and a lot of works of fiction have used the idea. My Favorite Martian did it twice, I think, once with two Uncle Martins and once with three, before Star Trek even premiered. Although it's true that the replication device did look a lot like a transporter. I found this one quite weak, though William Smith gave an excellent performance as Modok pleading with the Patron.
My first exposure to the material as I was too young to go see the film in a theatre. Watched the series on a B&W tv set and liked it as a kid. Saw the film in color when it aired on CBS in 78 or 79 and thought it blew the series out of the water and have been a huge fan since. Also eventually read the books. Finally got back to the series on Apple TV last year and was pleasantly surprised and entertained. Too bad it didn't hold on longer. By the next year, TV was DYING for SF shows to cash in on Star Wars fandom.
I remember having an argument with my father about it, trying to convince him to let me see the movie in the theater. When I finally saw it uncut decades later, I understood why he refused.
I remember thinking badly of it when I was a kid and had seen it in reruns. I had loved the movie, but the show seemed crappy and low-budget by comparison. Last spring, I got the DVD box set during lock-down and I was pleasantly surprised at how entertained I was with it. It’s a pretty fun little sci-fi series, and I love that era. I’d highly recommend it. It has a lot of interesting Star Trek ties as well (wtiters, actors) which makes it very interesting.
Qonundrum, there's a thread covering the series in detail, but I will re-post some information about the series and its media coverage-- About the series: I watched it it first run, but was disappointed that the drama and risk of the film was nowhere to be found. Such is the case of many a serious film adapted for TV. Typical of the entertainment business, they cannot let a success stand on its own; after the film was a hit, MGM initially wanted a sequel, and of course, that did not happen, eventually leading to the creation of this TV series. Inexplicably, MGM-TV tapped Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts--at the time, famous for developing Charlie's Angels for Spelling-Goldberg Productions--to bring Logan and Company to TV, and despite the contribution of writers such as D.C. Fontana, et al, this was just another in the long line of the man-on-the-run TV sub-genre. Their best option would have been to make a sequel TV movie with a healthy budget (possible, since they recycled so much from the film), and wrap up the entire post-City matter / answering any questions left by the film. To this end, Marvel Comics--after their 5-issue adaptation of the film--tried to address such issues (anarchy among people forced to think for themselves, Sandmen plotting against Logan, etc.), but the comic was cancelled after the publication of issue #7 (July, 1977). Ways the TV series differs from the book and the 1976 film: no Lifeclocks. While they were central to the plot of the books and films ( to the extent of being a physical representation of the Thinker's control over citizens), the film rendered them powerless once outside of the City, so in the end--with the series being an off-road chase series--there was no reason to use the Lifeclocks. The best episodes are any that make any references to the film (though they are not in the same continuity) such as the pilot, and "Carousel", where Logan is shot with some sort of dart that erases his memories of life as a runner, willingly returns to the City, and if memory serves, will face Carousel as his parting gift. Unintentional CBS/late 70s TV fantasy cross-pollination: Randy Powell (Francis) appeared on The Amazing Spider-Man's two-parter, "The Deadly Dust" (as a classmate of Peter Parker) while Spider-Man himself--Nicholas Hammond--guest starred on this series' "The Judas Goat" as a Sandman surgically altered to appear to be one of Jessica's friends... Regarding the main title music: instead of using any of Goldsmith's excellent, memorable motifs composed for the film (or modified, if necessary), they tapped Laurence Rosenthal to work way out of his element and deliver some wild, silly synthesizer-laced piece that did not support the series concept at all. Despite its short life, the TV series did have some sort of following, enough to earn the following coverage in popular magazines of the day: Look-in (1971-1994) was a weekly UK publication in association with ITV and its local and imported TV series aimed at younger viewers. The Logan's Run TV series inspired an original, serialized comic feature (black and white), which was collected in a hardback annual. [LEFT][SIZE=4][COLOR=rgb(20, 20, 20)] Samples (not in sequential order): Next... Circus #168 (November 10, 1977). The once famous music industry magazine covered nearly all popular movies and TV during its run (1966-2006), and yes, the Logan's Run TV series grabbed a cover, with a fairly in-depth behind the scenes article on the show, which--at the time--might have seemed promising, but... Dynamite #43 (December, 1977). Dynamite was a popular monthly kid's media/education magazine published by Scholastic, Inc. from 1974 - 1992, and was distributed for free in U.S. public schools. Jenette Khan created the magazine two years before joining DC Comics as its publisher, (and playing a significant role in the DC rebirth starting at the end of the 70s, after the infamous "implosion") that would shake/change the mainstream comic book industry. More than the 1976 movie, the TV version of Logan's Run was thought to be somewhat kid-friendly, hence its coverage in a monthly aimed at elementary school-aged kids. Finally,... Starlog #9 (October, 1977) and #13 (May, 1978). Of course, Starlog was not going to miss out on the series. with issues eagerly announcing its production, to a cover story (below). Not long after the series' debut, the usually lightweight magazine did have more than a few unkind words dedicated to the series' perceived problems, and by the time CBS cancelled the series in the Spring of '78, Starlog was there to offer their postmortem and a details-free episode guide. There were other magazines with coverage of the show, but none of it was ever glowing. It received its best treatment after the preview of the pilot, where the many differences between it and the movie were noted, but some reviewers thought that would not matter...if the series was solid. By now, you know the rest. [/COLOR][/SIZE] Oh, on the merchandising end, Mego (the toy company famous for their 8-inch action figures of everything from DC & Marvel characters, Star Trek and Planet of the Apes, among other properties) obtained the rights to develop a line of 9-inch action figure line based on the TV series, creating prototypes of Logan, Rem and Francis. Obviously, the line would not see the inside of Mego's Hong Kong factories when the TV series suffered an early death, but some Sandman costumes were produced and in a strange turn, ended up used on unrelated, Barbie-like dolls.[/LEFT]
Thanks! I didn't check down enough pages to have seen the other thread. Depending on how old it is and the rule against bringing up posts over x months' old, I probably would have made a new thread anyway...
