Supposedly, UFO 1999 was commissioned when UFO's three-year-on US screening got great ratings. Then the character-led episode Confetti Check A-OK was run and the ratings dropped permanently. So the series was retooled: not a follow up to UFO, and no episodes on Earth.So you stopped at War Games. Keep going, some of the best is still to come. Dramatically it is a mess and for a very good reason. It;s not the show we were making. There's a comprehensive wiki article about UFO and how Space 1999 was supposed to be UFO: 1999 which makes including the year in the title more sensible. UFO series 1 took place in 1980. Imagine Straker as an older war-torn commander (imagine the more sensitive Landau as the Victor Berman character, etc) Even as a child I wondered why the same company made 2 shows about a base on the moon. The Americans loved UFO at first but then the tide turned as it got deeper, and it was deep. Imagine Star Trek meets Mad Men. The plug was pulled after months of production, set and costume design. A new larger moonbase as Shado moves to the moon full time (alpha). Eagle INTERCEPTORS, etc. No moon leaving orbit. The moon was last defense against an increasing alien attack meant to colonize our planet...and bodies. Would it have been better? Who knows. In my mind it sure as hell is.
fred freiberger : hack or hapless?
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Yes, I did some years ago.
I found more in the series to reccommend it then I recalled from seeing it back in the '70s.
Here it is: http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/revisiting-space-1999.169891/
That reminds me of a line from National Lampoon's Vacation, when car salesman Eugene Levy is unloading the Wagon Queen Family Truckster on Chevy Chase: "You think you hate it now, but wait 'til you drive it."
But I'll admit I got into Space: 1999 as a boy and it never really let me go.
I like S3 a lot. When I was a lad in the 70s they seemed no less wonderful than S1. Now as an adult I appreciate the sterner, oft-quieterTrek of S1(early). One thing I think Christopher mit have left out on his very cogent critique was the obvious planet-of-the-hats theme to S2. And (what a criticism!) some of the S2 eps seem like they just got really good at cranking out decent-to-good eps. I think S3 has more of my childhood favorite eps than S2 does, especially Tholian Web! (Wink of Eye, Plato's, Eden, and Spectre are others. Judge me if you must.)
I was surprised too. They print a lot of what Gene Roddenberry said in his notes, and he was one that kept reminding them to keep it within Trek believability, etc. Now it's when Gene sat down to write scripts and rewrites that his weaknesses show. They claim some of them are bad, especially when trying to finalize a script for Titans/Phase2/TMP. That's when the cracks started to show. I'm looking forward to the multi-viewpoint of him starting TNG in vol 2. That should help connect the dots more.
If I recall correctly, the hour long episodes of Danger Man, re-titled Secret Agent, ran for two years on CBS. It ended only because Patrick McGoohan abandoned the series to make The Prisoner. There were plans to go to color, but after two episodes, McGoohan was done. Those two episodes were edited into a feature picture. The Avengers, while not an ITC series but still a British import, had a nice long run on ABC.
The Saint did better syndicated than it did on NBC, which only ran 32 of the 47 color episodes.
There's a line from Gerry in the making of UFO doc where he states that ITC would call him over for meetings and he'd fly to NY. If someone was there to meet him, he knew they were happy with the show. If they didn't meet him, he knew they didn't like the latest episodes (during its American run). He said they liked the shows with the aliens and hated the earth based stuff, and yes, UFO 1999 had the mandate that they would abandon earth based stories. I don't see how they could since the moon would still be in orbit and having some of the aliens get past moonbase was the main gimmick of the show. Also, the show was hurt by the 6 month delay during production because of Pinewood studios closing for some reason I think. I'm hazy on those details, but they lost Alec during that period and one of the purpleheads and couple others. It was to be retooled, but Straker was going to be commander as far as I know of UFO 1999 and Paul at least was going to be there, but beyond that it would be a quite different show. My main regret in us not getting this instead was that most of what S1999 was criticized for had to do with the unbelievable premise of a traveling moon.
Wow! I had totally forgotten about Tim heald 's book.... I've had it sitting on my shelf from...well.... From the era! I must go and read - read it! I assume, from your comment, that FF wasn't so well regarded.
Yeah... Gangster planet, Roman planet, Nazi planet, planet of hedonists, a few primitive-tribe planets, etc. "A Private Little War" managed to avoid that a bit by having two distinct factions. But season 3 had a couple of "Hats" itself -- Indian planet, Ancient-Greece cosplayers, that sort of thing. And its aliens were often defined primarily by their problems -- the accelerated people, the overpopulated people -- without much of a developed culture of any kind. But at least most of them weren't thinly veiled ethnic stereotypes.
Both Secret Agent and The Saint are currently available for free streaming on ShoutFactory TV. They've got some other interesting stuff over there too. (Anyone know if Sapphire and Steel is worth checking out? It sounds really weird...)
Meanwhile, back at the Fred Freiberger thread...Aunt Martha is lying in a ditch on the edge of town after having taken a traipse through the woods.
The bit which sticks in the mind is the account of a meeting with a possible writer, where Freiberger is ready to throw him out when he says he has to be at a rehearsal: FF only wants full-time writers, not anyone part timing around other careers (the writer was OK, as he was going to a rehearsal of a play he'd written, not one he was appearing in).
Perhaps it makes sense as a policy, but it does seem to lock out brilliant new talent, and multi-taskers. And also, in the UK at the time, most of the good full time writers would be locked into script-editing jobs on other series, or laden up with commissions from mates. So FF was effectively limiting himself to full time writers who can't get enough work: a relatively small pool if you also want them to be good.
Very definitely, though you might want to know that the Odd Film Curse applies to it: stories 2 4 and 6 are much better than the others. 3 is pretty universally despised.
But you can see the whole series, legally and for free, on ShoutFactory TV, which is what I was saying. ShoutFactory makes a lot of the shows in its DVD catalog available for streaming on the site, presumably to help promote them. They've currently got a bunch of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Elvira's Movie Macabre, the Super Sentai shows Zyuranger and Dairanger, all the Gamera movies except the 2006 one, a number of Showa-era Godzilla movies, some Ultraman, several Gerry Anderson Super-Marionation shows, and other stuff.
Not explicitly stated above is that The Name of the Game (season 1) was the lead-in to season 3 of Star Trek; it ran 8:30 to 10 p.m. Sometimes I would watch both in sequence, with my mom (I was 12). The third and final season of Name, 1970-71, included the series' one excursion into SF: the Gene Barry episode "L.A. 2017," directed by none other than Steven Spielberg. I saw it at the time and it made a big impression - I'd love to see it again.
I remember "L.A. 2017", but hadn't remembered what it was called. I'll have it mind all next year...
Same here, I was a fan of the series from it's first transmission back in 75 here in the UK! Hate to admit to this but I missed part of Force of Life, the second episode as I was out with a pal but I soon zipped home when I realised it was on but I'd still missed the first fifteen minutes! By Dragon's Domain I was a total nineteen ninety niner!
JB
I got that book about ten years ago and strangely enough they wrote it without letting the show get finished first! But no, things didn't look very good for the new series even back then and they knew it!
JB
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