John Kenneth Muir's Blog, page 4

Space:1999 50th Anniversary: "Earthbound"

In “Earthbound,” Commissioner Simmonds (Roy Dotrice) complains in a Command Conference about the Alphans’ direction for the future.  

He wants to know why there has been no discussion -- and no concrete plans – for a return to Earth.  

Commander Koenig (Martin Landau) counters that a return to Earth is impossible and that the Alphans are, rightly, focusing on two primary goals: survival, and a new place to call home.

Simmonds is not placated.

Before long, Alpha detects a powered object -- an alien spaceship – approaching the moon.  

Rather than going into orbit, however, it crashes on the lunar surface.  Aboard an Eagle, Koenig, Professor Victor Bergman (Barry Morse) and Dr. Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) investigate the vehicle.  They force entry, and find several humanoid aliens in suspended animation in transparent sleep cubicles.

The Alphans inadvertently kill one of the aliens when they tamper with a sleep cubicle, an act which awakes the others, including Captain Zantor (Christopher Lee).  

Zantor shows no malice regarding the accident, and introduces his people, the Kaldorians.  They are the last survivors of a world that has grown sterile, and they are traveling to Earth where they hope to be welcomed as friends. 

Their journey, they report, will take seventy five years.

With one of their number dead, Zantor offers the vacant slot on his ship to an Alphan of the Commander's choosing.  Accordingly, Dr. Russell begins to study the suspended animation process while Koenig instructs Computer to pick one Alphan to return home to Earth. 

Simmonds wants Koenig to choose him, but Koenig refuses, noting that the choice must be objective. Simmonds refuses to accept that answer. He attacks Alpha’s power station and holds the base captive. 
Koenig realizes he has no choice but to let Simmonds return to Earth with the Kaldorians. 

But Simmonds has not allowed Zantor time to prepare a proper physiological matrix for him, meaning that the suspended animation process does not work correctly.  Simmonds learns this the hard way very soon into the 75 year journey.

One aspect of  Space: 1999  (1975 – 1977) that I resolutely admire is the fact that many stories often re-purpose famous literary horror devices or narratives. There’s a valid thematic reason for this, too. The series’ heroes, the Alphans, are not prepared psychologically or technologically for a deep space journey.  They don’t understand the nature of the galaxy; they are not experienced.  Outer space is not a place, necessarily for brotherhood among aliens.  It is a realm of mystery.

Accordingly, the Alphans often encounter beings and phenomena that we would term terrifying. 

Not always, of course.  Some stories deal with wonder or awe, the other side of the equation.  

But a good number of stories, especially in Year One, contend with horror-based ideas, like the monster in “Dragon’s Domain,” a man with the Midas Touch (“Force of Life,”) ghosts (“The Troubled Spirit”), and even sadism and torture (“End of Eternity”).

“Earthbound,” a very strong early entry in the canon functions on a similar principle.

In particular, it pivots off a key element in Edgar Allen Poe’s (1809-1849) short story:  The Premature Burial  (1844).  In Poe’s time, a pervasive cultural fear, in fact, was being buried alive. Poe's tale involved a character obsessed -- wracked with fear, in fact -- regarding this fate.  He took many steps to prevent such an outcome, and yet (it appeared, anyway...) that it was all for naught.

Intriguingly, “Earthbound,” takes that fear of being buried alive – of being trapped, unable to escape, in a casket -- and updates it for the space age. 

Here, Commissioner Simmonds fails to take the necessary precautions before entering a suspended animation chamber, and awakens only a short-time in on a seventy-five year flight.  All the other people on the ship -- Zantor and the Kaldorians -- are sound asleep and therefore oblivious to his desperate cries for help.  

And because the cubicle is transparent, we are able to watch Simmonds’ panic grow and grow, as he repeatedly throws himself against the unbreakable walls of the sleep cubicle  Finally he is left screaming, defeated, with no way to escape his premature burial.

Surrounding this climactic set-piece, “Earthbound” features some of the sharpest, and in a way, cruelest plotting in the entire series.  

Koenig orders the Computer to pick one name among the Alphans; one person who the base can reasonably spare if it is to continue to function.  Since Simmonds is not really a member of the base personnel, he is the natural choice to go. 

But Simmonds refuses to let “chance” (or, presumably, a machine) dictate his fate, and takes steps to assure that he goes home.  

Alas, the irregular manner of his methods -- blackmail, hostages, gunpoint diplomacy, etc. -- assure that he will not be adequately prepared for the voyage.  He does not trust Zantor, and doesn’t give him time to prepare a  biological matrix.  So he will go home…but he will never, in fact, see home.

At the end of the episode, the other shoe drops. 

Helena asks Koenig who Computer ultimately chose to return to Earth.  In one of the series’ greatest, most chill-inducing codas, Alpha's commander answers.  With one word.

“Simmonds.”

Landau’s delivery is great here. It is deadpan and straight-forward, imbued not with too much or too little emotion.  It’s a simple declaration, and Landau's delivery allows the viewer take in the information for him or herself; to realize the full ramifications without spoon-feeding or hand-wringing.

In short, “Earthbound” represents  Space: 1999  at the top of its game. 

Outside of the horror trope re-purposed for the near future, and the chilling,  Twilight Zone -worthy twist or denouement, we also get examples of the Alphans at their best here.  The Kaldorians are treated as friends and allies, not as monsters or enemies.  

A common criticism of the series is that the Alphans are always “menaced” by advanced aliens. Clearly, that’s not the case in “Earthbound.” If anything, the Alphans here are menaced by human nature; by Simmond’s selfishness and cut-throat determination. As Paul Morrow (Prentis Hancock) trenchantly notes at one point, the Alphans are better off without Simmonds.

And yet, as bad as Simmonds is, the Alphans clearly don’t wish for him to endure the horrible fate of being prematurely buried. Accordingly, the episode presents a three-dimensional depiction of the Alphans.  They know how flawed Simmonds is, and yet, as fellow human beings, they can still empathize with his predicament, and grim fate.

I picked “Earthbound” to review this year -- the fortieth anniversary of  Space: 1999  -- not only because I believe it is a strong episode of the series, but because it features a guest performance from Sir Christopher Lee.  

This great actor passed away a few months ago, and left behind a vast catalog of amazing work. “Earthbound” is an intriguing part of that work because Lee plays against type. In the early-to-mid-1970s he was widely typecast as a villain ( The Wicker Man  [1972],  The Satanic Rites of Dracula  [1973],  The Man with the Golden Gun  [1974]).  

