Other series like Trek & Twilight Zone

I love TOS and Twilight Zone Original series. I will watch each episode dozens of times. A few weak episode in each series, but not many. I really dislike the newer Trek and newer Twilight Zone series and never caught on as I seem attached to the originals. Do you know of any other series like Trek and Twilight Zone from that period I would enjoy? Thanks...

PS- Its rough and very difficult getting the younger generation to watch Trek and Twilight Zone as they find it boring and dull. Anyone had any luck getting people under 30 into these series?

 

The original Outer Limits, for sure.

As for later series along the lines of Star Trek . . . maybe Farscape?

 

I discovered this British series a few years back. Most surviving episodes (and bits and pieces of "lost" ones) are on Youtube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Unknown

Sir Rhosis

 

I think "Raumpatrouille Orion" would do nicely, but unfortunately it still requires an English dubbing or at least subtitles.

Bob

 

Yes, it really is a pity "Raumpatrouille" remains reserved for German speaking audiences. I´m pretty sure many TOS fans would enjoy it. Hopefully they´ll release a subtitled edition someday.

Mario

 

Definitely The Outer Limits and One Step Beyond. OSB deals more with the paranormal than science fiction, though one episode had the host experimenting with hallucinogenics or something, sort of documentary style.

A show I first saw in 1959, which got me interested in science fiction at 8, was Men Into Space. It was more near future, and stories were set usually no farther than the moon if I remember right. They tried to present a realistic approach to space travel based on what was known at the time. It's probably pretty dull by today's standards, I've not seen it in over 50 years.

Then of course if you stand watching marionettes, there's Gerry Anderson's shows like Supercar, Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet.

ETA: And if you want something really baffling, there's always Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner.

 

Other than what's been mentioned, the only dramatic SF show from '60s US prime-time that I can think of was The Invaders, about a man trying to expose the alien invaders hiding among us. It wasn't particularly like Trek, though, aside from having some of the same FX creators.

I'm going to make an odd recommendation: Space: 1999, one of Gerry Anderson's live-action shows. It's kind of a bizarre concept and often quite silly -- the Moon is blown out of Earth orbit and somehow drifts millions of light-years through space and encounters new planets on an almost weekly basis -- but in the first season it almost kinda works in a way, because there was an overall sense that space was a bizarre and incomprehensible realm that challenged our assumptions about reality. It was more a mythic journey in the vein of The Odyssey than a grounded science fiction show, and if you could buy into the trippy, surreal quality, it almost worked. (Maybe it could fall into the "like The Twilight Zone" category as much as the "like Trek" category.) Moreover, there are a couple of things it did even better than TOS: its supporting ensemble cast was better developed, and its technology design and visual effects pretty much left TOS in the dust.

The second season, however, was under new management -- Fred Freiberger, who also produced TOS's third season -- and it was retooled to be more "American" and action-oriented, losing that surreal and philosophical quality in favor of much the same kind of random weirdness you saw in TOS season 3, like aliens happening to have whatever assortment of magic powers was convenient for the plot (teleportation being the msot common by far). It also dumped several of the supporting characters in favor of new ones, including a beautiful alien shapeshifter with a Spock-like intellect. The Freiberger connection does give it a very TOS-like flavor, but mainly like the third season.

Anderson also did an earlier live-action drama called UFO, about a team fighting off an ongoing alien invasion (more overt than the one in The Invaders, but I've never seen it. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't have the entire series.

 

UFO's top secret SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation) used a film studio as its cover. One of the stranger episodes was the lead character hallucinating that SHADO was just a film set, and we get to see the actual sets as they looked from beyond the false walls.

 

Thanks for mentioning it, shame on me I forgot.

IMHO, most of the stories have Twilight Zone characteristics, so it's closer to TZ than ST.

Bob

 

Definitely! Some of the (still spectacular) visuals and terminology will seem very familiar to TOS fans, as well as having an intelligent story and the general "feel". And even the Enterprise´s trademark "1701" is taken directly from this classic SF movie. Highly recommended to anyone who hasn´t seen it yet.

Mario

 

Sliders(1995-2000) was a series that explored 'what if...' parallel Earths with many different societies and timelines.

 

Or it's a coincidence.

 

It's a coincidence. Matt Jefferies chose "1701" because he thought it registered better with the eye than other numbers when glimpsed briefly or in low resolution.

 

UFO launched with a compelling concept--but like many of the Anderson series, characterization suffered. The decades-long criticism that acting in live-action Anderson series suffered because the creators were used to working with marionettes was intentionally cutting--but the end result seemed to lend support to that criticism.

I remember UFO well, and indeed, the acting was often a mix of wooden and "this is the most serious thing EVER," which tends to sell something the conclusion will never pay off. Some episodes were ok, and the FX--the space shots anyway--were top notch, but some of the land-based miniatures were far too reminiscent of Thunderbirds quality--at least for the early 70s.

 

I always liked the Mobiles though. They were my favorite hardware on the show since they looked like they could really exist. And Lt. Gay Ellis was my favorite "software".

 

Alfred Hitchock Presents might be a good one to check out. Similar to TZ in that it's an anthology thriller, but it very rarely (if ever) includes supernatural elements.

 

That would be a mighty big coincidence, don´t you think? I get his official explantion that he excluded "6", "8" and "9" from the registry, because they would be hard to tell apart on the TVs of the day. But that still leaves more numbers than "1", "7" and "0". And furthermore there was the question, whether to have 3, 4, 5 or more digits in the registry to begin with - that too was an arbitrary decision. And with these variables in mind it just seems too improbable to me that TPTB just happened to choose the "1701" without ever thinking of the movie that definitely influenced Roddenberry when creating Star Trek.

Mario