Will check that out, thanks for the link! Especially for 70s standards. Once in a while I might have heard a line that tries to get past the radar (per "TV Tropes", https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GettingCrapPastTheRadar ), which in ways is more fun than more direct means but it's all good... the tv show alludes to it slightly but keeps it open-ended. Maybe too much so, why would anyone really become a runner either which way - and what to expect outside. Chances are low they'd find all these splintered civilizations, never mind food, water, lavatory facilities, gun ammo (so why they keep destroying the weapons taken from freshly defeated Sandmen...I probably missed the part where they say the weapons automagically recharge... ) Yeah, I still need to read the book but if the secret cabal of men (lead by Morgan Woodward of TOS fame, hehe) did invert that... I dunno, the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie sidelined the book for its own stance and managed to pull it off... Yeah. As with so many things I'm on the fence. In a way, the innovations that LR showed were build upon in later shows in an evolutionary way. And, of course, on top of "cat and mouse" there's only so much they could really do with escaping from a closed city like that. Definitely agreed. I'd still expect to see some devolution in some areas, but not all. I rolled with it... heck, if I can roll though Space 1999's premise then anything's possible... Aye, it is a glib generalization I made. The youtube reviewers made it as well, but it's those videos that piqued my interest. And true, older sci-fi was inspiration - and innovated upon. Even TOS used older sci-fi in the same manner. Great point and nuance. Normal for the 70s, I still wonder what the "man hunting man" episode might have been if it weren't for the teaser at the start, in terms of key reveals. Given the pacing of the shows, it makes sense for the teases as well - and now as I type this... yeah, they don't really spoil it. Especially when the guy's wife (great acting too) told Jessica how she'd be next. Even if I remembered the line verbatim, it's a must-see moment as when a 40+ year-old show can create such a palpable reaction... Makes sense. Yeah, the theme as a whole has grown on me. Even the weirdness of "pew pew pew". Same here. Didn't find much on his involvement in the story. A shame, it is easily a first rate example of this show (and the time travel trope). True. If the show did say what Sanctuary was then it'd be over. In my headcanon, I like to think that "Sanctuary" was a word handed down over the centuries and it stemmed from this time travel episode. I forgot about the established bit that the word could mean different things too... :blush: That was a brilliant moment. I'm more into Jessica... Logan too... but when an episode's main plot doesn't always work, there's always a subplot that makes up for it. Like the one with the girl raised by robots... The Logan/Jessica rapport was definitely worthwhile, even if the traps Logan and Francis had to go through were half-contrived. (Not bad overall...) Sweet. And excellent points. I've not seen all of those shows or read all the books, so your posting these tidbits is much appreciated. I did like the unrequited love subplot, but - yeah - it was one of the lesser outings. With a few good moments, but where this "nowhere" was and how they brought everyone back - from memory it seemed too glossed over. I just finished that one. Smith was excellent. It was lower than average, though the twist with the girl in blue being the evil one kept alive all this time (and referenced early enough in the episode) seemed either a missed opportunity or a misplaced one. It didn't really do much with the good vs evil aspect and the resolution seemed too quick as well. "Crypt" I'd just finished. The guilty one was quick to spot and are they really going to leave her in cryo-freeze forever? Oh yeah, I noticed Neva Paterson was in it in the end credits. Most notably as Ruby from "V", she has an impressive range... After looking up her IMDB list of credits, it's tempting to find other shows. "Amen", "The Paul Lynde Show", and a few of the dozens of others (and movies) I have seen but will check out the specific episodes...