On  Space: 1999 , by contrast, he plays a regal and reasonable alien, a being who doesn’t permit the passions of the moment to alter his beliefs or actions.  Lee is quite imposing as Zantor, especially in his first scenes, wherein we don’t yet know what he will do, or who he is.  

But Lee remains a fascinating presence right through his last appearance in the episode in part because he keeps the character’s motivations opaque. 

In the last scene, for example, Zantor could help Simmonds by telling him he needs to prepare a matrix. Instead, he behaves according to Simmonds demands...and keeps his mouth shut.  He makes a choice not to help a man he considers “diseased.”  

Is this murder, or merely an adherence to the logic of the moment?  

It is very likely that even if Zantor warned Simmonds about the necessity of a  matrix, Simmonds wouldn’t believe him.  Hence, the same fate would result.  

But I love how ambiguous the moment is, in terms of Zantor's decision-making and feelings.

The episode features some other welcome visual touches too, The Kaldorians arrive on Alpha bearing a gift: ceremonial gold eggs belonging to a life-form called a “libra bird.”  Eggs, of course, represent fertility and re-birth.  And the Kaldorians are seeking their re-birth on Earth.  In a way, they have already been reborn on Alpha, awaking from the deep slumber that has characterized their journey.
I should also note that I enjoy “Earthbound” because it remembers the basic premise of the series; that the Alphans are, essentially, us in space. They are men of the 21st century, with our flaws and foibles, not romanticized figures of perfection and “evolved” natures.

Here the Alphans accidentally kill a Kaldorian while attempting to open a sleep bay.  It is a mistake, of course, but a bad one.  

Yet when you put human nature together with the unknown, such things may happen, even if the humans -- Koenig, Bergman and Helena -- have the best of intentions. 

Space:1999 50th Anniversary: "Matter of Life and Death"

An eagle returns from an apparently habitable planet that Computer has code-named Terra Nova: “New Earth.”  Before docking can occur, however, the pilots are rendered unconscious by an unknown force.

Upon boarding the landed Eagle Commander Koenig (Martin Landau), Professor Bergman (Barry Morse) and Dr. Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) are shocked to see a third person aboard the craft: Lee Russell (Richard Johnson).

Russell was believed to have died years earlier, when his Astro 7 mission became locked in tight orbit around Jupiter.

Koenig halts Exodus, the operation to abandon Moonbase Alpha for Terra Nova, fearing that Russell’s appearance signifies a mystery regarding the planet.  Lee Russell has no memory of being on the planet, or aboard the Eagle, but seems to draw his energy from Helena’s presence.  

Lee eventually warns Koenig not to go to Terra Nova, and then appears to die.  
Koenig authorizes a mission, though Bergman warns that Lee’s corpse is beginning to “reverse polarity,” starting the transformation process towards anti-matter.

On Terra Nova, Koenig’s landing party meets with disaster as the planet’s true nature -- anti-matter -- begins to impact the Eagle’s systems and machinery…

Historically, I have not been the biggest admirer of  Space: 1999’s  (1975-1977) second produced episode, “Matter of Life and Death.”  
I had the honor and privilege of talking to co-writer Johnny Byrne (1935-2008) about the episode many years back (in the year 2000), and this is how the conversation went:

BYRNE:

First I was asked to go to Pinewood Studios and see the series sets and the production.  When I first got there, they were in final preparations for the first episode, “Breakaway,” and there was a bit of a panic because there was no second script prepared.  I was shown two scripts and they were both completely un-filmable as far as I could see when I tried to marry them to the briefing notes I had received at the time.

MUIR:

So your job was to make one of them acceptable?

BYRNE

I was asked to rewrite one of them, and the Art Wallace script (“Matter of Life and Death”) was the one I suppose they had selected as easier to develop.

MUIR:

How did you feel about rewriting the teleplay of another artist?

BYRNE:

I would have preferred to write something from scratch, and I only had about two or three weeks to rewrite the script.  But I wrote it at Pinewood, and was taken on almost as a kind of staff writer.  Somehow or other, I revised the concept, and by the end of it, realized I should really claim sole credit.Still, it was more ethical to include Art Wallace’s name.  It wasn’t his fault the script was unusable because he was writing for a series that literally hadn’t been created yet.

MUIR:

The episode you revamped, “A Matter of Life and Death,” is a sort of problematic episode, and is not often considered one of the best of the series. The climax of the story, in which the Alphans die but are miraculously brought back to life, didn’t sit well with many critics.

BYRNE:

I wasn’t entirely happy about making it all come right at the end, either.  But you have to remember that at this time there was enormous pressure to get something done they could shoot.  I never felt during the writing of that episode that I was sailing in blue water.

MUIR:

Is Terra Nova in “Matter of Life and Death” really the planet Meta?

BYRNE:

No. They put all the Meta stuff into the first episode, “Breakaway,” which was being shot while I was writing “Matter of Life and Death.”

MUIR: 

Was the intention ever that Terra Nova be Meta?

BYRNE:

No.  There was a strong pull to make each episode a stand-alone story because the series would have been selling in syndication, and we didn’t have a clue in what order the shows would be screened.  If I had been told to follow on with Meta, then I would have used Meta.  Instead, I created Terra Nova, and there seemed to be reason to do that, to actually get away from Meta. Had I been wrong to do that, Christopher Penfold or someone would have surely told me I was wrong.

MUIR: 

What [else] do you remember about working on that particular story?

BYRNE:

I spent a long time with Charles Crichton putting this into a shooting-script in the most maddening form of detail.  It was kind of a primer in filmmaking, and if there had been flaws that kind of stood out, Charles would be the one to spot them.  I was really at the mercy of superior experience there.

MUIR:

Since this was a re-write of an Art Wallace script, can you recall what your contributions were?

BYRNE:

Looking back, I see the things that interested me.  I was very fascinated that Richard Johnson had been cast, and I liked the idea of someone being Helena’s husband.  I would have looked for a level of human story there, and seeded it into the script.  The problem was that nobody was sure who was having who, or who was supposed to be having whom.  At that time, Koenig was calling Helena “Dr. Russell,” and all sorts of things.  It was a bit formal.  Nobody had sat down and planned out in detail how it was going to develop.  That Lee Russell relationship made the show special for me.  I remember that.

MUIR:

[Personally speaking] I have a problem with the story in that everybody dies in the climax, and then is miraculously resurrected when Helena wishes it.  The same sort of “reboot” was used in “War Games” later in the season.

