Movie Monday: The "Do You Remember These 1960s Science Fiction TV Series?" Edition

I had something a little different planned for today's Movie Monday. And then I found this while I was looking around for something else on YouTube:



This short documentary (with bonus Bill Mumy) highlights four science fiction television series from the 1960s that are widely considered to be "bad" science fiction, but which were fixtures of my television experience during those years. And, indeed, seen from today, they were mostly bad. The writing was often horrible. The production values, especially compared with what we see on-screen today, even in television, were lacking. The acting was sometimes, well, hammy, although not necessarily much better than other television acting at the time. All of them were produced by Irwin Allen.

All the same, I loved those shows as a child and early adolescent.

"Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" was the first of the shows covered in the clip above, beginning September 14, 1964 and running through 1968. This show is old enough that the first season was shot in black and white. There were four seasons and 110 episodes of the show, which grew out of the 1961 film of the same name, also produced by Allen. This was a great favorite in our house, for all that my father and I would sit there and make fun of the pinging sound that was often in the background. We called it "sea chickens". The show consisted of the continuing adventures of the nuclear submarine Seaview and its crew, which was tasked with doing undersea research and, oh, yeah, saving the world on a regular basis.

"Lost in Space" came next, running from September 15, 1965, through the end of the 1968 television season. Again, the first season was shot in black and white. This was a sort of "Swiss Family Robinson" in space, and in fact the family that made up most of the crew of the Jupiter 2, their spaceship, was named Robinson. There were the mother and father, Doctors John and Maureen Robinson; their older daughter, Judy; a younger daughter, Penny; and the youngest, their son Will. In addition, there was the pilot, a military man, Major Don West. There was also a stowaway, Dr. Zachary Smith. Dr. Smith set out to sabotage the mission, and instead because stuck on the ship. His botched attempt at sabotage was the reason the mission got lost. Intended to only remain for the first few episodes of the show, Dr. Smith became sort of the bumbling villain you loved to hate. There was also Robot who, despite being a robot, became an essential character in the show, and his most famous and repeated line, "Danger, Will Robinson", has become iconic. If you were there at the time, you probably remember this:



Yes, I was a confirmed "Lost in Space" fan, for all of its silly stories and shaky sets, even after "Star Trek" came along in 1966, with similar production values but much better stories and writing. I loved (and still love) "Star Trek" in it's original incarnation, but "Lost in Space" was still something I loved to watch. Of course, I was nine years old when it began, but still...

Next in the Irwin Allen universe came "The Time Tunnel" which, coincidentally, debuted on September 9, 1966. I knew there was a reason why I wanted to write this post today. "The Time Tunnel" only lasted one season, probably deservedly. But it was time travel, and time travel stories are probably my favorite flavor of science fiction. The premise of the show was that the government had sunk ten years and billions of dollars into a secret project to determine if time travel was possible. The time had come to either prove the project, immediately, or have their funding cut off. One of the directors of the project, Dr. Tony Newman, says he is willing to be the guinea pig and try to travel into time, but he is turned down by another of the three directors, Dr. Doug Phillips. Dr. Newman sneaks into the lab that night, powers up the time tunnel, and disappears into it and, presumably, into time somewhere. Feeling responsible, Dr. Phillips follows him. But something goes wrong and the two of them spend the rest of the series being shuttled from time to time, getting into trouble everywhere they go.

Again, the acting wasn't top-tier, some of the writing wasn't the best, and the production values, despite what is said in the clip at the beginning of the post, weren't top-notch. But it was time-travel stories, and I watched faithfully.

And then there was "Land of the Giants", which ran for two seasons, from September 22, 1968 through 1970. This was my least favorite of the four series. I think this has to do with the fact that by the time the show debuted, I was older, entering junior high, and my demands for story in TV had grown a bit, helped along by having watched "Star Trek" since it's beginning. The premise in "Land of the Giants" was that a suborbital ship making a run from Los Angeles to London ran into some sort of anomaly at the edge of space, sending the ship and its crew to a planet where everything, including the inhabitants, are much larger than on Earth. It turns out that this particular craft is not the only one to have come to the planet by the same means, but their crews had never fared very well, and none had ever returned to Earth. This does not stop this group of travelers from attempting to repair their craft and return to Earth, but during the run of the series, they never make it back to their home planet.

No point to all this, really, I suppose. Just a remembrance of the television I used to watch. With the exception of "Lost in Space" which got the big-screen treatment in 1998 in a film starring William Hurt and Gary Oldman (and which I have not seen), and the fact that "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", the series, came out of an original film, there is no real connection between any of these four series and the movies I usually write about here on Movie Mondays. Although, to be honest, I'd like to see someone try to translate "The Time Tunnel" to the big screen with today's production values and much bigger budgets.

Oh, and the idea that television, especially science fiction television, was not always necessarily the best of TV in the past, it was often the most fun. But that might just be my inner science fiction geek talking.

