Sadly I haven't watched most of those shows, but I have watched both Classic BSG and Buck Rogers and enjoyed both series. 
Did You Love Other Vintage Sci-Fi Shows?
- Thread starter ZapBrannigan
- Start date
I am still having trouble with the term "Vintage".
At 51 years of age I am finding everything being called vintage these days and I find much of the modern Science Fiction unwatchable.
At 51 years of age I am finding everything being called vintage these days and I find much of the modern Science Fiction unwatchable.
You're welcome. It's a bit dated and the model work is laughable but the stories are pretty good. BTW, Space: 1999 was originally intended as a sequel to this of sorts.
I grew up with Dr Who, Blakes 7, and Buck Rogers. Cheesy but fun. Battlestar Galactica wasn't available in our TV area so we had to watch it on a fuzzy black and white portable in my parents' bedroom with almost no signal. Only saw a handful of episodes. Having watched some more recently, Blakes 7 (ignoring the special effects) stands up the best but Dr Who has the most enduring charm.
Much oif my love of sci fi came from the action figures so Star Wars and the Black Hole was high on my list. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica produced only very limited runs and I didn't ever consider customs in those days.
I preferred ensemble shows so Invaders was a bit repetitive. Thunderbirds and Space 1999, I loved. Tomorrow People and Logan's Run I can barely remember. I only saw one episode of Children of the Stones but it's burned into my brain forever. The Owl Service was incomprehensible to me at the time. The Phoenix and the Carpet was good fun. Who can forget Chocky? Battle of the Planets was AMAZING. Sapphire and Steel is ripe for a remake. The Fantastic Journey and Buster Crabbe serials were on every school holidays so I grew to love them.
Much oif my love of sci fi came from the action figures so Star Wars and the Black Hole was high on my list. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica produced only very limited runs and I didn't ever consider customs in those days.
I preferred ensemble shows so Invaders was a bit repetitive. Thunderbirds and Space 1999, I loved. Tomorrow People and Logan's Run I can barely remember. I only saw one episode of Children of the Stones but it's burned into my brain forever. The Owl Service was incomprehensible to me at the time. The Phoenix and the Carpet was good fun. Who can forget Chocky? Battle of the Planets was AMAZING. Sapphire and Steel is ripe for a remake. The Fantastic Journey and Buster Crabbe serials were on every school holidays so I grew to love them.
Yeah, UFO had good ratings in the States, so Lew Grade greenlit Anderson to start work on Season Two. Anderson decided that SHADO should relocate to to a vastly-enlarged moonbase, and they would have improved Interceptors.
A large amount of this design work had already been done when the ratings fell, and the US stations cancelled thier interest in Season Two.
Without this market, Grade could not authorise a second season, but Anderson suggested applying the new designs to a new series, so the work wasn't wasted.
This explains why the Moonbase Alpha uniforms are the same mushroom colour as SHADO ones. Also, Straker's secretary's typewriter found it's way to the Main Mission Control Panels (usually in front of Paul Morrow).
Guess that answers the question of my favourite series of the '70's!
Oh yeah, by the time I was a teenager, we had Tom Baker Doctor Who, which I loved, and by then I'd seen (and loved) all the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon, both at the movies and on TV, and his Buck Rogers, at the theater.
I wouldn't call the model-work on UFO laughable. Yeah, there's only so much you can do without motion-control, but the detail in the models is as high as anything you'd see later out of ILM.
I not only watched this series, I taped the audio of the end of the final episode from January or February 1971. Most unusual for that time, they actually got to do a final episode (wherein Chris George finds his brother, who doesn't turn out to have the same blood); Frontiere got to write a huge, long final chord with harps, etc., at the very end.
They were using Dinky Toys, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
I loved it in the 70s but now I just have to laugh at it. It reminds me of the Jupiter 2 models I used to make out of two paper plates, scotch tape, and toothpicks. Or the phasers made of duct tape and aluminium foil.
Derek Meddings, the miniature fx guy on UFO, went on to do amazing work for the Superman and James Bond movies. I have several times been surprised to learn that a big "outdoor" scene I thought was real, was actually one of his huge, in-studio diarama-type miniature sets.
One of the dangers of HDTV, too.
I remember visiting the set of MILLER'S COURT, a WCVB production in Boston many years ago—in the prehistoric NTSC days. It was a minimalist set in a black limbo featuring a bench with legal books in a bookcase, a jury stand and other trappings of a US court room.
What looked like lathed woodwork was in fact styrofoam painted brown with poster paint. The bookshelf was a studio flat with no depth at all—the "shelves" were strips of lathing and the hollow of the shelves were flat black poster paint with the bindings of retired legal books hot-glued in place. On camera it all looked very substantial. In person the economical diorama was evident from a distance.
TOS was very much a theater of the mind.
As model builder Steve Neill once stated to me they were good enough for film.....
Back when I was growing up and Star Trek seemed to be on all the time - so that's the late seventies and early eighties - the other shows I watched and loved included Doctor Who, Blakes 7, Sapphire and Steel, The Tomorrow People, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and re-runs of UFO, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90 etc. I still love most of those shows - and indeed I'd regard Doctor Who, Blakes 7, UFO and Sapphire and Steel still easily in the top ten sci-fi shows of all time.
The weird irony (for me) is that I saw Space: 1999 (series 1 only) at the time of its original broadcast - and though I enjoyed it, I wouldn't say that I loved it, nor did it particularly stay with me as anything but a vague memory. I had a moment of total epiphany that day when I rediscovered it as an adult (25th April 1992 - seared in the memory!). I'd certainly now regard it as the best "space opera" type show ever made.
The weird irony (for me) is that I saw Space: 1999 (series 1 only) at the time of its original broadcast - and though I enjoyed it, I wouldn't say that I loved it, nor did it particularly stay with me as anything but a vague memory. I had a moment of total epiphany that day when I rediscovered it as an adult (25th April 1992 - seared in the memory!). I'd certainly now regard it as the best "space opera" type show ever made.
The spinning-top UFOs did look a bit silly, but that show had some excellent miniature work considering it was made in the late 1960s on a TV budget.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0VCqz4Jams[/yt]
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