Would 'Assignment Earth' really make it as a series?

What I meant by the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman comparison was that the situations being dealt with were mostly mundane crime, intrigue, or adventure stories with the main science fiction element being the technology the hero used to solve the problems, with occasional episodes where the problem itself involved some light SF element like a near-future scientific advance or a pseudoscientific ability like ESP (which was seen as scientifically plausible at the time, before the experiments seeming to demonstrate it were debunked).

Not just the pilot. There were occasional moments where they showed a bystander's point of view of Steve running and used an undercranked camera to speed it up (e.g. in the season 2 premiere "Nuclear Alert"), and it did indeed look silly.

Interestingly, the iconic "ta-ta-ta-ta-tang" bionic sound effect took a couple of years to become standardized in 6M$M. It was first used in season 1's "Day of the Robot" for a machinery sound made by the robot impostor during battle with Steve. It was first used for Steve's exertions in "Dr. Wells is Missing," but oddly was also used for a non-bionic goon swinging a heavy lamppost. From there through early season 2, oddly, it tended to be used to represent fists or objects swinging laterally through the air, whether through bionic strength or not (e.g. when rage monster Mike Farrell swung a railroad tie in "The Pioneers"), but not for other things. By midseason, it started to be used more consistently for bionic exertions (or robotic ones in "Return of the Robot Maker"), and was codified as an exclusively bionic sound effect by season's end, but it wasn't used for bionic running until season 3.

 

I didn’t remember it for running. I haven’t seen these since airing. Loved it as a kid, though. Was it not in syndication/reruns that much?

Does the fandom have a name for that noise? I like “chimping,” but that doesn’t really fit.

 

Not that I know of. It's just the bionic sound. Although it was already in Universal's sound effects library before the bionic shows; for instance, it's heard in the alien complex at the climax of The Questor Tapes.

 

I want the Cigarette Smoking Klingon to be the mastermind of the takeover of the United States government.

 

That's untrue. From the episode [http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/55.htm]:

SCOTT [on monitor]: Still unable to analyze it, sir. It was so powerful, it fused most of our recording circuits. Could have brought him back through great distances, could have brought him back through time. There's no way for us to know.​

SEVEN: That's impossible. In this time period, there weren't (notices Spock) Humans with a Vulcan? You're from the future, Captain. You're going to have to beam me down to Earth immediately.​

It's unambiguous that Gary Seven has knowledge of other time periods, including the future.

Scotty's line about Gary's transporter beam being powerful enough to bring him back through time and their having no way of knowing whether that's what happened is the exact opposite of the episode stressing that only the Enterprise engaged in time travel.

The episode opened the door wide open for Gary Seven himself to have traveled through time. He certainly associated with aliens who did so.

 

The language "in this time period" implies a knowledge of other time periods. edited to add: Also, he's about to speak of events in that period in the past tense.

In any case, that's hardly stressing that Gary is not a time traveler.

 

After re-reading my post, I realized it was rather poorly thought out and deleted it!

 

I always think of it as a chimping noise. I don't know what else to call it? The sound of the gears and motors in his leg pulling him along. In the early episodes it sounded only when he was lifting anything mechanical or extremely heavy itself before it started to be used at every opportunity!
JB

 

I liked "Assignment: Earth" as an episode a lot. I like Gary Seven as someone who's technically a Human but also an Outsider, Roberta Lincoln had a strong personality, and I think it could've worked as a series. I could see something like this in the late-'60s and early-'70s. BUT, I don't think Gene Roddenberry could carry it all by himself. I think he'd have to have some other people to make it work. A spy series doesn't seem to have been his speed. You'd want to have someone where that's in their zone.

TOS had allegory. With Assignment: Earth, they could've dropped the allegory and dealt with issues openly that directly effected Earth at the time, instead of using the fig-leaf of another planet. That's one advantage a series like this would've had over Star Trek.

 

And the Federation said there isn't or never was or has ever been a planet at those coordinates. Gary states it will remain hidden from them even in their time. But was it ever found in TNG or Picard's time?
JB

 

Nope. It wasn't.

