Logan's Run First Watch

[FormerLurker]

If they had cast Randy Powell and Gregory Harrison in each other's roles, the resemblance to their movie counterparts would have been significantly more pronounced. All they'd need is to bleach Randy Powell's hair.

I feel the need to defend Buck Rogers. I've met both Gil Gerard and Erin Gray, and they both contend that network interference was the primary reason their show was dumbed down so much. They've both said that if the show had made it to a third season, it would have gone back to Earth and stayed there. Buck would have done his own 'wandering the wilderness', but in the interest of bringing the peoples of the Earth together. We'll never know how well that would have worked.

 

[Christopher]

If they had cast Randy Powell and Gregory Harrison in each other's roles, the resemblance to their movie counterparts would have been significantly more pronounced. All they'd need is to bleach Randy Powell's hair.

I don't see it. Harrison was far too bland to be particularly effective in either role. Powell didn't just resemble Richard Jordan's general type -- he had a similar personality too, a sense of cold menace and sociopathic ruthlessness tempered by his friendship for Logan.

I feel the need to defend Buck Rogers. I've met both Gil Gerard and Erin Gray, and they both contend that network interference was the primary reason their show was dumbed down so much.

Oh, believe me, I'm well aware of that from my rewatch/blog reviews of the show, and the articles I found to assist me with the latter. I actually find season 1 of Buck Rogers enjoyable, but it's superficial as hell because showrunner Bruce Lansbury explicitly wanted to avoid science fiction stories and just do "basic" TV action plots with futuristic trappings.

They've both said that if the show had made it to a third season, it would have gone back to Earth and stayed there. Buck would have done his own 'wandering the wilderness', but in the interest of bringing the peoples of the Earth together. We'll never know how well that would have worked.

I was just imagining what a hybrid of Logan's Run and Buck Rogers would've been like, something combining the best of both. The strong, likeable cast and understated but impressive-for-the-day gender equality of BR combined with the more SF-oriented storytelling of LR, perhaps similar to what you're describing. The original Anthony Rogers novellas by Philip Nowlan were on a post-apocalyptic Earth, after all -- although I'd be hesitant to go back there, because those novellas were horrifyingly racist tracts about the noble "White Race" heroically committing genocide against the "Yellow Peril," and the Buck Rogers comic strip was redeemed by its decision to abandon the race-war angle after its first year and instead become the first space-oriented adventure comic.

Anyway, if that's really what they had in mind, it would've been an even more massive continuity reboot than the one in season 2, since both seasons showed Earth as united. It would've basically been tossing out everything after the pilot, erasing the series proper's portrayal of Earth as a prosperous world that had many thriving cities and was a leading power in an interstellar Federation and reverting to something more like the pilot's portrayal of Earth as an impoverished wasteland with only one surviving enclave of civilization surrounded by mutant-infested ruins. It's hard to believe they ever would've gone through with such a massive revamp, even though they'd done it twice already.

Would it have worked? I doubt it, because it would've felt like a rehash of Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run, Ark II, and Genesis II/Planet Earth. Man, '70s TV really liked shows about post-apocalyptic wanderings. Probably because it lent itself to the kind of pseudo-anthology format that was favored at the time, since the fragmented world could be home to all sorts of isolated enclaves with whatever freaky cultures or technologies a given episode called for. That was Roddenberry's express intention behind G2/PE, and we saw it realized in Logan's Run.

 

[Kerock]

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

If they had cast Randy Powell and Gregory Harrison in each other's roles, the resemblance to their movie counterparts would have been significantly more pronounced. All they'd need is to bleach Randy Powell's hair.

Casting was not really the problem; if the TV series had been a straight adaptation of the movie, such a detail would have been higher on the "to do" list for Goff and Roberts, but it was not. The series went with a more Western-ized, central casting approach, with American actors this time around, and the need to be "Logan", "Jessica" and "Francis" more in name only, rather than versions of the film counterparts.

Heather Menzies (Jessica) was energetic--arguably more so than Jenny Agutter, but Harrison was the aforementioned central casting choice: typical 70s TV look, typical 70s TV performance. He was not particularly charismatic.

Randy Powell was the best choice overall; while he was nowhere near as menacing and dramatic as Richard Jordan's movie Francis, he gave a determined, no-debate performance. I'm not sure if anyone mentioned it, but there was a bit of coincidental cross-pollination between this series and The Amazing Spider-Man TV show on air at the same time: Randy Powell guest-starred in part one of Spider-Man's two-parter, "The Deadly Dust", while the Wall-Crawler himself--Nicholas Hammond--guest starred in the LR episode, "The Judas Goat."

Speaking of Hammond, he co-starred with Heather Menzies as two of the von Trapp siblings in The Sound of Music (20th Century Fox, 1965).

 

[Greg Cox]

FYI: Just read a blog about William F. Nolan, one of the co-authors of the original novel, who is 91 and apparently still going strong. Kind of ironic when you think about it.

