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Space: 1999 Sailing along

Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1975, "TV Times" magazine

Sailing Along... On Moonbase Alpha

The year is 1999. The moon has become a dumping ground for mankind's nuclear wastes. Huge arc lamps light the waste disposal areas, contaminated valleys of pockmarked stone where unknown magnetic forces are about to touch off convulsive explosions that will cause the moon to jump its groove and go hurtling off into space.

But all of this is still a mystery to the 300 personnel who man Moonbase Alpha. They are concerned with more down-to-earth problems-the outbreak of an unidentifiable disease, the pending launch Of an exploratory space mission and a recent change in command. "The giant leap for mankind," mutters one of the characters, "it's beginning to look like a stumble in the dark."

Space: 1999, starring Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Barry Morse (pictured on opposite page, lower right) is the sort of science fiction that owes more to the futuristic designs of Buckminster Fuller than the pace-cowboy fantasies of Buck Rogers. Its finely-detailed spacecraft and convincing lunar landscapes are reminiscent of the stately spaceships and desolate moonscapes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, to which Brian Johnson, the special effects director of Space: 1999, also contributed.

The interiors of the moon colony look as if they were patterned after TV dinner trays. Monitors, projection screens and miniature television cameras abound. The crew is outfitted in zippered, pocketless unisex suits designed by Rudi Gernrich.

Yet, for all the care expended on machinery-under executive -director Sir Lew Grade and producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the series' 24 instalments were filmed at a lavish cost of $275,000 per episode-the series focus promises to centre on the small tribe of humans cast adrift on the runaway moon. Space: 1999 - which previews Saturday at 7 p.m. on KHJ-TV Channel 9 and becomes a weekly tenant of that time slot on Sept. 20- promises to provide a homebase for some of the same sort of psychological and philosophic speculation that caused so many sci-fi addicts to radar in on Star Trek. In one episode, time loses all meaning. In another, schizophrenia is dramatically encountered when the moonbase personnel run into their duplicate selves. For good measure, there are also the inevitable mysterious aliens-intimidating aliens who possess the ability to decompose atoms as well as pathetic aliens who have just been evicted from a dying planet.

"The difference from Star Trek," says series star Martin Landau, "is that our approach is more humanistic. The characters are neither technologically or emotionally capable of what they have to do."

"You have to remember that we are only 25 years into the future," adds Barbara Bain, who costars with her husband as the colony's head medic. "Everything that you will see is grounded in knowledge that we have now.

"As the ship's doctor, I'm expected to care for the psychological and physical well-being of everyone on the base. I do get to work a lot of magical things with light, because the whole field of space medicine very clearly defined yet.

"We have no offensive weapons and only a modicum of defensive ones. When we encounter alien beings, we don't know who they are, and we don't know how to relate to them."

"I play Commander John Koenig." Landau explains. "He was born in 1959. He watched the first moon landings on TV. He was sent to man a weather station, not command a space probe.

"As the series goes on, some advanced civilizations contact us and find us very undesirable. In an odd way, we often become the heavies."

The Landaus-familiar faces around the world because Of the success of their last series, Mission: Impossible which continues to be seen in 69 countries according to Martin-have recently returned to their Beverly Hills home after 16 months of shoot, ing at the Pinewood Studios outside London.

The two were converted to Anglophilia during their stay, despite the fact that the series got underway during the power- short winter of '74. "There were constant unannounced power cuts that slowed down shooting," Barbara Bain recalls. "We were freezing on the sound stage. The humans stood it, but the electronic equipment was much more sensitive."

England did provide compensatory advantages-most especially English actors such as Margaret Leighton (on cover), Christopher Lee, Ian McShane and Catherine Schell who guest star on upcoming episodes of the series.

With Space: 1999 playing in over 100 countries simultaneously, there is every reason to expect that Sir Lew Grade will turn a profit during the series' first year, that the Landaus will return to London in November, and that the unfortunate survivors on Moonbase Alpha will go on being lost in space for heaven only knows how long.