Buck Rogers - The Lost Series

[Kegg]

Wow, this actually sounded like a pretty interesting take on Buck Rogers. David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana, some awesome ship designs... this might have been a series I could sit through more than five minutes of it at a time.

Sure its cheesy. Now more than ever. But vintage Dr. Who is cheesy and beloved.

I'd say it's fair to say the old Doctor Who is mostly discussed by people who love it.

Remake the source material, but I loved Gil Gerard and the old seventies show.

The Glen Larson series isn't the source material. Buck Roger's roots are in pulp novellas from Amazing Stories, and decades before Gil Gerard, Buster Crabbe played the misplaced hero in film serials.

 

[Starkers]

Wilma was in season 2 but sidelined quite a bit. Worse she went from a hot liberated pilot in spandex to a mousy flight attendant (just look at her season 2 duds!).

Yeah the stewardess look wasn't great.

I loved both Buck Rogers and Battelstar Galactica back in the day, but upon re-watching both in the last few years my opinions have diverged.

Galactica is still a good show, bit cheesy at times but they had good solid stories and the show went somewhere. Buck...well I own the first season on DVD and you know I'm not actually sure I've seen every episode, and it's really bad in places (well maybe more than just places)

The space Olympics is terrible (though the guys boxing with flowerpots on their hands is hilarious) but the nadir, for me at least, is the Space Rockers.

On the plus side I like the Starfighter design, love Wilma and Ardala, and Gerrard is an appealing lead, and of course Twiki rocks--but given the choice I prtobably only watch an episode if I've had a drink/need a laugh these days.

 

[xortex]

Buck Rogers was so much better than BSG in every way. I found BSG unwatchable. I find Buck Rogers more watchable that DS9 any day.

 

[23skidoo]

I always enjoyed the Gerard-Gray Buck Rogers. It was fun and brought back the feel of the old serials. It wasn't meant to be Lost or nuBSG. It was meant to be a fun family show, and it accomplished that.

I hated the second season when it first aired but watching the DVD later I actually found the stories, for the most part, were better and the relationship between Buck and Wilma actually was treated more mature and realistically. And although I agree it was a bit "Dairy Queen in Space" (which I think is how Erin Gray describes it) but I actually thought Wilma's Season 2 costume was hotter than the catsuits, and they let her go back to her natural hair color too. Yeah, they had that guy with feathers on his head, but I dunno - I found myself liking the second season stories more than I expected to, even if it became a BSG pastiche.

I'm stoked for this year's Calgary Entertainment Expo in June. Other folks can go line up for the TNG reunion - they just announced that both Erin Gray and Gil Gerard will be at the show, so there's a Buck Rogers reunion happening.

Alex

 

[Starkers]

Buck Rogers was so much better than BSG in every way. I found BSG unwatchable. I find Buck Rogers more watchable that DS9 any day.

To each their own, like I say I loved Buck when I was a kid but it's become one of those shows that hasn't translated to something I like now.

 

[Winterwind]

I will always have very fond memories of Gil Gerard's Buck Rogers. When picked up the DVDs a couple years back I was amazed that I remembered the stories for each and every episode and I hadn't seen them since the early 80s.

I liked the first season better than the first. I just enjoyed the humour and found the second season lacking in many ways. The loss of Dr. Huer and Theo were keenly felt I thought. Adm. Asimov, Crichton and Dr. Goodfellow annoyed the hell out of me. The daft voice change for Twiki was rather jarring as I loved Twiki when I was a kid. Hawk... well, I appreciate what they tried doing with the character and Thom Christopher did a good job in the role but the biggest issue with the second season for me was turning Wilma from a strong, independent woman and the leader of the Earth's Defense Forces into a glorified stewardess and minor, recurring character.

I've only every had one celebrity crush and that was Erin Grey. To this day, whenever I watch an episode I still sigh when I see her.

 

[Christopher]

I kinda liked the second season of Buck Rogers, at least compared to the first (though of course they were both ultra-cheesy). You can't go wrong with Wilfrid Hyde-Whyte. And I liked the switch to a space-exploration format, although the whole "search for the lost tribes" justification was kind of bizarre and pointless. Sure, it was a blatant Star Trek knockoff, but I appreciated the tribute.

 

[Mysterion]

^^^
To me the "search for the lost tribes" sounded like an attempt to tie-in to Battlestar Galactica. Though, I suppose the timelines probbly don't come close to matching up (even putting Galactica 1980 aside).

 

[Christopher]

Not so much an attempt to tie in as a sign that Glen Larson's Mormon background influenced both shows. Or simply that he didn't have a lot of imagination when it came to ideas for space shows.

 

[Harvey]

Glen Larson isn't exactly noted for having a lot of imagination on any of the shows he produced, no?

 

[Christopher]

Nope. Galactica was the only thing he ever produced that had the potential to rise above schlock, and it did so only infrequently.

 

[xortex]

Why the shake up - out of ideas or trying to fulfill the potential of BSG ? which IMO was similar to Lost in Space in it's hokiness. I can appreciate the concept but it wasn't realized and borrowed alot from Dune. I could never rewatch it or Lost in space ever. OTOH, I think I'm going to buy Buck Rogers. If only they didn't stir the pot but rather let it develop and evolve naturally. Ironically it was when Fontana and Gerrold muscled their way in that it's vision soured, but I can't say anything because their stories were still pretty good. Not sure if Larson stuck with it or stood up to them or not but it seemed like many people were steering that ship into the barrier reefs too artistically for creative control as is always the case.