BYRNE:

If you kill off your main characters too often, you do have this terrible reality gap.  So you have to choose your moments very carefully.

MUIR:

I’m not a huge fan of “Matter of Life or Death,” but I think it only fair to mention that at least one critic (Dick Adler for the Los Angeles Times) noted you should be nominated for an Emmy Award for the script.

BYRNE:

There is a small band of people who like it.  I think Gerry is very keen indeed on waving a magic wand, and everything comes out all right in the end.  I’m not sure I would have worked it out in quite that way.
I featured that interview segment as a prologue to some of my comments about the episode.  

Basically, I am very much of two minds about the show.  Yet when I watched it in 2016 in preparation for this week, I liked “Matter of Life and Death” more than I ever had before.

What is my problem with it?

Well, in a nutshell, I feel that Commander Koenig is portrayed as a very weak character in this drama. All along, he seems to feel pressure from his subordinates (including Alan Carter, Paul Morrow and Sandra Benes) to commence Operation Exodus, and send an Eagle to Terra Nova. 

It is fine that this pressure exists, and that he feels it. This is realistic, and one of the reasons I love  Space: 1999  is that it, despite its far-out premise, it attempts to showcase human beings in realistic rather than romanticized conditions.  

Koenig is a modern administrator, essentially, forced to become an ad hoc (and un-elected) governor. Unlike Captains in Starfleet, he has no hierarchy and no guiding regulations to consult on every decision. He is on his own.  He would feel such pressure to please those with whom he serves.

At first, Koenig resists the landing completely, noting that -- quite accurately -- the Alphans have not acquired enough information to mount a landing. There are too many questions marks, including Lee Russell’s presence on the Eagle, and the injuries of the Eagle pilots. 

For about roughly 50% of the narrative, Koenig is remarkably persuasive about the fact that a landing on Terra Nova represents a significant threat, and should be avoided, if further information is not gathered. 

But then, after Lee Russell’s death, Koenig flip-flops completely. He says things like “what’s going to stop us?” regarding the landing. 

Well, what should stop him is the same set of unresolved variables that made a landing unwise in the first place.  

Worse, Koenig receives additional and vital information from Victor that makes a successful exodus to the planet a less-likely, not more likely, possibility. Victor attempts to warn him on at least two occasions (once in his office; once when he is already in the Eagle cockpit) not to go to Terra Nova.

But now Koenig double-downs on his complete about-face, and won’t accept any information contrary to the decision to go. 

In real life, we would say he makes a catastrophic decision.  And indeed, it is. 

Koenig and the landing party die because of his choice. The eagle blows up. The moon (with all on Alpha…) explodes too.  Terra Nova is proven to be not merely dangerous, but catastrophically so.

Then, Lee shows up to talk to the surviving Helena, and tells her she can “wish” everything back to the way it was.  

In essence, the universe grants Koenig a mulligan, an extra shot at getting this (bad) decision right.

I am concerned about this turn of events for two reasons.  

First, Koenig is our central protagonist, and as viewers we should either have some confidence that in a situation like this, he will make a good decision.  Or contrarily that if he makes a bad decision, we should understand his motives for doing so.  I understand that, from a writing perspective, the Alphans had to overlook warnings and go to Terra Nova.  I accept that.  But If Koenig’s arguments were presented in a coherent, consistent fashion, we would understand his decision to go, and perhaps even support it.

Instead, Koenig spends half the episode being cautious, and half being incredibly impulsive.  I would have actually preferred it if he were impulsive all the way through.  The character could have taken the tack -- since this is early on in series continuity -- that the Alphans must seize this opportunity, questions and concerns, or not.  At least then, we would understand Koenig as a character, a leader, and a human being.

That’s my problem with “A Matter of Life and Death” in a nutshell. I feel that Koenig’s character is manipulated in terms of the writing, to achieve a particular end.  And that weakens the character, and our support for/belief in him. I love it when characters make mistakes in drama. But when the mistake is such that everybody dies a horrible death, and only divine intervention can save the them, there's a problem.

However, I do feel that what I have always failed to see, understand and appreciate about “Matter of Life and Death” is the nature (and indeed value) of the Helena/Lee story.  

Some may see it as a cold relationship, since the two hardly have the opportunity to speak with one another.  Indeed, I have often felt it was remote and distant, or Helena states about her feelings: “numb.”  

The relationship is not very warm for a husband and wife separated by tragedy.

But while watching "Matter of Life and Death" this time, I saw more plainly how the visuals carry the story, and symbolize the essence of the Lee Russell mystery so beautifully.  

As Victor’s thermal plates point out (in one of the episode’s best scenes…), Lee Russell only exists in the form he does -- as a human being -- because he is drawing energy from Helena, from the person he loved most in life.  



There is a beautifully-rendered scene, consisting of no dialogue, during which Lee wakes up in the Care Unit, and Helena sits up, in her quarters, some distance away.  They communicate, without words -- perhaps even without conscious thought -- establishing a link between the source of energy (Helena), which might even be termed imagination, and the product of that energy, which is Lee’s physical form.

This imageric meaning or approach is important, if subtle. 

If matter can be shaped by thought (such as Helena’s thoughts or memories), then, the ending of the episode with the “waving of a magic wand” is supported in some sense, and not the umotivated "divine intervention" I noted above.  

Helena creates the form of Lee Russell -- a voice of warning -- and later re-arranges the matter on Terra Nova, also to conform with her thoughts/desires, restoring life to all those who died. 

The episode’s ending, which I have, I admit, always considered a special effects showcase for special effects sake, is actually built in, and paid for, so-to-speak, by that scene of symbiosis. That moment wordlessly connects Helena’s thoughts to the manifestation of those thoughts: Lee in the flesh.  What I once called a “bankrupt” creative ending, I can now see is properly prepared for, and accounted for in the story’s structure and specifics.

Lee is only really “alive” and, indeed, Lee Russell, as Victor suggests, when in the presence of Helena, his personal battery/power source.  He cannot exist in that form when not in her presence.  It is his connection to her which permits him to warn the Alphans, and take that form.  His love for her, his connection to her, is what gives him dimension and life.  The "matter" of life and death of the episode's title may not be anti-matter, but the matter that results from thought; from love itself.

This is a fascinating and romantic notation, that love and the memory of love, can create new life, new forms. Some have seen the episode as a reflection of 1972’s Solaris, and certainly, I can see that connection, but don’t find it bothersome. In both stories, an alien world gives shape and breath to those who inhabit our memories.