 

I didn't think so but wasn't there some hints in the last episode of Picard:Season Two?
JB

 

They touch upon what they call "The Watchers" but they never mention the location of what planet they're from. All Picard knows about the Supervisors comes from what he knows from Kirk's logs.

 

I dunno. The '67 series prospectus document describes the intended tone of A:E as a modern-day Have Gun, Will Travel, the series that Roddenberry wrote for the most often before his producer days (to the point that I've seen him described at its story editor, though he wasn't credited as such). It likened Seven to HGWT's Paladin, a cool, hyper-competent, rational man who comes onto the scene and uses his intellect and skills to solve people's problems. So I think he intended something very much in his "zone."

I agree that Roddenberry would've needed a good collaborator to pull it off, but not because of its genre or focus, simply because he wasn't that great a writer. As I mentioned before, I think "The Cage" is the only really good solo science fiction script he ever wrote, and the weakest of his '70s pilots, Genesis II, was the one he wrote solo, while the strongest, The Questor Tapes, was co-written with Gene L. Coon.

In the case of A:E, presumably Art Wallace would've been Roddenberry's main collaborator, in the equivalent role to Coon or John Meredyth Lucas in Trek. So the quality of the show would've probably come down to how good Wallace was.

On the contrary -- it would've been a distinct disadvantage. The whole reason that 1960s producers like Roddenberry and Rod Serling turned to science fiction was because networks and advertisers shied away from controversial subject matters, so the only way to get them on the air at all was to cloak them in SF/fantasy metaphors. When Roddenberry made his modern-day series The Lieutenant, he famously had to fight to get the episode "To Set It Right" (with Nichelle Nichols & Don Marshall) on the air due to its story about racism. He realized it was easier to get such stories past the censors if they were allegorical instead of direct, hence his turn to science fiction. (Or at least that's how he told it after the fact. Knowing Roddenberry's tendencies to exaggerate his own biography, I sometimes suspect he was just copying Rod Serling's story.)

 

It might have been easier if it were produced in the early 1970s when 'relevant' shows like All in the Family began presenting depicting current issues.

 

In an alternate reality where TOS runs five seasons and Gene Roddenberry convinces NBC to give Assignment: Earth a second chance, that would put us right in 1971.

 

Well, if TOS had been successful enough to last that long, I have no doubt they wouldn't have stopped at five seasons. I mean, this was the era of TV where you had Run for Your Life, a 3-season series about a guy with 18 months to live, and M*A*S*H, an 11-season series about a 3-year war. Today's TV shows are precious about "real-time" chronology, tending to assume that every episode takes place on its airdate, but back then, TV shows tended to exist in a timeless present. The "5-year mission" would've kept going as long as they kept renewing the series.

So if ST had been that big a hit (and it would've had to be, since hardly any genre show back then ever made it to 5 or more years), then Roddenberry would've had the clout to get A:E made alongside it, rather than replacing it. So he wouldn't have needed to wait until '71.

Although, of course, Roddenberry did make another stab at the premise behind A:E in 1973, just replacing Gary with an android in The Questor Tapes. And that actually did get a series pickup, but Roddenberry walked away when the network demanded dropping Jerry and retooling it into a Fugitive clone. So they ended up doing The Six Million Dollar Man instead.

 

If only the slowest-moving TV ''thriller'' ever had matched the intensity of its title sequence.

 

I dunno, it wasn't paced that differently from any other '70s adventure show, back when people still had attention spans. Sure, it had the long slow-motion bionic sequences, but the reason it latched onto slow motion as an action-scene device is because that was already done by a number of productions in the '70s.

Besides, even when the slowed-down action scenes dragged, Oliver Nelson's music kept it lively.

 

My father claimed the actual reason was Lee Majors was in no mood to do any more heavy-duty running after the opening credits, so we were treated to weekly aaaaaccccccttttiiiiiioooooonnnnnn sssssscccccceeeeennnnneeeessssss due to Majors' laziness. But I do enjoy underwater slow-motion with music in THUNDERBALL, and, yes, even BATMAN.