 

[arch101]

FYI: Just read a blog about William F. Nolan, one of the co-authors of the original novel, who is 91 and apparently still going strong. Kind of ironic when you think about it.

He's an Elder!

 

[Marsden]

This is kind of an oblique comment but going back to the computer failing; I am watching The Prisoner for the first time and in episode 6 there's this big powerful computer that Number 6 blows up just like that by asking it "Why?". Bang dead, that's not even an argument. I'm not saying it justifies what happens in the Logan's Run movie but computers were almost magical and so they had ridiculous ways to destroy them as well.

I also wonder what Box was really supposed to be, he really didn't seem like a Robot as we understand the term.
He describes himself as, "I'm more than machine or man. More than a fusion of the two."
And why does his cave suddenly just collapse because Logan finds the way out?

 

[Noname Given]

This is kind of an oblique comment but going back to the computer failing; I am watching The Prisoner for the first time and in episode 6 there's this big powerful computer that Number 6 blows up just like that by asking it "Why?". Bang dead, that's not even an argument. I'm not saying it justifies what happens in the Logan's Run movie but computers were almost magical and so they had ridiculous ways to destroy them as well.

I also wonder what Box was really supposed to be, he really didn't seem like a Robot as we understand the term.
He describes himself as, "I'm more than machine or man. More than a fusion of the two."
And why does his cave suddenly just collapse because Logan finds the way out?

I'm not kidding about this. Back in the Mainframe days on the 1960ies to mid-1970ies, most jobs were submitted to them via batch card readers; and the computer operator was just supposed to feed the cards, and check the printed output bins and basically sort any printouts associated with various 'jobs' so they could be returned to teh client who submitted them.

I'm Junior High and High school we had access to them and were able to submit jobs via Mail Currier (mostly stuff that would result in ASCII art being printed on fan-folded computer paper); but we were to EVERY JOB required an "END", "ENTRY", and "IBSYS" card at the end of each job (in that exact order). <--- Those 3 cards signaled to the Mainframe that the data and processing for the job was complete, and it would reset and be ready for another job. If you forgot any one of those 3 cards or submitted them out of order; the Mainframe would just continue in its processing loop. (And we were informed that if we EVER submitted a stack without those cards, the person submitting would lose access to submit in the future; and the school might loose student submission ability altogether, so it was then ONE thing we were sure to put at the end of a stack (those were the only pre-punched cards and they were of a different color than the rest.)
^^^
I mention all this because the end result of not submitting these 3 cards might cause damage to the mainframe (it could gt locked in a processing loop and elements would eventually overheat and cause physical damage that took time and cost a lot of money to repair. (Yes, it was the operator's job to be on the lookout for something like that and kill any job in such a state before it caused damage; but often they were reading/otherwise occupied (there was usually a bell or buzzer or something to indicate a job was finished and it was resetting and moving on to the next job - but as some jobs took longer then others, they weren't always paying the attention they should before something bad happened.

The above also actually occurred to the mainframe I had such access to in Junior High; and it was a job submitted by a U.S. Lab that had forgotten the "IBSYS" - and that Mainframe was out of commission for 6 weeks.

So, anyone who knew the above could happen with mainframes of that era just extrapolated that such things would be bigger and nastier; and that if you put such a Supercomputer in such a "Processing Loop" state it would just melt/short out/blow up, etc. much more spectacularly.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

This is kind of an oblique comment but going back to the computer failing; I am watching The Prisoner for the first time and in episode 6 there's this big powerful computer that Number 6 blows up just like that by asking it "Why?". Bang dead, that's not even an argument. I'm not saying it justifies what happens in the Logan's Run movie but computers were almost magical and so they had ridiculous ways to destroy them as well.

That's been the problem with movie and TV super-computers; they're so unrealistically powerful or in some cases all-knowing that there's no believable way for the hero to defeat it without resorting to physical violence. So, they have information, questioning programming or another purely thought-based tactic confuse the device into going boom.

I also wonder what Box was really supposed to be, he really didn't seem like a Robot as we understand the term.
He describes himself as, "I'm more than machine or man. More than a fusion of the two."

Box was supposed to be psychologically unhinged. In other words, he was sort of looney, hence his claiming to be more than machine or man, and his crazed laugh as he chased the duo. Various production individuals have suggested in his isolation and job of capturing runners, he believed he was indeed "more" than anyone else, as if he held some special, artistic place in his world.

And why does his cave suddenly just collapse because Logan finds the way out?

In the struggle with Box, Logan's Sandman gun shoots into the celling of the cave, destroying it, thus it all collapsed in on the lair, killing Box in the process, and taking a part of the wall with it, which allowed Logan and Jessica to escape.

 

[Christopher]

This is kind of an oblique comment but going back to the computer failing; I am watching The Prisoner for the first time and in episode 6 there's this big powerful computer that Number 6 blows up just like that by asking it "Why?". Bang dead, that's not even an argument. I'm not saying it justifies what happens in the Logan's Run movie but computers were almost magical and so they had ridiculous ways to destroy them as well.

