[X] My Assistant

[ustrax]

The series was surely guilty for my interest in space exploration...
I remember that it was broadcast when I couldn´t even read, but when I heard the music I would leave all the toys and come running to the living room screaming completely euphoric "It's MinóMinó!!!", Space 1999 in portuguese is an hard expression for a 3 years old kid to say...Espaço Mil Novecentos e Noventa e Nove...
Never forgot it and when the internet arrived one of the first things I went looking for was the theme...How I love that groovy theme...
And those Eagles...
And Maya...
And those freakin-something-like-algae monsters...
It brings some very good memories...

Here goes...
The opening sequence

And a very looong wikipedia article...

[dvandorn]

I just have to add my $.02 here...

I grew up on Gerry Anderson's "Supermarionation" work. I loved Fireball XL-5, and can still sing the theme song. My absolute favorite piece of Anderson-tech was Supercar. I was so taken with that vehicle that I was crushed when I failed to receive a toy model of it on my 8th birthday. (No matter how many times I told my parents that I *really* wanted a Supercar for a birthday or Christmas, over at least a three-year period, I never, ever got one. I had to make my own Supercar models using Tinkertoys and/or Legos.)

But...

Maybe it's because I was older when Space: 1999 came out, or maybe it's because it was a highly-touted live-action s.f. TV offering, of which there had been relatively few good examples. But I found Space: 1999 a pretty lame attempt to combine space opera with hard science fiction.

The base concept -- that an explosion in an expended nuclear fuel dump could hurl Earth's Moon out of orbit and accelerate it to such a great speed that it would leave the Solar System in a matter of days -- was such bad *science* that I was turned off by it. I mean, do y'all have *any* idea of how much energy it would require to propel that much mass that quickly? If you tried to apply that kind of energy to the Moon within the very short time frame presented, you wouldn't propel it out of the Solar System, you would shatter it into a gazillion pieces.

The Eagle spacecraft were very kewl-looking... but I didn't care for the clouds of dust they kicked up on the airless Moon. By the mid-1970's, we all knew quite well that dust doesn't hang in the "air" on a body with no atmosphere. Again, bad science began to ruin it for me.

And finally, I just wasn't all that impressed with the characters and situations presented in the stories. The acting direction didn't bring out the cast's strengths, and the whole thing just sort of sat there, leaden and lifeless. At least, thus it seemed to me at the time.

Had the same concept and stories been presented in Anderson's Supermarionation and presented as a Saturday morning "cartoon" entry, I probably would have been somewhat fond of the effort. But as a very highly touted "next coming of Star Trek" into "adult" TV science fiction, it fell far short of expectations and was a rather severe disappointment to me.



-the other Doug