I have always admired Lee's final speech to Helena, in which he notes that "matter never dies."  He might as well be saying, perhaps, "love never dies" as long there is thought and energy, and memory behind it. 
The episode provides no real scientific underpinning for any of this, and most of the talk of anti-matter seems murky, but I nonetheless appreciate that this episode, in the thoughtful words of Johnny Byrne, establishes the thesis, in essence, behind Year One of  Space: 1999 .  As Victor notes:

“We’re a long way from home, and we’re going to have to start thinking differently if we’re going to come to terms with space.”
When I wrote my first book, on  Space: 1999,  over 30 years ago, I understood this theory in principle. 

But it has taken me probably over a dozen re-watching of “Matter of Life and Death” to come to grips with the way this story conveys the “the terms”  Space: 1999  negotiates as a work of art.

Space:1999 50th Anniversary: "Breakaway"

In “Breakaway,” the time is September 9, 1999, and John Koenig (Martin Landau) is ratified Commander of Moonbase Alpha. A distant planet, Meta, is within reach of Earth’s space program, and has begun transmitting a signal that suggests intelligent life exists there. Meanwhile, the International Lunar Finance Committee plans to meet on September 15th, and the Meta Probe must launch during a narrow time window or backing for the project -- and perhaps for all space projects -- could be cut back, or rescinded.

Complicating Koenig’s crucial task of launching the Meta Probe is the fact that the probe’s crew members -- astronauts Frank Warren and Eric Sparkman -- have contracted a mysterious “virus-infection,” just like nine others on Moonbase Alpha. 

However, after replacing outgoing Commander Gorski (Philip Madoc), Koenig learns from his old friend, Professor Victor Bergman (Barry Morse), that there is no virus-infection. Instead, Doctor Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) believes that the affected personnel are suffering from brain-damage caused by radiation.

The only problem is that no abnormal radiation levels have been detected anywhere on the lunar surface, not even in the vicinity of the nuclear waste dumps, Areas 1 and 2.

Koenig questions Dr. Russell about the Meta Probes back-up crew, and wonders if they might fall ill on their long journey, suffering from the same baffling condition. He also meets with Captain Alan Carter (Nick Tate) to find out if the probe itself is ready to go.

Koenig makes a horse-trade with his politically-minded superior, Commissioner Simmonds (Roy Dotrice).  He agrees he will get the probe launched if Simmonds can stop, at least for a while, more waste from being sent to the moon. Simmonds agrees to his terms, and Koenig continues his investigation, although he fears the Meta Probe will not be a “giant leap for mankind,” but rather a “stumble in the dark.”

Before long, Koenig and his team determine that the lunar dumps are evidencing signs of fluctuating “magnetic surge.”  The brain damage Russell has noted in the Meta Probe astronauts could be the cumulative effect of the magnetic radiation, but still, there are larger problems to contend with.

After Nuclear Waste Disposal Area One burns itself out in a surge of magnetic energy, Koenig realizes that Area Two could follow suit, causing a catastrophic explosion on the moon. 

The men and women of Moonbase Alpha work to avert “total disaster,” but it is too late. The Moon is blasted out of Earth orbit with all hands on Alpha marooned there…

“Breakaway” -- the hour-long premiere episode of  Space: 1999  (1975 – 1977) by author George Bellak -- is designed to establish the series’ (much-criticized…) premise: that the Earth’s moon, along with the 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, is blasted out of Earth orbit and into deep space on an unplanned journey of awe and mystery.

When I watched “Breakaway” recently, however, I also detected something else of interest.  Specifically, the episode’s creators (including Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Bellak, Brian Johnson and Keith Wilson) go to tremendous lengths to establish here a believable, realistic or recognizable near-future world, one that eschews any sense of glamour that one might associate with space travel.  This is an important notion, especially since the yardstick used to rate (and often bludgeon)  Space: 1999  is in fact,  Star Trek  (1966 – 1969), a romantic, idealistic, optimistic even glamorous vision of man’s distant future.

As “Breakaway” takes pains to establish,  Space: 1999  involves a different kind of world, one very much in keeping with the series’ 1970s context. 

Star Trek  arrived not long after the Age of Camelot, in the colorful, swinging sixties. The world was our oyster.

By contrast,  Space: 1999  was created in the early 1970s (following  2001: A Space Odyssey ) while the U.S. was mired in political scandal (Watergate) and losing a war in Vietnam. I love and admire  Star Trek , obviously, but  Space: 1999  thus seems a more sober genre effort, and one that deals in mankind’s real, often-conflicted nature. 

For example, the series eschews imperialism or gunboat diplomacy, having seen, explicitly, its failure in Eurasia.   Space: 1999  also offers, in episodes like “Breakaway” a pointed critique of bureaucracy and politics.

Specifically, the episode follows John Koenig as he is appointed Commander of Moonbase Alpha. At first glance, this appointment would seem very much like an honor or privilege, but as the episode progresses, one can detect how Koenig is actually being set-up by Simmonds as the fall guy, in the event that things go wrong.

For example, Simmonds has withheld crucial information from Commander Koenig, and not permitted Dr. Helena Russell to report her findings about the so-called “virus-infection,” which is actually brain damage caused by exposure to an unknown form of radiation.  

The virus-infection” is so insidious a lie or cover story because Koenig has been led to believe that there is the possibility of the astronaut’s getting better. 

No doubt he accepted command of Alpha with that idea in mind. Koenig is soon faced with the reality, however, that here is no getting better or healing from catastrophic brain damage and genetic mutation (as established by Alpha’s computer). 

One beautifully-orchestrated shot in “Breakaway” reveals the distance between Russell and Koenig, and their knowledge, at least at first. 

In the foreground, we see a dying astronaut, his weakening form taking up considerable space in the frame. In the background of the shot, we see Koenig and Russell framed in separate windows, worlds apart visually-speaking, as they countenance what his death really means.  Russell knows the truth, and what the astronaut is facing.  Koenig, by contrast, is playing catch-up, and forced to re-examine the facts that he has been provided.


Koenig’s position as “fall guy” is also established by another character, Commander Gorski.  Koenig notes that Gorski seems to be handling “his suspension” from command of Moonbase Alpha rather well.  Koenig also observes to Victor that Gorski is famous for being “flexible,” a coded-commentary on his propensity to switch allegiance and sides, depending on which way the wind blows.

Why is Gorski so friendly and helpful?  It could be because Koenig’s appointment as commander absolves the former commander of all responsibility or guilt in the matter of the dead astronauts and the failure of the Meta Probe.  It is Koenig’s neck that is on the chopping block, not his. 