Happy Doctor Who Day...

Today is Doctor Who Day.

That will mean nothing to many people. But, to me and many people like me, today marks the 50th anniversary* of the first broadcast of the British science fiction series "Doctor Who" which, after a rocky start and a few years away, is still going strong.

That rocky beginning included having to re-film the first episode of the series, "An Unearthly Child" after technical problems during the first filming. And,that was just the start of the trouble. The first airing of the show happened to be scheduled for the day after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in the United States, when most people around the world were focused on other things besides the debut of a new show aimed mainly at children. Additionally, parts of England were hit with a power outage that day, so the number of households able to receive the broadcast was limited. Because of these circumstances, the first episode was re-aired a week later, just before the second episode was broadcast.

After three seasons, with the health of William Hartnell, the first actor to portray The Doctor, failing and faced with the loss of their lead actor, those in charge of the program came up with a novel way of explaining why the character didn't look the same once Hartnell left the role. Being an alien, The Doctor had the power to regenerate (they originally called it "renewal") into a different form in case of serious injury. And so Hartnell was replaced by Patrick Troughton, who became the Second Doctor. In turn, Troughton was eventually replaced by Jon Pertwee, who was replaced by Tom Baker, the most famous of the Doctors from the classic series. Following Baker, Peter Davison became the Fifth Doctor, then Colin Baker (no relation to Tom) took the role, followed by Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor.

At that point, the series seemed to have run its course and production was ended in 1989. It had remained mostly a UK phenomenon, although there were fans in the United States who had been introduced to the show when PBS ran episodes on its stations around the US. It was not the end of the Doctor Who phenomenon, however, with the characters kept alive in novels and comics.

In 1996, the Eighth Doctor appeared, portrayed by Paul McGann, in a movie co-produced by the Fox Network, Universal Studios, and the BBC and shown first in the United States and then, a couple of weeks later, in the UK. The intent had been to follow up the film with a series, but the film did not bring in the hoped-for ratings in the US, although it was one of the top-ten rated shows the week it was shown in the UK, and no series followed.

A couple of further plans were made to bring The Doctor back to television, and the plan that finally reached fruition was announced in 2003 and made it to television screens in the UK and the United States in 2005, with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor. Eccleston left after only one season, followed by David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. After three seasons and a year of specials, Tennant was replaced by the current Doctor, the Eleventh, who is portrayed by Matt Smith.

That's the short and very incomplete history of Doctor Who. During the classic series, there were also a couple of movies made, with Peter Cushing portraying The Doctor, as well as audio episodes that have been produced in parallel to the new series. Additionally, the fandom never went away, even during the years between the classic series and the new series, with conventions for fans of the show being held in the UK and the United States.

There have also been spin-off series: "The Sarah Jane Adventures" for adolescents and "Torchwood" for a more adult audience, both produced in the UK, and an unofficial series, not produced by the BBC, featuring the robot dog K-9, aimed at younger children. Also, a tradition has grown of making and airing a Christmas special featuring The Doctor every year.

For those of us who are fans - and, yes, I am a big fan of the Whoniverse in all of its manifestations - all of this provides a rich legacy as well as continuing enjoyment as the series goes forward.

Those of you who are not fans probably wonder what all this is about, and why fans are so devoted to the series and all its spin-offs. Truthfully, it is difficult to explain fully to the uninitiated. For me, it is the idea that because The Doctor is a traveler in both time and space, the stories can take the viewer and reader virtually anywhere in the universe (more than one universe, in fact) and to any point in time - past, present, and future. The story possibilities are limitless. Also, although the character of The Doctor is an alien, he is also a most human character, capable of great compassion and great humor, but also of great rage and great sadness.

Late-night television host Craig Ferguson, who is a Whovian, put it this way: "Doctor Who is all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism." For me, that encapsulates the Doctor Who experience very well. I've been accused of being naive, but if I had to choose, I'd want intellect and romance to win out over brute force and cynicism any day, even on those days when my own cynicism is out and active.

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*To be clear, this is the beginning of the 50th anniversary year of Doctor Who, a big deal for Whovians. I don't think I made that clear enough, and so I am doing that now. I can count. Really.

Movie Monday: The "Klaatu barada nikto" Edition

So, I'm thinking about 1950s "flying saucer" movies today. I probably do that more than most people, since I was brought up on science fiction films, but today's reflections on the genre, or sub-genre, I suppose, since there were other types of science fiction movies that were popular in the Fifties, were prompted by my viewing last night of "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956) on Turner Classic Movies.

It's the time of year for movies like this, I suppose, since we're only a couple of days from Halloween. This is when all of the science fiction, horror, monster, and slasher movies get dragged out of the vaults in an attempt to scare the living daylights out of us. But, I'm always happiest to see this particular sub-genre, even though I've seen the three films I'm highlighting here today countless times.

