Post by GRWelsh on Jul 27, 2009 20:45:28 GMT -5
On YouTube, I've been watching a few episodes of an old TV show I obsessively remembered from childhood... it was called "The Fantastic Journey." * One of the reasons I was so obsessive about it was that hardly anyone else seemed to remember it.
It only ran for ten episodes in 1977. But I have such a powerful memory of this show being advertised and seeing the episodes and thinking it just was absolutely pitch-perfect because it had everything I LOVED... aliens, psionics, androids, time travel, teleportation, ray guns, crashing space ships, the Bermuda Triangle, and even (in a later episode) Cheryl Ladd... I'm not kidding. It was as if studio execs asked a couple of 9 year old boys what they would like to see in a TV show and then made an honest effort at delivering every item from such an absurdly assembled list.
The premise is not so much ridiculous as confusing. Evidently, a group of people from different time zones end up stranded on an island in the "Devil's Triangle." At first, the creators of the show had intended for it to be more about time travel, with characters going back and forth into the past, present and future. But as it developed, it was more like the characters were teleporting from one futuristic pocket dimension to another, as they made the attempt to get to... somewhere (the Eastern Shore? Evoland?) which would enable them to get back to their own times. The show developed a group of these castaways journeying together, encountering various weirdness, overcoming or solving some obstacle, and then moving on at the end of the show. A lot of these episodes opened with the characters materializing out of a blue glow, appearing in a certain "time zone" and then trying to journey by foot across it to the next "time zone."
Anyway, watching the show now, I can't help but think of other shows like Star Trek, Space:1999, Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run, Buck Rogers, Voyagers, Sliders, and LOST. Some were influences on it, others were shows it seemed to influence in turn... or maybe they all just remind of each other, in certain ways.
I had heard that a lot of the people who worked on "The Fantastic Journey" had also worked on Star Trek: TOS, as far as the behind-the-scenes crew. When the show hit its stride (or was trying to hit its stride), it seemed to settle into a similar kind of style that Star Trek had... a core group of characters who were on this journey, worked together to overcome problems (not primarily through muscle), and then had this friendly denouement at the end, summarizing what happened in case not everone (the viewers) "got it."
"What do you guys want in a TV show?"
"Aliens!"
"Space ships!"
"Time travel!"
"Cheryl Ladd!"
"Well, say, one of you is precocious, anyway..."
For the first time, I think I love YouTube as much as everyone else does, for letting me revisit this. Of course, watching it now, the show is terrible: it's cheesy, with bad sets, hammy acting, improbable reactions, pat endings, etc. But I love seeing it again... I really appreciate that some studio exec gave the green light to let this show even get made. And even if I only got to enjoy it for a few months, it got bronzed in my childhood mind (as better than it actually was) forever.
* No relation to Fantastic Voyage, which was the story about people being shrunk to microscopic size and injected into someone's veins).
It only ran for ten episodes in 1977. But I have such a powerful memory of this show being advertised and seeing the episodes and thinking it just was absolutely pitch-perfect because it had everything I LOVED... aliens, psionics, androids, time travel, teleportation, ray guns, crashing space ships, the Bermuda Triangle, and even (in a later episode) Cheryl Ladd... I'm not kidding. It was as if studio execs asked a couple of 9 year old boys what they would like to see in a TV show and then made an honest effort at delivering every item from such an absurdly assembled list.
The premise is not so much ridiculous as confusing. Evidently, a group of people from different time zones end up stranded on an island in the "Devil's Triangle." At first, the creators of the show had intended for it to be more about time travel, with characters going back and forth into the past, present and future. But as it developed, it was more like the characters were teleporting from one futuristic pocket dimension to another, as they made the attempt to get to... somewhere (the Eastern Shore? Evoland?) which would enable them to get back to their own times. The show developed a group of these castaways journeying together, encountering various weirdness, overcoming or solving some obstacle, and then moving on at the end of the show. A lot of these episodes opened with the characters materializing out of a blue glow, appearing in a certain "time zone" and then trying to journey by foot across it to the next "time zone."
Anyway, watching the show now, I can't help but think of other shows like Star Trek, Space:1999, Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run, Buck Rogers, Voyagers, Sliders, and LOST. Some were influences on it, others were shows it seemed to influence in turn... or maybe they all just remind of each other, in certain ways.
I had heard that a lot of the people who worked on "The Fantastic Journey" had also worked on Star Trek: TOS, as far as the behind-the-scenes crew. When the show hit its stride (or was trying to hit its stride), it seemed to settle into a similar kind of style that Star Trek had... a core group of characters who were on this journey, worked together to overcome problems (not primarily through muscle), and then had this friendly denouement at the end, summarizing what happened in case not everone (the viewers) "got it."
"What do you guys want in a TV show?"
"Aliens!"
"Space ships!"
"Time travel!"
"Cheryl Ladd!"
"Well, say, one of you is precocious, anyway..."
For the first time, I think I love YouTube as much as everyone else does, for letting me revisit this. Of course, watching it now, the show is terrible: it's cheesy, with bad sets, hammy acting, improbable reactions, pat endings, etc. But I love seeing it again... I really appreciate that some studio exec gave the green light to let this show even get made. And even if I only got to enjoy it for a few months, it got bronzed in my childhood mind (as better than it actually was) forever.
* No relation to Fantastic Voyage, which was the story about people being shrunk to microscopic size and injected into someone's veins).