And consider too, Koenig’s terminology vis-à-vis the ex-commander. He declares that Gorski is taking his “suspension” well.  The word suspension explicitly suggests a temporary status. 

Is it possible that Simmonds has made Koenig commander only to see him fail, and plans to restore Gorski (a more flexible puppet…) to the same post after Koenig’s failure?  No wonder Gorski seems unbothered!  He’s Simmonds’ man, and has been taken off the hook.  He’ll just wait in the wings until Koenig is blamed for the situation….

“Breakaway” is structured in such a way that Koenig, learns, a piece at a time, how he has been manipulated, and a trap has been sprung (by Simmonds) and the actual science behind the so-called "virus infection." The severity of the crisis, in fact, sort of creeps up on him, another idea reflected in the episode's visuals.  The danger is looming, but he is not entirely aware of just how bad it is.

Koenig has been sent to the Moon to get “the space flight of the century” launched. Everything -- but notably future-funding from the International Lunar Finance Committee – depends on the success of the mission.  But when he arrives at Alpha, Koenig learns that crucial information has been denied him and there is, in essence, no way to get the Meta Probe launched.  He recognizes that he is Simmonds’ fall guy.
Angry, Koenig confronts Simmonds and tells him, point-blank, that Simmonds “lied” to him. Simmonds attempts to cow him at first, telling him that he will replace Doctor Russell with a team of “top medical people,” no doubt “yes men” who will hew to the cover story of a virus infection.

Quite rightly, Koenig demurs, and rejects the offer.

At that point, fully cognizant of the situation, Koenig begins horse-trading, as I noted above, granting concessions only in return for them. This is, Koenig understands, the only way to get to the bottom of the situation, and to understand the nature of the crisis unfolding around him.

Koenig also makes the decision of a good leader. He knowingly and irrevocably takes his own success off the table, and focuses on the problem. “Forget the probe,” he tells Carter.  The space-flight of the century is off, he decides, until he gets the answers he needs.  This is a courageous stand, and one that separates Koenig from men like Simmonds, or Gorski.  Ultimately, it matters more to him that people are dying than that the finance committee is meeting in a few days.

Again, just make the comparison crystal clear, in franchises such as  Star Trek  or  Star Wars , or even  Doctor Who , there tends to be very little if any discussion about the “cost” of space adventuring.  Artistically-speaking, as soon as you get into the realm of budget and financing, and CYA political maneuvering, one thing has happened: the realm of outer space has become de-romanticized. 

It has become, essentially, an extension of the (failed?) systems we see playing out here on Earth.

Importantly, a close-up look at this world is the starting point of  Space: 1999 .  When the Moon is blown out of orbit, it is leaving behind a “failed” society in a sense, and mankind – represented by good men like Koenig -- gets a second chance to write his destiny.

Other aspects of “Breakaway” also seek to de-romanticize or de-glamorize the series’ milieu.

At one point, after Koenig survives a dangerous eagle crash, Helena upbraids him and tells him that she is seeking “answers, not heroes.” 

Once more, this line is a deliberate rebuke of the popular space opera form, which suggests that when man is capable of reaching the stars, he will no longer have to worry about money, or poverty, or even political-backstabbing.   Space: 1999  suggests instead that man will remain man, and that he will takes his nature to the stars, with all the drawbacks that description (and his psychology) suggests.

Uniquely,  Space: 1999  is both dystopian and millennarian in nature. It is a fin de siècle production that suggests man must irrevocably separate from his past and present on Earth to recognize again the value of his humanity.  Hence the  Science Digest  descriptor of the series as concerning the “downfall of technological man.”

It may be more apt, at this juncture to describe Space:1999 as the rebirth of man, since many episodes of the series reckon with the Alphans facing different realms of existence, and considering their place and purpose in the universe.

Many episodes of the series also pit the Alphans -- as examples of restored humanity -- against more advanced civilizations that, like Earth and men like Simmonds, seem to emerge from dystopian or sterile states. These worlds and peoples are examples from the Alphans to learn from; examples of a road that they need not take on their exodus to the stars, on their new beginning.  

It is so ironic that  Space: 1999  is often criticized for an “unrealistic premise” when the ingenious approach to storytelling, characterization, and production design is, in some sense, actually the opposite.  It is hyper-realistic. 

“Breakaway” is our starting point.  It portrays a world we recognize as an extension of our own, in which bureaucrats still practice CYA, and in which the failure to solve big problems (like atomic waste) leads to bigger problems down the road.
It is the world, finally, that the Alphans must “break away” from if man is to have a future of hope and purpose.

Attention All Sections Alpha: Space:1999 Turns 50!

Approximately fifty years ago, in September of 1975 -- shortly before I turned six -- I sat down in front of a color TV, turned on WPIX New York, and a TV show blew my mind.
Seriously.
I was watching a new science fiction series, called  Space:1999 , and, no exaggeration, it changed my life. It was a series that I not only loved as a child, a teenager, and as an adult, but as a writer, it transformed my career. 
My very first book was a non-fiction book guide to the series. My first magazine sale was a retrospective of the series.  And in 2002 and 2014, I wrote officially licensed novels or new adventures in the 1999 universe, representing my first fiction sale. 
My love of the series introduced me to a creative mentor, friend and collaborator in the late, great script-writer Johnny Byrne, and I have made so many new friends and talented colleagues because of Space:1999.  Musicians. Writers. Model-makers. Filmakers. Podcast and video-makers.
But in the beginning was the series itself.
Here was a program that felt different from  Star Trek  (1966-1969) and  Lost in Space  (1965-1968), and at least to me, it seemed incredibly real; incredibly possible.  
Say what you will, but Space:1999 was my sci-fi show, for my era, in the 1970s.
Half a century later, with the year 1999 far behind us,  Space:1999  still feels that way to me, and this week, I'll be celebrating the series as it celebrates this milestone and anniversary.
I always say that the year 1999 need not be an expiration date, and that this Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series from the disco decade still has much to share with audiences about ourselves, about humanity.  
Those people who compile internet list insisting that its age makes the series unwatchable? Let's just say they suffer a paucity of imagination, understanding of context, and lack of appreciation for the tenets of filmmaking.
 
As I see it,  Space: 1999  was constructed upon the following six creative pillars and philosophical underpinnings.  
These half-a-dozen ideas represent the identity of the original 1970s program, and keep it vibrant after all these years and decades. 


