That site is a labor of love, and well deserved by the creatives who made the show.
I had the Revel model Eagle and it seemed like a sensible design for lunar utility craft. The Dynetics design seems closest in the current HLS batch: the opposite of tail sitters.
Then, it got syndicated, a couple of years ago, and I tried watching it again.
Same here, but not because sets or effects, but plots and jargon. Some of the ideas are interesting. But the whole premise was shocking even for my child self.
The initial premise, as ridiculous as it was, wasn't really more ridiculous than other sci-fi of the time. There's lots of sci-fi movies and TV shows in the 60s and 70s with hilariously bad depictions of basic physics.
Don't forget, the 70s were the time when typical American cop dramas showed cars exploding into fireballs whenever their wheels left the ground.
Some bits of tech seem a little silly though, such as the remote-control doors and the computers that spit out paper receipts and don't have proper screens. Almost a decade previously, Star Trek at least got those correct, and computers in the 70s already had screens, so I'm not sure why they screwed that up so badly. The sets on Space:1999 look fantastic (esp. in HD), but they don't really make that much sense.
I didn't really understand much of Star Trek or the series of that time, like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel or Mission: Impossible. I loved the imagery, the diving or space scenes and the gadgets, but the plots were impenetrable.
Space: 1999 appeared a few years later and I not only understood what was going on, but had devoured a fat Astronomy book so I also had a decent idea of the distances involved.
and it isn't more ridiculous than the wandering earth movie today. at least rocks hurling through space do exist.
that it and many other shows were so much more unrealistic a decade after star trek is really the weird thing. like for example jason of space command with james doohan. it's absolutely cringe
The cop dramas in the 60s/70s we almost infomercials pedaling very specific messaging. Some was aimed at police in an attempt to educate the myriad of forces on the law (Dragnet) while others educated the public. The explosive nature of car crashes mirrored the "educational" nature of contemporary traffic safety films. (I would provide links to youtube but such films are too gruesome, showing actual dead bodies.)
Space 1999 was a ridiculous show but there has never been a better TV show as far as production design does. The sets look cool and appear functional in a way that other shows (even modern star treks) can only aspire to.
I'm still a fan. I rewatched a few years ago. It's darker than I remember and there are sexier elements I completely missed as a kid. Some of the episode themes - like racism - were far ahead of their time.
Of course it's dated now, but I don't think it's more ridiculous than today's superhero franchises
If you compare to other British 1970s TV SF, like Dr Who, it was a remarkable effort.
Another series along these lines I’ve been meaning to finish watching: “Moonbase 3”[1] from the bbc. James Burke (Connections, The Day the Universe Changed) was science advisor, although I don’t quite see how it helped overcome the inherent cheese.
Barbara Bain (playing Helena Russell in Space 1999) married Martin Landau (captain(?) Koenig in same). They had a daughter Juliet Landau who played - IMO played rather well - Drusilla in Buffy, the vampire who was about fifteen sandwiches and eleven cupcakes and a bottle of lemonade short of a picnic.
"You promised me Moonbases, and instead, I got Facebook"
Now fading in the misty passages of the brain, but I think this show was maybe the first scifi saga that had a distinct feel of being real. Loved the Eagles in particular, for some reason that I still don't understand.
The whole premise that the Moon is heading into deep space because of a nuclear explosion that went off on one side is hard to stomach. (Kid me had no problem with it of course.)
Maybe something like "When World's Collide" they could have had some Nemesis-like object pass through the Solar System and capture the Moon or send it flying away. (I mean, they would probably still be scooting through the Oort Cloud for both seasons though.)
True! What seems a little unusual about Space 1999 was their lack of control over where they went. In Voyager they have some agency, in BSG they're searching for something, etc.
Stargate Universe seems a bit closer in the sense that (for large parts) they can't control their spaceship and just have to go explore and get back on board quickly.
It's indeed a ridiculous premise, but no less ridiculous than the more-recent book and movie "The Martian", where a wind storm on Mars is the initial event that triggers all the following drama. (The atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1/200 that of Earth's; there's no way any kind of wind storm there would have any significant effect on people.)
Yeah, but one you get past the windstorm, the majority of the film has a superb engineering / science focus. Really plausible, right up until the last ten minutes.
This is still vastly more believable than the Moon encountering a new planet every episode.
Even if it was traveling at near light speed, it should take thousands of years before they encounter another planet. And if they were traveling that fast, they would barely see these planets for a fraction of a second before continuing on their journey :-)
at light speed, the next solar system is 4-5 years away. but yes. although we can assume that what they ran into were all rogue planets because i don't remember seeing any stars. who knows what's out there that we haven't detected yet.
still remains the problem of everything needing to be pitch black all the time. i think even without finding any other planets they had a magic light source on the moon.
i am assuming the most optimistic outcome that is physically possible, no matter how unrealistic. because if we go by statistics we'd have to scrap most movies that are about an unrealistic (but possible) event.