I read the book for the first time not that long ago, and I was surprised by how close the movie was to it. The main difference that really mattered to the story was that in the book, the astronaut admired the ape society and was (superficially) welcomed into it -- but Escape from the Planet of the Apes eventually did that part in reverse, pretty much. And of course Spoiler it was Earth in the movie rather than an alien planet, but in the book, the alien planet just presaged how Earth had evolved by the time the astronaut got back, so it made sense for the movie to streamline that. I don't know what innovations you're talking about. As I said, LR was pretty typical of '70s SFTV. Indeed, it was the last of a spate of "wandering the post-apocalypse" pilots and shows in the mid-'70s, including Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II and Planet Earth, the non-Roddenberry re-retooling thereof called Strange New Worlds, Filmation's Ark II on Saturday mornings, and to some extent the Planet of the Apes live-action and animated series.
To be honest, Goff and Roberts would have been better off trying to adapt Nolan's sequel novel Logan's World (published in December of 1977), which had been considered by MGM to be an official sequel movie, but the studio (and the original film's producer Saul David) reportedly thought Logan's World would be too expensive to produce, and its plot far too bleak, so all involved chose to reboot the concept as a weekly chase series. World was a logical, serious follow up to the original novel, feeling like it had a right to exist (as opposed to most sequels that are only about getting another dollar out of an idea), but I do agree with David and MGM that it would have been too costly, even if restructured to follow the less-developed world established in the '76 movie. In addition to that set of problems, it was unclear Michael York would even consider starring in a sequel. That said, thinking about the possibility of World as a film was far more exciting than the TV series; the TV LR was--as you will see--a letdown--certainly not on the level of the movie. Further, although Gregory Harrison went on to be a better actor, in this series, he's just there as Logan--none of the heart and energy of his predecessor.
“Three To Make Ready” (S2 E03) “Night Life Of Uncle Martin” (S2 E12) We covered these episodes early on for FACT TREK in Tweets and in our 4 May 2020 blog post The Martian Within (link) .
I remember watching and enjoying the show. I did find the movie and TV show weird that they weren't like the novel, with additional enclaves like the city in other countries (part of one of the sequels takes place in Russia, and another part in Africa). And of course the reason for Lastday... population control in the novel and... I guess limited room for people in this one city? Of course they changed the upper age at which people would experience Lastday. I read somewhere, years ago, about this decision as everyone realized that there was no way that Michael York could ever pass for 21 at the time the movie was being filmed. Heh, I was 13 when the movie came out, really wanted to see it, and knew there was no way my family would ever allow it. For one thing, it was only shown at the drive-in (yes, they were still around in the mid-'70s). I knew that my grandfather would never go along with it. Eventually it came on TV, though, on a Canadian channel. We don't have as much censorship of nudity on our channels as there is on American channels, so yeah, I realized that it was for the best that I hadn't been able to convince the family to let me see it. I'd never have heard the end of it, and I'd have had to hide my books so my grandfather wouldn't throw them out.
Nolan's 1st sequel novel--1977's Logan's World--was very expansive, starting on the off-world colony and migrating back to various locations on earth. As noted up-thread, MGM considered adapting Logan's World, but taken "as is" would have been too expensive to produce, so the man-on-the-run to different, small outposts was the Goff/Roberts solution--none as brutal or serving as the social commentary of the sequel novels' locations/survivors. In the movie--yes, but the Computer never says this in any direct manner--its only implied by the mandatory "Lastday" ceremony, and the fact the Computer did not answer Logan's question about no one ever renewing, so that's informing the audience that the city maintains a "perfect" number that's never a burden on resources thanks to enforced, ritual suicide. In fact, of the principals ages during the 1975 production, Jenny Agutter (Jessica 6) was closest to the novel's cuttoff age (23). but Michael York was 33 at the time, Richard Jordan (Francis 7) was 38, Michael Anderson Jr (Doc) clocked in at 32 and Farrah Fawcett-Majors (Holly 13) a bit over the novel age at 28 years old. The changed city cutoff age did not make a significant impact on the story, since the cast (and city extras) appeared young enough to sell the youth-oriented, decadent superficiality presented in the film. In America, CBS first aired the movie in 1977, making a pretty big deal about in the commercials and print ads; I saw the film when released in '76, but I still watched the TV broadcast, and I instantly noticed the edits to the Love Shop sequence and Jessica undressing in the Box scene. Such was situation with some TV broadcasts at the time.
