Vasquez Rocks appearances

Pretty sure they said in the pilot that it was built on the ruins of the original. There was a sequence where Buck visited the ruins outside the city and recognized some old Chicago haunts.

 

I always wondered how all those bugs fit into that little teeny-tiny spaceship.

 

They didn't fit. They were Misfits.

 

Touché!

 

They flew on Ryan Air.

 

That was very cool. I’m so old school I would have suggested just getting the appropriate usgs topo map......

 

I put Vasquez Rocks on Venus once...

http://www.hirezfox.com/21cf/d/20150316.html

 

Just don’t lay down in front of that Venus probe... The Heartbeeps version should have been donated to the BBC as a super-Dalek

 

During the fourth to seventh seasons of the Drew Carey Show, 1998-2002, the opening theme song was "Cleveland rocks".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Rocks

So I can imagine a tee shirt or sweatshirt with an image of Vasquez Rocks and the motto "Vasquz Rocks!" used by someone name Vasquez.

 

I'd wear that t-shirt and my name isn't even "Vasquez"

 

^^ That's Private "Let's Rock!" Vasquez...

 

They make an appearance in A Single Man.

 

The Venus probe aka the "Death Probe". They even made a rather inaccurate toy of it. It got redesigned and made black in "The Return of Death Probe", which is what later became the Heartbeeps Crimebuster.

BTW, John de Lancie has a brief role one episode.

 

Odd off topic note: I realized how they built the "Death Probe":


The way it moves is like a Zero Turning Radius Lawnmower which were just getting popular in the 1970s.
It's very quick to wheel around turn, and it's fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-turn_mower

I also have to figure that's why there was no dialog in the scenes with the machine moving.
If they had to record sound, they'd picked up the roar of the lawnmower engine.
Must have been deafening under the cone of the Probe's box!

Scott

 

That wouldn't require a lack of dialogue, since dialogue in outdoor scenes was routinely redubbed in those days, because of uncontrollable recording conditions, wind noise, passing cars and airplanes, etc. In older shows like 6M$M and Trek: TOS, you can often tell that "outdoor" dialogue has an incongruously studio-clean, recording-booth sound to it. (In my Mission: Impossible rewatch, I noticed that some actors who appeared exclusively in outdoor scenes had their voices looped over by familiar voice actors like Walker Edmiston or Vic Perrin. Since their lines were 100% looped anyway, they didn't have to match the actors' real voices, so it was easier to double up the voice actors they were already using.)

I daresay it's probably still routine to redub outdoor scenes, but they've gotten better at faking an outdoor voice quality. Not sure, though.

 

Perhaps it would have been technically possible to do it,
but for the actors outside it would be like trying to talk over a roaring motorcycle.
That would make it difficult to lip synch over.

I think even in Heartbeeps, the machine didn't appear indoors and I don't remember it interacting with the characters much.
I suspect it must have really been pretty deafening.
Which when you think about it is probably why it elicited such a frightened response from the actors dealing with it.

It's one thing when you've got a guy standing next to you in chrome armor with a toy gun pretending to be a killer cylon robot. It's another thing when you've got a large, lurching, deafening machine roaring at you pretending to be a killer robot.

Scott

 

A fair point.

Assuming they actually did modify a lawnmower rather than using something else with a similar wheel base. It could've just had a couple of guys inside the thing pushing it around from within, like an oversized Dalek. But I haven't seen the episode in ages, so I'm a poor judge.