1.  Technology is a double-edged sword. 

While technology permits for the Alphans to sustain themselves on the moon (and in deep space), and the wonderfully versatile Eagles permit for landings on planets that could represent a new home, technology is not a cure-all in the  Space: 1999  universe.  
On the contrary, technological solutions to problems (like atomic waste on the moon), cause the "Breakaway" catastrophe in the first place.  

And in episodes such as "Space Brain" and "The Troubled Spirit," technological solutions to crises are often proven to be flawed.

A nuclear charge-carrying Eagle (mysteriously) can't return to Alpha when it is on a collision course with a cosmic intelligence in the former episode, and in the latter episode, a scientific "exorcism" of a ghost is the very thing that creates a haunting on the lunar base in the first instance.
In large part, this conceit of technology as a double-edged sword is what distinguishes the  Space: 1999  universe from the  Star Trek  universe.  In  Star Trek , "Technology Unchained" has made the Federation a paradise. Without the need to worry about survival issues like hunger and poverty, man has turned, particularly in the 24th century, towards "enriching" himself, not his pocketbook.   
Writing in  Science Digest  all the way back in 1975, editor Arielle Emmett wrote that  Space: 1999  concerned the "downfall of technological man."  That's the template,  "Earthbound" is a perfect example of this idea well-executed. It showcases the glorious potential and horrors of advanced suspended animation in a most chilling fashion.
As we are developing new technologies, new medicines, new weapons and new media at a prodigious rate right now, this facet of the original series remains timely. 
Do our tools make us more human, or less human?  Do our tools connect us or isolate us?  Do we control our machines, or do they control us?
2.   Outer Space is Terrifying and Mysterious.  It isn't a Cosmic United Nations.
Many popular "outer space" franchises, from  Star Trek  to  Farscape  to  Andromeda   have featured recurring alien villains.  We all know their names: the Klingons, the Peacekeepers, the Nietzscheans, the Ferengi, the Borg and so on.  Communication is possible with all these species, and the galaxy is like a cosmic U.N., with different countries separated by the vast cosmic ocean of outer space. You can radio back to headquarters (Earth) via a sub-space radio, and there is no time dilation at all.
Not so in  Space: 1999 , the original series. 
There, outer space was a realm of mystery and terror and awe.  I'm reminded of Taylor's lyrical description of deep space in  Planet of the Apes : "Time bends. Space is...boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely."  
Those sentences perfectly describe the established  Space: 1999  aesthetic.  
Another way of putting it, the original  Star Trek  had a rule for prospective writers that they should not get lost in "the bigness of it all" in terms of outer space.  
In  Space: 1999 , the bigness of it all is the very point of the drama. 
It's important to remember that on  Space: 1999  the errant moon was moving through alien star systems, on an unplanned course, never to return, so there were not recurring enemies to battle.  This makes it more challenging, I suppose, in terms of drama: you don't have a regular villain to fall back on.  But the idea was also rewarding, each episode offered new horizons.   Space: 1999  wasn't pinned to an increasingly complex alien-based continuity where you had to say, "but a Ferengi would never do that!"
There was a logical reason for this approach in terms of the structure of  Space: 1999 . The Alphans had few resources and fewer weapons on their cosmic odyssey. Thus they were never in a position to combat a continuing enemy like the Borg or the Klingons.  
Indeed, Moonbase Alpha might -- with luck and ingenuity -- survive one engagement with a militant alien empire, but it would never have survived if the Sidons, the Dorcons or other villains had kept hammering at it, week after week. The base was too fragile for that, its life support systems too precarious, its defenses too "primitive."  
Again, this goes right back to the late Martin Landau's (correct) assertion back in the 1970s that  Space: 1999  was less "macho" than  Star Trek .   Star Trek  was about peaceful contact with aliens in a universe of plenty, but also about gunboat diplomacy. The Enterprise had phaser banks to make certain the crew was safe, and the Federation was protected. By contrast,  Space: 1999  was about a Darwinian universe where survival was the overriding issue, and this was distinctly a battle for limited resources.
We saw many aliens in  Space: 1999  who attempted to steal the Alphan resources ("The Beta Cloud" and "Bringers of Wonder" to name two episodes), and the series obsessed on matters of survival. One character, in an episode called "Dorzak" said that the battle for survival "makes monsters of us all." Yet another episode, "The  Exiles" saw characters debating survival explicitly.  

Is it more important that you simply survive, or how you choose to survive?"
Johnny Byrne's "Mission of the Darians" looked at a disaster on an alien spaceship where the crew turned to cannibalism because there was no uncontaminated food remaining. The series hero, John Koenig was asked if he would have turned to the same grisly solution if that crisis had occurred on Alpha. 

Rather pointedly, he didn't answer.
3.  Mankind in Space: 1999 is technologically and psychologically unprepared for the mysteries of deep space , and when he countenances those mysteries, it is his human nature which will either hand him defeat, or bring him to victory. The scientists and astronauts of Moonbase Alpha were not examples of evolved, idealized, romanticized mankind, but us -- contemporary man -- in space, replete with all our flaws, emotions, paranoia, fears and hopes. 
Frequently in  Space: 1999,  a mistake by the Alphans was the very thing that led into the adventure of the week.  They tampered in alien justice in "End of Eternity." They investigated and opened up orbiting cryo-chambers in "The Exiles."  

Humans are curious, and that can be a strength, but it can also be a weakness.
The story "Collision Course" depicted beautifully how man is psychologically and technologically unprepared for life in space.  An alien from an advanced race, Arra (Margaret Leighton), informs Commander Koenig that he must permit the moon to collide with her colossal world. In this case, she claims, it will trigger some kind of evolutionary metamorphosis, but that Alpha will survive the event.  That's a lot to "believe in," but Koenig discovers that he trusts Arra.  He's made a human judgment about her.
Back on Alpha, however, his team can't get on board with this idea of letting the collision occur and it goes around Koenig's authority to attempt to avoid disaster with mines deployed in space.  

What is the superior value in this instance? Trust in science? Or trust in a person?  Do we depend on what we know, or what we feel?
I'm not drawing any universal conclusions regarding that idea, but  Space: 1999  meditated on the notion that in deep space, the "laws" of the universe might not be exactly exist as we understand them now, from our perch on Earth.  Instead, man is going to be asked to take -- now and again -- a "leap of faith."  