No, really. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", "Invaders from Mars" (1953), and the granddaddy of them all, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951). You see, we had this thing called the Million Dollar Movie on channel 9 when I was growing up in Southern California. Every week the show would present a movie, and then show it every weeknight and two or three times each on Saturday and Sunday. People complain now about how often cable movie channels, especially, show particular films, but for those of us who grew up in SoCal in the 1960s, it isn't a new thing at all.

Anyway, those three movies got shown a lot on the Million Dollar Movie, and I'd be right there watching them. Now, I might not watch every weeknight, but I'd see the movie of the week at least two or three times on the weekend. Since all three movies were in fairly heavy rotation there, I saw them frequently.

Actually, "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" is my least favorite of the three. I think that mostly has to do with the fact that the main female character, Carol Marvin (played by Joan Taylor) spends most of her time either screaming or hiding her face in the chest of her husband, Dr. Russel A. Marvin (played by Hugh Marlowe). Dr. Marvin, who is in charge of Project Skyhook, which puts research satellites into orbit, is the one chosen by invading aliens to be their contact with the governments of Earth. This puts him in danger from both the aliens and from his bosses in the government, who order him not to contact the aliens as they have requested. Of course, this being Hollywood, he goes ahead and contacts them anyway. There is a climactic saucer attack on Washington, D.C., the saucers are defeated through the ingenuity of human (American, of course) science, and the day...and the Earth...is saved.

Earth is also under attack in "Invaders from Mars", but the aliens in this film are much stealthier than those in "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers". In this one, the Martian ship burrows into a sandpit near where a boy, David MacLean (played by Jimmy Hunt), lives with his parents. David sees the landing, but when he tells his parents the next morning, they pass off his story as a dream. But David soon sees changes in his parents and tries to get help. Of course, none of the adults he goes to with his story believe him. Some of them have already been taken over by the aliens, and others just regard him as a boy with an overactive imagination. Again, finally the day is saved...maybe. One of the cool things about this movie is that the resolution, at least in the American version, is left ambiguous. Was it a dream? Was it real? And, if it was real, is the invasion really over?

There was a remake of "Invaders from Mars" in 1986. It is not nearly as good as the 1953 original, which was made on a budget of around $293,000. Possibly the only notable thing about the remake is that Jimmy Hunt, who played David in the original has a one-line role as a police chief in the remake.

There was also a recent remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still". I've avoided it on general principles, seeing as the original, from 1951, is a classic. I wrote an argumentative paper for a critical thinking course once which argued that the original 1951 film is not only the ultimate first-contact movie, but the perfect science fiction film. It is a little different from "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and "Invaders from Mars" in that the aliens here are not invaders, exactly. Instead, they have noticed that scientists here on Earth have developed nuclear weapons, and have used them, and they are concerned that we are going to carry those weapons, and their destructive power, out into the rest of the universe. A representative of the aliens, Klaatu (played by Michael Rennie), has been sent to Earth to warn its inhabitants that if we insist on exporting our violent tendencies and weapons into space, the Earth will be destroyed. But, Klaatu is injured by a trigger-happy soldier and taken to a government hospital. He escapes, of course, and turns up at a boarding house claiming to be a Mr. Carpenter. He befriends a boy (played Billy Gray) and his mother (played by Patricia Neal) who live there, much to the dismay of the woman's boyfriend (played by Hugh Marlowe), who is convinced that Mr. Carpenter is up to no good.

The escape of the spaceman is big news, of course, and it doesn't take long for the boy to start suspecting that Mr. Carpenter might be the spaceman. With the boy's help, Klaatu/Carpenter contacts Dr. Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), an Einstein-like figure, and charges him with bringing the world's leaders together so that he can deliver his ultimatum. But no one believes the scientist and Klaatu must arrange for a demonstration to convince the world that they must listen. The message is delivered, but Klaatu is killed. But, being alien, there is technology that resurrects him, at least temporarily, and Klaatu and Gort fly off, leaving Earth to make their decision.

It has been said that there are allusions to Christianity in the character of Klaatu because he takes the name Carpenter and then is resurrected after being killed despite his message promoting peace in the universe. Screenwriter Edmund North has been reported as saying that he did insert the references deliberately, but as a sort of subliminal private joke rather than as a serious theme of the film. But, the story goes that the references were overt enough that the Motion Picture Association of America censor at the studio (20th Century Fox) objected to them and a line was inserted into the film which indicated that Klaatu's resurrection was only temporary.

So. Flying saucer movies. Of course, all three of these movies contain overtones, one way or the other, of the Cold War that raged during the 1950s and beyond. These are interesting, just like the allusions to Christianity in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" are interesting. But, ultimately, and overtones and allusions aside, all three of these movies are just plain good fun. Some are better than others, but all three are classics of their genre, a permanent part of pop culture, and stand on those credentials alone.

Do yourself a favor. If you haven't seen them, give them a look. If you haven't seen them in a while, revisit them. You'll probably be glad you did.