That's part of the problem, as I said. By 1976, it was already a done-to-death trope. And in most cases, as I also said, at least it was evident that the protagonist took some positive action against the computer, so you could tell it was a battle of wills that the hero won, no matter how arbitrary the method. In Logan's case, that's not as clear. There's some vague suggestion in Michael York's performance that Logan is resisting the computer somehow, fighting back mentally and refusing to yield, but it's very unclear what's actually going on.

And the other problem is that it wasn't just the computer, it was the whole dang city somehow. So it took the trope to a laughable extreme.

Anyway, The Prisoner was a surreal allegory, so the philosophical point mattered more than the technical mechanism. The point was that the computer could only handle cold facts and figures and couldn't begin to parse a philosophical question like "Why?" It could process information but couldn't contemplate meaning or purpose.

I also wonder what Box was really supposed to be, he really didn't seem like a Robot as we understand the term.
He describes himself as, "I'm more than machine or man. More than a fusion of the two."

It doesn't seem like they put a lot of thought into Box -- or if they did, most of it got cut out. The whole sequence seems kind of random.

And why does his cave suddenly just collapse because Logan finds the way out?

The same reason the city blew up. The sequence needed a climax, so boom.

So, anyone who knew the above could happen with mainframes of that era just extrapolated that such things would be bigger and nastier; and that if you put such a Supercomputer in such a "Processing Loop" state it would just melt/short out/blow up, etc. much more spectacularly.

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. People figured that computers would always use punch cards and vacuum tubes and the like, just bigger and more numerous.

Of course, it's still possible for a computer to overheat and shut down from being driven too hard. My laptop sometimes does that when I'm watching HD streaming video, though oddly it's only on some sites but not others.

 

[Greg Cox]

I once reprinted an old science fiction novel from the fifties in which a computer fell over and killed two men.

 

[Steven P Bastien]

I once reprinted an old science fiction novel from the fifties in which a computer fell over and killed two men.

Now, two men can fall over and kill fifty computers.

 

[Christopher]

It was usually assumed that the future of computing would be a single huge planetary mainframe that people could query for information, in person or remotely. Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" was an exception -- he famously predicted something much like the modern Internet, although his "logics" were large appliances comparable to a '40s TV set and the "tanks" (server farms, more or less) were various large buildings around the world, so it kind of split the difference.

 

[FormerLurker]

It was usually assumed that the future of computing would be a single huge planetary mainframe that people could query for information, in person or remotely. Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" was an exception -- he famously predicted something much like the modern Internet, although his "logics" were large appliances comparable to a '40s TV set and the "tanks" (server farms, more or less) were various large buildings around the world, so it kind of split the difference.

"I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream"

 

[Forbin]

I once reprinted an old science fiction novel from the fifties in which a computer fell over and killed two men.

 

[Skipper]

I once reprinted an old science fiction novel from the fifties in which a computer fell over and killed two men.

Please, the title!!!

 

[Shawnster]

No, it's a painting of the San Francisco coastline: http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=304&pid=33901#top_display_media

You're right, it was Star Trek V: http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/planets/logansrun-earth-startrekv.jpg

Mike Okuda pointed us to another re-use of the "Logan's Run" city in Star Trek. A portion of the cityscape with is characteristic pyramids appears on the Enterprise's viewscreen, behind Admiral Bennett, in "Star Trek V".
.
The interior location used for the Sandmen HQ was in TNG's "Tapestry" and "Inner Light."

My mistake. http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/reused_planets.htm

Buildings from "Logan's Run"
The Sandmen Headquarters from the science fiction movie "Logan's Run" (1976) appears on two occasions in Star Trek, in TNG: "Final Mission" and "Tapestry". Mike Okuda tells us: "That wasn't a miniature building, but rather a large painted backdrop. I love Logan's Run, so I tried to push the use of those backings from that film whenever it seemed appropriate, although the actual choices were made by the production designers.... In Logan's Run, that painted backdrop would have been based on their (very large) miniature city, and that particular building in the miniature was based on a real building in Texas that was used for location filming in the movie. (I think it was Sandman headquarters.)"

 

[Greg Cox]

Please, the title!!!

Unwillingly to Earth by Pauline Ashwell.

A fun old book that has kinda a Trek-ish feel despite predating Trek. Young girl from outer worlds gets accepted into Starfleet Academy on Earth, more or less. Adventures ensue as small town girl copes with the big city, as it were.

It was a compilation of a series of short stories that appeared in Astounding back in the day. Not sure they were ever all collected in book form until that Tor paperback, back in the day.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Looks like it's out of print. You need to reprint it again.

 

[johnnybear]

I watched this show back in the day and loved it despite some obvious problems that thinking too hard about won't help you get through each of the episodes! Now I've got the official DVD set I can get rid of my bootleg editions and even my audio tapes from 1978/79! Great show with a lot of links to classic Trek!
JB