Some men and women will be equipped to do so, some will not. This creates tension amongst the Alphans.
Now,  Space: 1999  has been accused of being anti-science, and this is so because the series suggests that:
a.) technology is not always the answer, and... 
b.) that the laws of science as we understand them in the here-and -now may not apply, exactly, in the far corners of space and time. In  Space: 1999 , man must puzzle his way through answers, based not on techno-babble, but on a combination of technology, psychology, philosophy and even spiritualism.  
4 . The Alphans are the new kids on the block, literally.   I once compared the original universe in  Space: 1999  to a classroom. It's a crucible from which the Alphans -- having escaped from a dying, politically-destructive Earth -- learn about themselves and their role in space.  
You'll notice that in no episode of  Space: 1999  do the Alphans encounter a race that is less advanced than they were, at least in terms of technology (unless you count 13th century Earth in "Journey to Where," or the Alphans themselves, as cavemen, in "Full Circle.")
Instead, the Alphans universally countenanced super-advanced aliens that believe they have life "licked," so-to-speak, and are apparently far more advanced. But these aliens, almost universally have lost  or sacrificed some important aspect of humanity.  
The Zennites of "Missing Link" have emphasized science over emotion, and have forgotten how to feel.  
The Sidons of "Voyager's Return" champion their  legalisms over moral solutions to their problems, thus embracing vengeance under the auspices of "law."  
The aliens of "War Games" have created a world with no fear...and yet they fear the presence of the Alphans on their world.  Planet of the Hypocrites.
In "Guardian of Piri," the Alphans discover an extinct race, the Pirians, that gave up physical labor and "work" and destroyed themselves through lassitude and luxury.
Again and again, the Alphans gaze at alien worlds in the series, and find that while some of those societies possess glorious aspects, they also showcase an absence of something important; the very things the Alphans cherish most in themselves, as human beings.  
Space:1999's  late story editor, Johnny Byrne always told me that the Alphans would be successful, ultimately, in their space quest, and they would achieve success by accepting their limitations and potential as a species. Their humanity -- warts and all -- is their greatest gift. 
5. Horror Mythology.  If you look across the catalog of  Space: 1999  episodes, you begin to detect that many episodes actually had more in common with the original  The Outer Limits  than  Star Trek . This is because the horror genre -- particularly the Gothic -- played a considerable role in  Space: 1999 . Various episodes resurrected and updated famous horror tropes.  

I've written about this in length in a post here.  
In short,  Space: 1999  in 1975 and 1976 gave us outer space, high-tech variations of  The Premature Burial ("Earthbound), the Siren ("Guardian of Piri"), the Midas Touch ("Force of Life,") the Midwich Cuckoos ("Alpha Child"), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ("Full Circle), Faust ("End of Eternity"), Ghosts ("The Troubled Spirit"), St. George vs. The Dragon ("Dragon's Domain"), The Picture of Dorian Gray ("The Exiles") and even the zombie ("All That Glisters.")  
You'll notice that some of these tales arise from ancient mythology (the siren, the Midas Touch, namely), and others come from more recent mythology, 19th and early 20th century literature.  
Johnny Byrne once informed me that his idea for "Another Time, Another Place" came from a mythology built around a church in Ireland.
He told me: "One hundred yards up the road from the house where I grew up was this little church with a fantastic reputation.  We heard that if you walked around the church sun-wise (clockwise) three times, you'd meet yourself coming out.  That kind of legend was the core of "Another Time, Another Place."  Our mythology is filled with situations in which a person stumbles into a mist and then emerges 300 years later or some such thing. So I constructed a story around the experience of my upbringing."

6.  Mind-blowing Visual Distinction.  In terms of visualization,  Space: 1999  was a series that took ambitious, even crazy risks on a regular basis, and was never afraid to fail.  
There were occasional visual failures (the soap suds of "Space Brain," one of my favorite episodes), of course, but also radically new environments featured on the series.  

Who can forget the bizarre but mind-blowing surface of planet Piri in "Guardian of Piri?"  
We saw, in  Space: 1999  worlds of soft fabrics glowing mists and hard-edged nightmares ("Missing Link,"), diamond-like, jeweled mirrors ("Seed of Destruction"), vast computer/man interfaces ("War Games," "The Infernal Machine"), an anti-matter world of crimson skies ("Matter of Life and Death"), an underground alcove of spheroid "bouncing" probes ("AB Chrysalis"), and much more.  
In some sense,  Space: 1999  was really about allowing the imagination to run wild -- with very little control or barrier terms of scientific rationalization or explanation.  Farscape  was truly brilliant in this regard as well, showing us colorful worlds of tremendous ingenuity and visual invention.
these are my thoughts on what  Space: 1999   as we celebrate its fiftieth birthday. These are the values I see played out, across the catalog of 48 episodes.  These are the reasons I enjoy the series after a half-century.  
Other fans have other reasons, I should hasten to add.  I'm not trying to speak for anyone else, or for any agenda. This is just my interpretation of a work of art that inspired me (and, incidentally, began my writing career).

50 Years Ago: Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975)

Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975) is a Saturday morning TV program developed for television by David De Patrie and Fritz Freleng. This fifty-year old series assimilates and re-invents characters, plot lines, devices and technology from all previous incarnations of the once-popular franchise, including the Pierre Boulle novel, the 1968 film and sequels ( Beneath , in particular), and even the short-lived 1974 live-action TV series.
The result is an invigorating shot in the arm for the franchise. The series is attentive and committed to details, and even develops an overall story arc.
That might bee a surprise to you. Because frankly the buzz from the old genre press wasn’t good. Going back to  Fantastic Television  a reference book from 1977 that I've always adored, the author writes in a summary review of the NBC series that it “was a not very exciting animated version of the short-lived CBS live-action series,” and that the artwork and plots were “simplistic.” (page 177).  
The comment about the art work is correct, and yet some times "simplistic" can also mean...interesting.  Once you get used to it, the design of the cartoon series is actually pretty terrific, at least in a baroque kind of way.

The premiere episode of  Return to the Planet of the Apes,  “Flames of Doom,” (by Larry Spiegel), finds a NASA space capsule called the “Venture” traveling on a routine deep space mission on August 6, 1976. 

Aboard are three astronauts: Bill Hudson (a white man), Jeff Allen (an African-American man) and Judy Franklin (a woman). 

