"Future Flight" - How 1987 saw 2087

[Mark_Nguyen]

I saw this one as an eleven year-old boy and wore my Betamax video recording of it raw. And on a lark, I discovered someone else did too and preserved it on YouTube.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMQ83jtkQxs[/yt]

Having Christopher Reeve as the presenter was perhaps a bit too on the nose for a show called "Future Flight", but he did a great job IMO. This show presents a series of ten "flights" or future fancy including what our return to the moon would look like, a trip to mars, solar sail race, and the next grand tour of the solar system following the Voyager route but with a manned spacecraft. It's illustrated by the latest achievements of the time, including the space shuttle (on hold at the time following the Challenger disaster), another Voyager's recent nonstop flight around the world, and other historical stuff.

Pretty cool look back at the future as science thought it could be, versus how it's turning out a quarter century later. Anyone catch this back in the day?

Mark

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Addendum - looking over the credits, look who did the Special Effects Art Direction: that young buck, Rick Sternbach! I'm guessing that means the model work and such..?

Mark

 

[Rick Sternbach]

Addendum - looking over the credits, look who did the Special Effects Art Direction: that young buck, Rick Sternbach! I'm guessing that means the model work and such..?

Mark

I helped out with some miniature stuff and some sketches of future spacecraft. I'd have to look at my drawings again, but I could swear the show was made before 1987. Might be a rights/release date thing.

Rick

 

[JES]

Unfortunate that the space plane is one of those things predicted that never panned out. I mean sure the USAF might be operating hypersonic vehicles in secret, and it appears I recently read an article that confirms that a hypersonic successor to the SR-71 is in the works, but that is about it.

Even if we have the technological knowledge to build them, no one currently seems to want to spend the money necessary to design, build, and operate a commercial spaceplane.

And Burt Rutan/Virgin Galactic's current design just couldn't possibly serve anything more than a tourism function.

But everything up to the Mars mission appears to have been accurately predicted within about a decade or so. We can't say that anything afterwards is actually planned. Is the moon base still in the works, or was that cancelled for the foreseeable future?

 

[publiusr]

Good job on the effects Rick! I hope you do post some more ofyour Chronology art on line--esp. the superwarp ships and the flying fortress.

The solar regatta--that's being looked at, what with the lunar flashlight
http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/lunar-flashlight/
http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/ne...missions-too-stsci-director-tells-house-panel

 

[Rick Sternbach]

Addendum - looking over the credits, look who did the Special Effects Art Direction: that young buck, Rick Sternbach! I'm guessing that means the model work and such..?

Mark

I just did a quick scan of Future Flight and reminded myself that there was a ton of art done by my IAAA colleagues like Ron Miller, Bill Hartmann, and Pam Lee, and even some heavy reuse of FX footage we did back in 1978-79 for the original COSMOS. From what I recall, Carl Sagan Productions had some kind of a license deal with our miniseries film editor Bea Dennis to let other shows use bits and pieces. I even seem to recall some COSMOS footage used in THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO.

Rick

 

[Metryq]

I even seem to recall some COSMOS footage used in THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO.

Season 3 "Divorce Venusian Style." Ralph and Bill meet the "green guys" face-to-face and are shown the home planet, which was flyover shots of Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. Too bad they didn't use the "canals" shots from the COSMOS chapter on Mars and Percival Lowell ("Blues For A Red Planet").

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Remarkable background info, thanks Rick! Yes, I really loved all the paintings in this show. There's a lot of that sort of style missing in current futurist artwork IMO, but the gems still pop up.

I noticed some of the re-used Cosmos footage as well on this rewatch, which is testament to how good it was in the first place. The new model stuff was great, too - I remember building replicas of the solar sail ships with paper and straws, and a million attempts to get that mars ship (good grief, is that an old LEM on the front?) modeled out of Lego. Awesome times.

Mark