Blake's 7 on Blu-ray!
- Thread starter Turbo
- Start date
It just occurred to me that the basement of my elementary school was designated a fallout shelter as well as the gymnasium of my middle school.
I remember the fallout shelter signs, and at least one duck-and-cover-ish drill in the '80s when Cold War tensions peaked. But that was a (woefully inadequate) precaution against a nuclear war, not a nuclear plant meltdown.
There's only one way to find out!
As far as I can tell both began airing in 1980, but after Series C had finished airing.
I think both posed more of a threat to Who. The people behind Blake's 7 knew what they were up against and had been since they saw Star Wars while they were still finishing up Series A
Yeah, in my Behind the Scenes book, Star Wars looms heavily over the first series because it had just hit the theaters as the series was going into production.
It's the reason that they blew through the first series budget in the first few episodes, because they spent all the money on SFX shots of the Liberator and London.
The only other sci-fi movie that gets mentioned is Alien, as that had just premiered in theaters as they were getting ready to start production on Series Four, and the look of Scorpio was influenced by the Nostromo; and had Vere Lorrimer had his was, the bridge of Scorpio would have looked more like the interior of Nostromo.
As I recall, they weren't called 'Duck and Cover' drills when I was in school.
They were called 'Earthquake Drills', but the premise was the same; duck under your desk when you start to feel the ground shake, or stand in a doorway, or, if you're outside, head to the middle of the playing field and sit down until the shaking has passed.
Here in the Midwest, we had regular tornado drills, but that's different from the nuclear-war drill I remember having to do once in school, which was an exception to the rule. I remember it basically just scared us, or at least scared me, because I could see how useless it would all have been in the event of an actual nuclear attack.
How oddly appropriate that this popped up on my YouTube suggestion feed this morning
Did they really think we were going to survive a nuclear attack and go back to normal afterwards?
Did they really think we were going to survive a nuclear attack and go back to normal afterwards?
Alien had its world premiere in 1979. Production of the series 4 of Blakes 7 would have taken place late in 1980. Not saying Scorpio wasn't influenced by Nostromo, I'm sure it was, but I would think the production of series 3 coincided with the release of Alien, no?
Probably not, but they wanted to convince the public that we could.
Scorpio seems very Star Wars-influenced to me. It combines the profile of a Star Destroyer with the space-truck aesthetic of the Millennium Falcon.
Yeah, I'd be a lot more worried about working in a coal power plant than I would a nuclear power plant. I have a feeling a nuclear power plant would have a lot more thorough and stricter safety precautions.
Chapter 8: Season 4
Upon his return, (from Los Angeles, where Producer Vere Lorrimer had met with Terry Nation to get his thoughts on the fourth series), Vere sat down with Script Editor Chris Boucher, and they began mapping out the series together.
"We decided in the fourth series, we would give them a less magnificent ship. I always visualized it like a tramp steamer compared to a battleship., but we didn't quite get the design I wanted. I visualized chains hanging all over the place, like a cargo ship, with oil and steam seeping out of it, rather like the (Nostromo) in Alien. Instead, what we got was the usual clean-as-anything spaceship."
Upon his return, (from Los Angeles, where Producer Vere Lorrimer had met with Terry Nation to get his thoughts on the fourth series), Vere sat down with Script Editor Chris Boucher, and they began mapping out the series together.
"We decided in the fourth series, we would give them a less magnificent ship. I always visualized it like a tramp steamer compared to a battleship., but we didn't quite get the design I wanted. I visualized chains hanging all over the place, like a cargo ship, with oil and steam seeping out of it, rather like the (Nostromo) in Alien. Instead, what we got was the usual clean-as-anything spaceship."
What they got was affordable.
Which doesn't prove he was thinking of the Nostromo at the time, just that he used it as an analogy when talking about it years later. We'd need a primary source from the time in question to know for sure.