 

[scotpens]

There are other shows where the product wasn't necessarily great, but you got the sense that they were making an effort (i.e. first couple seasons of Andromeda). But with BR, it seems to me like they were just pumping it out just to do it. ("Don't worry, all those Star Wars fan will eat this crap up! Get me more aluminum foil over here!")

“And we need more beautiful women and hunky men for background extras! Are we running out of pretty people?”

I couldn’t stand the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers series. It just seemed like another lame Star Wars ripoff in the vein of the original BSG.

 

[sojourner]

borrowed alot from Dune.

That's the first time I've heard that comparison.

 

[xortex]

Did you see Dune? Well maybe I got it backwards but those robot drawings depicting the conscious robots looked just like the cylons of old. I didn't think about it 'till just now. I'm guessing that the artist was borrowing from BSG now because that was in the eighties but the concept of the sentient robots that Humans rebelled against was written into the novel, wasn't it? written well before BSG.

 

[Silvercrest]

Nope. Galactica was the only thing he ever produced that had the potential to rise above schlock, and it did so only infrequently.

Seems like Knight Rider had the potential to rise above schlock. Granted, it never did so, but the potential was there, if only they had followed their own tag lines. "A man who does not exist," and "A world of criminals who operate above the law."

Did you see Dune? Well maybe I got it backwards but those robot drawings depicting the conscious robots looked just like the cylons of old. I didn't think about it 'till just now. I'm guessing that the artist was borrowing from BSG now because that was in the eighties but the concept of the sentient robots that Humans rebelled against was written into the novel, wasn't it? written well before BSG.

As far as I know, the novel only refers to humans rebelling against "thinking machines". That could mean anything between HAL 9000, KITT, and Wall-E.

 

[Christopher]

The concept of Cylons as sentient robots who rebelled against their human creators is from the 2004 version of Galactica. In the 1979 original, it was explained that the Cylons were initially a reptilian race who, after contacting humans, determined they were the most efficient form and created humanoid robots as their servants. But once the Imperious Leader was created and corrupted by Count Iblis, he led the robotic Cylons to launch a war of extermination against all organic life, starting with their own reptilian creators and then moving on to humans.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Nope. Galactica was the only thing he ever produced that had the potential to rise above schlock, and it did so only infrequently.

Any potential was ruined the moment the GALACTICA encountered the casino planet and had everyone partying just mere hours after a genocide.

 

[Christopher]

Any potential was ruined the moment the GALACTICA encountered the casino planet and had everyone partying just mere hours after a genocide.

Here's what I said about that in my blog review:

Now, people often complain that the pilot lost its way when it got to Carillon and became about a space casino instead of about the struggle to survive and cope with tragedy. I’m not sure I entirely agree. Sure, there was some cheesy stuff in the casino sequence, but it served a purpose in the story, an allegorical temptation for the survivors. They’d lost everything and were enduring hardship, and here was an evident paradise threatening to lead them astray, like Odysseus’s crew in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. There’s actually some pretty tense stuff as Commander Adama plots secretly with Colonel Tigh in order to undermine the hedonistic Sire Uri’s (Ray Milland) plans for disarmament. So it’s not that they completely abandoned the concept of the refugees’ struggle for survival halfway through the story, since the space casino was a deliberate counterpoint to that theme. (Also, I’m sure it has some parallel in the Book of Mormon, since the whole premise was basically Larson retelling that tale as a space opera.)

No, I think where they really started to lose their way was in “Lost Planet of the Gods.” This story follows pretty immediately on from the pilot, but any sense of struggle or deprivation or loss is pretty hard to find. It opens with the main characters having a cheerful dinner party to announce Apollo and Serina’s engagement, followed by the lower-rank pilots’ shenanigans as they arrange a bachelor party. There’s lip service paid to supply shortages, but only barely. Then, the fighter pilots are taken down by a random disease that spread because two scouts were too excited by the bachelor party to go through decontamination — not because there was starvation in the ranks or because too many pilots were lost in the invasion or anything that would actually remind the viewer of the massive tragedy these people were supposedly recovering from. One of the music cues from this episode was actually titled “Another Day on the Galactica.” That’s how mundane things have suddenly become, despite the nominal premise.

 

[RandyS]

Any potential was ruined the moment the GALACTICA encountered the casino planet and had everyone partying just mere hours after a genocide.

Here's what I said about that in my blog review:

Now, people often complain that the pilot lost its way when it got to Carillon and became about a space casino instead of about the struggle to survive and cope with tragedy. I’m not sure I entirely agree. Sure, there was some cheesy stuff in the casino sequence, but it served a purpose in the story, an allegorical temptation for the survivors. They’d lost everything and were enduring hardship, and here was an evident paradise threatening to lead them astray, like Odysseus’s crew in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. There’s actually some pretty tense stuff as Commander Adama plots secretly with Colonel Tigh in order to undermine the hedonistic Sire Uri’s (Ray Milland) plans for disarmament. So it’s not that they completely abandoned the concept of the refugees’ struggle for survival halfway through the story, since the space casino was a deliberate counterpoint to that theme.

Another thing about Carrillon that is overlooked by fans of the new series who want everything to be about daddy issues is how the Ovions were distracting the colonials with the casino in order to feed on them and kill them.

Pretty horrifying if you ask me.