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For sci-fi fans Space 1999

For sci-fi fans Space 1999

Lavish sets mark series

By Lee Winfrey, Knight News Service Toledo Blade, 5th October 1975

Space: 1999 probably won't make science-fiction fans forget one of television's few classics, Star Trek. But launched into the middle of an unusually dull new TV season, Space may make a very happy landing.

Unlike most of the other new TV shows you've been hearing about lately, Space is not a presentation of one of the three major networks. CBS didn't create it, NBC doesn't own it, ABC didn't buy it.

Instead, Space was made in England by the Independent Television corp. (IYTC sic) and sold one by one to 146 different U.S. TV stations including Toledo's Ch. 24, which broadcasts the show Saturday night at 7 o'clock.

Almost half of the stations that have bought Space: 1999 have scheduled it for prime time, dropping some network shows in order to make room for it. That hasn't happened on any large scale for roughly 20 years, not since the old Sea Hunt and Highway Patrol series in the 1950s.

There are four major reasons for Space's selling success. Besides the fact that most of the new network products look like recycled sausage, they are:

• Much evidence suggested that an audience awaited a new quality sci-fi series. Since 1969, when Star Trek ceased production, the networks have failed to fill this need.
• Space is a lavishly-mounted show. ITC spent a fat $6.5 million for the first season's output of 24 one-hour episodes. Big names involved include costumes by designer Rudi Gernreich and special effects by Brian Johnson, who did the same job for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Stars of proven appeal head the cast. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain achieved fame and popularity in the old Mission: Impossible series almost a decade ago.

In the opening of the premiere, entitled "Breakaway," Martin Landau in the role of John Robert Koenig has just been appointed commander of Moonbase Alpha. There are 311 people up there on the moonbase, and Koenig is supposed to get some of them ready to launch a manned expedition to the Planet Meta.

But bunches of guys are dying up there. Koenig consults with his two co-stars, Barbara Bain as Dr. Helena Russell and Barry Morse as Prof. Victor Bergman, to try to figure out why his space men are waning on the moon.

They figured it out, but too late. The earth has been using the moon as a dumping ground for nuclear wastes, and first one and then another pile of the stuff blows up. The second explosion, on Sept. 13, 1999, blows the moon clean out of orbit and off-into space and 23 more adventures ride Koenig, Russell, Bergman, and friends.

The sets on Space are lavish, reminiscent of 2001. Almost all the special effects are noticeably better than usual for TV.

The dialogue on the premiere is pedestrian, the scriptwriters seemingly content to let the mechanical gadgets do most of the work. And Landau, Bain and Morse all read their roles stiffly, as though sobered by the task of attempting to launch an expensive new series without network backing.

But it's still nice to see someone out in space again.