I'm resurrecting this 3 year old thread because I recently started watching that show again. It was difficult to find subtitles for it.
Yes, that is quite a problem making this series accessible to audiences outside of Germany. There do exist French and Italian dubbed versions but to my knowledge these were never released on video.
And here is what the show would have looked like in color, and I have to say: omg, that would have looked excellent.
http://nice-bastard.blogspot.de/2010/09/fundsachen-13-bildergru-von-der.html
Unfortunately up to the last minute the producers were undecided whether to shoot in color (expensive, then) or b&w.
Nobody expected the series to be as successful as it turned out, and the lack of color turned out to be quite an obstacle trying to market the series for international audiences.
The series was not inspired by Star Trek (back in the 1960's US television series were largely unknown to German broadcasters) but some parallels are remarkable. On the contrary, the idea to use a spaceship as a "fireship" to stop a threat was visualized long before "The Doomsday Machine".
And how great the sets looked when differently photographed.
It was Rolf Zehetbauer's unique futuristic style. He also designed the BTA space station interiors for "Enemy Mine".
The militaristic approach is a little off putting. This was a West German show, right? But it comes off as pretty East German.
It was a West German show (produced by Bavaria who became famous for "Das Boot" aka U-96), and the militaristic approach was heavily criticized by the reviewers ("fascistoid"). The producers acknowledged that, and because of this criticism there was no prospect to go beyond the original seven 1-hour episodes.
And he gets some sort of Stasi/Gestapo officer forced upon. And his reaction is to lie, to cheat and to scheme against her.
Yes, one of the premises of the series was how he slowly turned her into an effective member of his crew, once she realized that out there in space you can't just do things "by the book" but have to be creative and imaginative. In the end she uses her position to cover for McLane and the other crew members.
The show itself seems a lot more feminist than TOS, as they put female characters in a lot more prominent lead roles than TOS did.
Absolutely, McLane's Boss was General Lydia van Dyke. And one of the renegade Earth colonies only had women in higher positions (and men as gardeners).
But at the same time, the Orion crew is a bunch of extremely sexist machos.
That would mostly apply to weapons officer Mario de Monti but the women snap back at him rather hard.
What I don't like is the militaristic shoot to kill approach. The aliens are hostile for no reason, and the Orion crew does not try once to talk to them.
Well, the "Frogs" acted like the Gorn in "Arena". The series didn't mention whether any attempts to communicate with this aliens were ever made but the Frogs obviously intend to annihilate the human race and get their "hands" (?) on human technology.
The science is a lot worse than in TOS. Here the authors truly didn't give a shit about astronomy and physics. And the technobabble, as far as I can understand it, makes absolutely no sense. It's just a bunch of exotic/technological sounding words connected, but there is no meaning behind it.
Admittedly there were some oddballs like a "supernova" being accelerated with FTL speed on a collision course with Earth, the aforementioned former Earth colony (apparently several light years away) harvesting radiation from our sun with ecological impact on our planet and planetoids with a breathable atmosphere.
The series used English descriptions that sounded fancy for German audiences in the 1960's and many acronyms like "EAS" ("ErdAussenStation" = Earth Outpost) - say hello to Bernd Schneider
- but other than that the terminology was no more technobabble than Star Trek's deflectors, phasers or photon Torpedos, IMHO.
Here is another link to the TV series in English which I think qualifies as a good and illustrated article to convey the general feeling about "Raumpatrouille":
http://toddstadtman.com/lucha-orion.html
Bob