It was 44 years ago, so the memories are hazy, but I saw the original version of the Logan’s Run series pilot at a Trek convention in Los Angeles in June or July of 1977. I was 17. What I recall is that the pilot was originally an hour episode (so, like 48 minutes) without the character Rem, and without the car. They knew they were going to do reshoots, and announced it at that screening. I was interested in what the show would become, but quickly lost interest when it premiered. It didn’t do it for me. There were a bunch of Sci-Fi series in the late ‘70’s, including Battlestar Galactica and that Bermuda Triangle one with Roddy McDowell and the kid who went on to be Peter Preston in TWOK (Fantantic Journey, maybe?) But the only one I remember liking was Quark, which made me laugh my ass off.
Conventions were so much fun in that era. Thanks for sharing that vital bit of history. It was not uncommon for TV series to preview pilots at conventions, usually with different edits from the aired version (e.g. TOS' "Where No Man Has Gone Before" or The Time Tunnel's "Rendezvous with Yesterday"), but I did not know the LR pilot was so scaled down at the convention. From what you recall, with no car or Rem, the pilot--more or less--would play like an alternate take on the movie. The biggest problem with the LR TV series: unlike man-on-the-run series with a goal that is a legitimate motivator for the decisions / trials of the hero like The Fugitive, where Richard Kimble had the linked goal of exonerating himself by finding Fred Johnson (the one-armed man who murdered his wife), or The Incredible Hulk, where Banner was attempting to find a cure for his Gamma radiation overdose (and series creator/producer Kenneth Johnson did have ideas on ending the series with Banner finding that cure), Logan's Run took the movie's Sanctuary idea as a weak thread to draw the heroes from one isolationist community to another, yet the heroes' goals were never truly a consideration. They had adventures just because, with only a couple of interesting exceptions. Yes, The Fantastic Journey did star McDowall and then-future Peter Preston, Ike Eisenmann. Late 70s TV fantasy was more disappointment than not, with onyl a couple of series actually having competent writing.
Yeah, it was Fantastic Journey. Someone uploaded the series online a few years ago and I rewatched it. Holy crap, it has not aged well. I still like the actors - Ike Eisenmann (he goes by a different name now, apparently), Roddy McDowall, Carl Franklin, and Jared Martin. All of them did other shows and movies I liked (of course McDowall's Planet of the Apes, Carl Franklin was in a detective show called Caribe, and Jared Martin played Dusty Farlow on Dallas (a love interest of Sue Ellen's). Fun fact: One of the women in the first episode of Fantastic Journey (one of those who left to go home, played by Susan Howard) also ended up on Dallas, though as a regular cast member. Her character eventually married Ray Krebs.
I can't help but think the cutoff age was increased to lessen the perception of child sexuality in the city. Let the teens play their video games, and get busy once they turn 18 like in the audience's reality. Cathedral then becomes the place where the drug addicts hang out.
There's a scene in the novel in which Logan goes to one of the "sex palaces" after work. It's basically a brothel, and one of the workers there who propositions him is only 13 - one year shy of turning red (yellow was birth to age 7; that age group lived in the Nursery, and age 8-13 were evidently turned out to fend for themselves somehow... age 14-21 might work, might take classes in something, or train for a job, or just drift until Lastday). People in the novel were considered adults at age 16, and if memory serves, that's when Logan started his Sandman training. He didn't choose the 13-year-old; he went with someone older (but not by much - 16, I think). I'm guessing that reproduction was in vitro, once sperm and eggs were obtained. The people considered pregnancy and giving birth to be disgusting, and tended to avoid discussion of what sex could lead to (besides pleasure). There was no marriage as we know it, just an option to "pair up" with someone. It tended to be a very temporary situation, as people flitted from person to person. In this respect, Logan's Run resembles the culture of Brave New World. Cathedral was always a place for the young teen misfits who found normal life in the city to be too boring, not violent enough, too law-abiding, and so these kids (males, as far as I know; the only female we saw living in Cathedral was Mary-Mary 2, who had escaped from her Nursery to live on her own). But as Logan told the leader, once his crystal turned red (age 20 in the movie, considerably younger in the novel), the others would kill him if he didn't leave on his own. One interesting thing about the novel vs. the movie is Jessica's age. In the novel, she and her twin brother are on Lastday (Logan meets her in the New You shop after executing her brother and finding his ankh key among his belongings). In the movie, Jessica's brother is still a Runner, but she's still on green, and as Logan says, "You're years away" and he can't figure out why running matters to her since she still has several years - plenty of time, in the mindset of the city's inhabitants, until Lastday. The answer is that Jessica is part of the Sanctuary underground - people helping Runners to escape the city. She's not old enough for Lastday, but she's committed to helping those who are.
Although I have not read any production notes about the age changes to avoid child sexuality, that's a good theory, since the novel's cutoff was 21, so it may have implied that teenagers are leaning in that direction, which was--obviously--not going to fly in a movie.