It's hilarious that the "TRAVEL UNIT" sign hanging from the ceiling is in MICR font (E-13B). Why would you need a machine readable font on a sign meant for humans?
There was a nice attempt a bit over a decade ago to update some of the CGI to make it less dated and to retcon out some of the science and production failures. It also moved the show to 2099. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPTZaSv9Bxk
There was no CGI used in Space: 1999, it's all practical model and optical effects. And as far as I can tell, it was all done on film, even though it was a TV show, so all of the effects shots could be rescanned for HD, or possibly even 4K.
Space: 1999 was made in the 1970s, and it's remarkable how optimistic they were about what could be achieved in a little over 20 years. 2099 may have been a more realistic date.
It wasn't just them, it was lots of sci-fi. Just look at the 1968 blockbuster "2001: A Space Odyssey": it predicted much of the same stuff, including a huge moon base, a huge rotating space station, regular transit flights by Pan Am, etc.
Or Blade Runner in 1983: it was set in the year 2017, with biological humanoid "replicants", flying cars, colonies on other worlds, etc.
Star Trek in the late 60s predicted the "Eugenics Wars" in the late 1990s, along with deep-space spacecraft (one of which carried Khan Noonien Singh so far away that it took centuries for his ship to be discovered by the Enterprise on its deep-space mission).
(edit) Overall, I'd say the most accurate sci-fi I've ever seen, as far as predicting things, is the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Running Man".
> Overall, I'd say the most accurate sci-fi I've ever seen, as far as predicting things, is the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Running Man".
Best I can think of was a surprisingly sophisticated 1970 young adult book by John Christopher, which had a mid 21st century Britain run by a Brave New World style low key authoritarian surveillance state divided between overcrowded cities that had very modest use of technology like electric cars and "holovision" and well to do rural areas that have an Amish style renunciation of technology like cars (but really the continued existence of their society depends on tech). Particularly because it lampshaded all the sci fi that was coming out at the time by having a teacher tell the kids "we stopped spending money on the space programme because it was a waste of money"...
(Oryx and Crake is very good too, though the sequels lose a bit because it turns out all the cliches about the world outside their gated community are actually true...)
The Running Man was based on a psuedonymous Stephen King novel, FWIW
>The Running Man was based on a psuedonymous Stephen King novel, FWIW
Not really. "Inspired by", yes, but I wouldn't say it was "based on" it at all. The plot had almost no similarity. The future predictions were all made by the script writer AFAIK.
The date, I would imagine, wasn't chosen because it was a reasonable technical projection, but because 1999 is a high-value “pending-odometer-turnover” year.
Actually, I suspect that everything in that show was possible in 1999 (the base, the equipment, etc). But no-one wanted to pay the gazillion dollars it would have required.
Perhaps not the "stun gun".
It would be interesting to know if a properly-qualified engineer has ever taken a look at the Eagle and determined if it would be possible (e.g. with nuclear thermal rockets).
Which is pretty much the plot of the excellent For All Mankind - basically how I expected things to progress when I was a young kid in the early 1970s.
I think it was more like "will civilization last another 10 years?" in the 1970s. The atomic bomb was a button press away and the finger was hovering. The population bomb was constantly hovering. The draft saw your friends shipped off as cannon fodder and shipped home in boxes. Heroin addiction was rampant and violent crime was high in the bankrupt inner cities. State-sanctioned racism, sexism, and homophobia caused untold suffering domestically. Inflation was in the double digits until double-digit interest rates caused double-digit unemployment. The air was so polluted in cities you couldn't see, and the water so polluted rivers literally caught fire and burned for days.
Then I think of my parents' generation. They grew up with literal Hitler dominating the news. For them, it was "will civilization last the year?".
These are better days. Better days are shining through.
The difference is that in the 70s, it was "civilization as we know it survives if only a few people at key points of power manage to keep themselves together" (i.e. not pull the trigger to MAD), while today "civilization as we know it survives if the society at large manages to refactor its consumption habits."
There's a fair bit of detail in the recently released Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, one of a series of in-universe documents from various Anderson shows.
If we're just talking human travel and light payloads, why not lean on EVTOLs on the moon? With less gravity and less track/infra to build could be a cheaper option
I had the Revel model Eagle and it seemed like a sensible design for lunar utility craft. The Dynetics design seems closest in the current HLS batch: the opposite of tail sitters.