Watching Buck Rogers In The 25th Century

I think in early season 1 the impression is that the pilots may fly the starfighters but they put all their faith in the computers and can't save their lives if they tried because the computers do all the flying and aiming of weapons. Manual control seems a very alien affair to them, at least that's the impression I got.

Buck turned all that on its head with his mavericky flying and being able to outshoot most oponents due to his 20th Century smarts. In other words being a better pilot and not needing a computer..

 

I wonder how many times Buck's origin was ripped off? (Though I guess he ripped off Rip Van Winkle )
The Shining Knight was frozen in ice and revived in the 20th Century.
Captain America was also frozen and revived in modern times.
Several Dylan Hunts.

 

Yes but which Dylan Hunt was worth watching?

 

The trope is much older than Buck Rogers, and at least half a century older than Rip Van Winkle:

https://web.archive.org/web/2019021...agon.com/UltimateSF/thisthat.html#immortality

Anyway, the original Anthony/Buck Rogers wasn't frozen, but preserved by a mysterious radioactive gas (or in the movie serial, an experimental "Nirvano gas" that induces suspended animation).

 

Farscape was Flash Gordon with the Buck Rogers backstory.

 

Farscape was awesome compared to Buck Rogers too...... And also very out there

 

I guess you mean the TV Buck Rogers who was an astronaut lost on a spaceflight. I was confused at first, since I was thinking of the previous versions where he was just in hibernation in a cave on Earth, or in a wrecked dirigible in the Buster Crabbe serial.

 

Buck Rogers was one of a number of TV series on the bubble that I followed which drastically changed formats. Some of them had transitional episodes, some just expected you to take the changes with a smile. Some shows just fell apart over time. Space:1999 just made a hard left with no explanations. They even rolled back the clock and effectively erased the first year. War of the Worlds (which was gutting), Human Target and SeaQuest all made extreme adjustments but at least they had episodes explaining them. V started the first few episodes in the style of the second mini series, but it rapidly went crazy and 2/3 of the way through, they killed off or jettisoned a third of the characters (some of the wrong ones honestly). Never have I seen a series change to quickly in a short time. Even Lost in Space evolved over a full season into all out comedy.

I would have enjoyed a transitional episode for Buck. It didn’t have to be all that much different than Time of the Hawk, just have Huer assign Buck to get Hawk on their way out, have him say goodbye to Buck, Wilma and Twiki, and boom, done. Like 1999, they introduced a new third lead who had an episode based around him and then – the next week – is fully integrated and pals with everyone. Hawk was never awkward and never wavered from his friendship with the Searcher crew. I wish they had a full second season, it would have been interesting to see Hawk meet an outcast colony of his people and find that he really doesn’t fit in at all…

I liked the idea of a Space Navy and that it had military traditions, although the uniforms were goofy. The ship could have been laid out better, but for some reason I loved the giant sonar in the engine room.

 

Buck Rogers TV, in particular with the astronaut angle, but in general Buck as a character involuntarily displaced into the "future" (yes I know Farscape isn't necessarily in the future) world setting. Aeryn is more Wilma Deering than Dale Arden. It was a casual statement, I'm sure it's not 100% apples-to-apples.

 

Sure, but Flash Gordon is also a present-day Earthman who finds himself in a "futuristic" alien environment, and one that's in the present day. So I'd call that slightly closer to Farscape in that respect.

But ultimately they're all portal fantasies of one stripe or another. Although Flash and Buck were both variants on the white-savior narrative, while Farscape tended to deconstruct it as often as not, making fun of Crichton's boasts of human superiority and whatnot.

 

Flash Gordon purposefully travels to Mongo generally. Also, with Scorpius being over-the-top warlord of the evil empire that Crichton ultimately battles it seemed to me that saying it was a Flash/Buck hybrid seemed appropriate. YMMV

 

No, in almost every version, it's Dr. Zarkov who purposefully travels to Mongo, and Flash and Dale are following his lead willingly or otherwise. In the original comics story, Zarkov straight-up abducts Flash and Dale to serve as his rocket crew. In the Buster Crabbe serial, Zarkov convinces them to join him on his mission voluntarily after initially holding them at gunpoint. In the DeLaurentiis movie, he tricks them into the rocket. In the Filmation movie, they're forced to flee with him from a bombardment of his lab. In the 1996 animated series, they're brought along by mistake when Zarkov thinks they're the assistants he sent for. Defenders of the Earth begins with Flash returning from Mongo to warn of Ming's invasion, so it's unclear whether he chose to go there in the first place.

So really, the only version I know of where Flash initially travels to Mongo on his own mission rather than in support of Zarkov's is the 2007 TV series, where he learns his missing father may be alive on Mongo and goes through the dimensional portal to search for him. And even there, it's still Zarkov who draws him into the narrative by telling him about his father, the portal, etc. in the first place.

 

Interesting that neither list you cite has Buck Rogers on it. It may be because except for the series version, he wasn't frozen, but I wonder if it's because they felt he was too well known/too recognizable, and wanted to cite works that hadn't been adapted so often.

 

I think it's more because the page I got it from is focused on prose science fiction and Buck Rogers is primarily known from comics, aside from the initial pair of novellas.

 

That's kind of what I was getting at, actually. Save for Rip Van Winkle, most of those stories are basically stand-alones, with no or almost no adaptations to other media, while Buck Rogers' entire history from the comic strip on is all about adaptation.

 

Second season radical changes happened to...
Space Academy(1977-78) with a cast change and title change to Jason Of Star Command(1978-80).



Battlestar Galactica(1978-79) with a cast change and title change to Galactica 1980(1980-80).

 

Well, Space Academy and Jason of Star Command were two totally different series. Jason was meant to take place on the same planetoid at first, but they didn't reference that series really. Battlestar Galactica and 1980 weren't two seasons of the same show. BSG was cancelled and done. While it was a continuation of the basic concept, it wasn't quite the same as a show that changed format to try to get a larger audience. Galactica 1980 was just ABC's desperate attempt to make more cash off their sets and and costumes. I don't think any of the fans of BSG thought this was actually a second season.

 

You're right about both. Jason was considered more a "sequel" to Space Academy rather than a second season. While SA was a standalone half-hour show, JoSC season 1 was a 15-minute segment in the 90-minute anthology block Tarzan and the Super 7, with the whole season being formatted like a classic Flash Gordon-style movie serial with 16 quarter-hour chapters ending in cliffhangers. It wasn't until season 2 that it became a standalone half-hour show itself.

I figure that connecting JoSC to SA was mainly just a way to save money by reusing the sets, props, costumes, and so forth. It was originally meant to bring back Jonathan Harris as Commander Gampu, which would've made it something of a spinoff, but that fell through so they got James Doohan instead.

 

But given the time and that it was a TV show Jason Of Star Command had good model work and effects. I think that's one of the things for me that really stood out on that show.

 

Oh, yes. It was praised at the time for its miniature work and stop-motion animation.

Space Academy had pretty good FX work too. It managed to hire a few staffers who'd just finished work on a little movie called Star Wars.