Bill narrates the captain’s log and confirms Dr. Stanton’s theory of “time thrust;” that man can utilize faster-than-light speeds to propel himself into the future. Admirers of the 1968 film will recognize this comment as a reflection of Chuck Heston’s opening narration, and Dr. Hasslein’s theory named there. It’s been simplified for children in this cartoon, but the idea is identical.
No sooner has Hudson informed us about this scientific theory than the ship’s chronometer goes wild and the Venture literally plunges into a time warp. The “Earth Clock” goes crazy, and the Venture arrives battered and bruised in the year 3979, where it crashes on a strange planet, and into a dead lake.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the surface  – in a city ruled by intelligent apes – General Urko, a gorilla power-monger, addresses the Supreme Council of Ape City and demands genocide against all humans. 
Arguing the opposite case is the kindly chimpanzee Cornelius, who pleads for a “different course.” He and his wife, a behavioral scientist named Zira, wish to study humans as the key to “simian origins.” Arbitrating this dispute of national importance is the ruler of the apes, an orangutan named Dr. Zaius. 
I must note that the level of attention to detail in this scene is remarkable.  For as Zaius issues his decision on the matter at hand, the edit cuts to a stone relief on the wall behind him which reveals the long history of ape-human relations. There are images of apes hunting humans and even domesticating them.
Humans may be hunted as legitimate sport, Zaius concludes, or brought into the city to perform “menial tasks.” They may even serve as domestic pets, but Zaius will not demand their total destruction.

However, on an ominous note, he warns that Article 18 of the “Book of Simian Prophecy” demands that man must be destroyed at any cost if he develops the power of speech. In other words, this is a temporary victory for Cornelius’s cause, and for the primitive, mute, stone-age humans who populate caves outside the technologically advanced ape-city.

Watching this portion of the episode, a few matters become plain. First and foremost, the franchise has returned to the ape society as depicted in Boulle’s original novel. In other words, the apes dwell in a twentieth century city with television, radio, automobiles and the like. 

Their city is not a rock-outcropping like in the popular original movie, but rather a contemporary metropolis with buildings and skyscrapers that resemble those from human history in a wonderful nod to the adage “monkey see, monkey do.” The ape culture of the original film was almost medieval, despite the presence of guns and such medical advances as brain surgery. Not so here.
For instance, the imposing ape council building resembles nothing so much as our own Capitol Building where Congress deliberates when it isn't shutdown. Since this is a re-imagination and updating of  Planet of the Apes  for the mid-1970s, not only is there the burgeoning nod to gender and racial diversity (this was the era of the equal rights amendment...) in the make-up of the astronauts, but the focus on the Council and its proceedings reveals a more bureaucratic bent to the apes.
Instead of ape culture being essentially of one mind (as in the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil/speak-no-evil triumvirate of the Schaffner film showcases), here Ape society is bedeviled by partisan politics, with chimpanzees representing the pacifist left, gorillas the militant right, and orangutans the sensible center. This is especially important considering the context of  Return to the Planet of the Apes : immediately post-Watergate and soon after the Vietnam conflict. Again, this is an example of updating and changing a franchise, but not throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Continuing with the story, Bill, Jeff (voiced by Austin Stoker of  Battle for the Planet of the Apes  and  Assault on Precinct 13 ), and Judy abandon their sinking spaceship and flee into the Forbidden Zone. Recalling the portions of the original film shot in Death Valley, the series offers an artistic montage here as the three astronauts search for water and food under the glaring sun of what they believe is an alien world.

The animated frames turn a bright scarlet hue to represent the heat of the desert and there are close-ups of human faces caked in sweat. Close-ups of tired feet marching in the sand also appear. This montage doesn’t rely on dialogue, but rather on clever images that express an emotion. 
The animation is limited perhaps, even crude but these limitations are marshaled as a strength on the program. Overlapping views, double exposures, intense close-ups, insert shots and first person subjective point-of-view shots all provide a texture to the desperate march through the wasteland. 
This march ends, appropriately, with the sighting of an Ape Mount Rushmore. Another new touch, but again one that along with the ape metropolis reveals the ape talent for mimicry (monkey see, monkey do) and is therefore thematically valuable; a subconscious reminder that all of the simian accomplishments are built on “aping” human society.

Later episodes go further with this idea, visiting "The Tomb of the Unknown Ape" or mentioning the famous author, William Apespeare.  One episode, "Invasion of the Underdwellers," even casts eyes on -- at least briefly -- a simian Mona Lisa.

In the desert, Jeff and Bill lose Judy when fires spontaneously erupts in front of them, and an earthquake splits the ground in a series of lovely frames that reveal a high degree of fidelity to images from  Beneath the Planet of the Apes  (particularly Taylor’s abduction by the underground mutants). 

The astronauts have little time to ponder the loss of their companion, however, as Bill and Jeff encounter a tribe of stone age humans, including the beautiful Nova.
Suggesting an interesting mystery, Nova wears the dog tags of another astronaut, someone named Brent (again, a reference to  Beneath the Planet of the Apes ). His birth date was May 2, 2079, so Jeff and Bill are forced to ponder the notion that an astronaut who was born after them arrived on the planet of the apes before they did. Boggles the mind, no? This is a pretty advanced concept for a kid’s show, and it also provides an underlying mystery for adults to enjoy. Where is Brent? What happened to him? 
Before long, the apes arrive, on the hunt,  in tanks, jeeps and with heavy artillery. The gorillas even lob gas grenades at the primitive humans. Here, the series utilizes zooms inside individual frames (not actual motion, but rather camera motion…) to suggest the frenetic pace of the hunt. Jeff and Bill are separated, and Bill is captured and taken to Ape City.
That’s where the first episode ends, but already, the attentive viewer can detect how this canny re-imagination assimilates the critical aspects of the  Planet of the Apes  mythos with something akin to 20/20 hindsight.

Instead of making up the saga as it goes (a deficit of the otherwise outstanding motion picture series…),  Return to the Planet of the Apes  accounts for -- from the very beginning -- the mutants in the Forbidden Zone (here termed “The Underdwellers.”) It also employs familiar characters in new ways and in  new situations, and even incorporates movie imagery to vet the story. 

In terms of characters, Urko derives from Mark Lenard’s character on the 1974 TV series. In  Beneath , a similar character was known as “Ursus.” He is essentially the same ape here, as are Zira and Cornelius, but Dr. Zaius has changed the most. 

Zaius is no longer a hypocritical religious zealot, but rather an equalizing force of moderation in Ape Society…almost heroic, actually.

“The free ape is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought,” he even states; an ideal that the movie’s “chief defender of the faith” could never get behind.

This is actually a significant structural change as well as a symbolic representation of the left/right divide in our culture. Why? Because with Zaius moderating pacifists and war-mongers, we can more logically believe that humans (particularly the astronauts) can continue to escape and outmaneuver a technologically advanced simian culture. The whole planet isn’t out to kill them; they do have allies.  Dr. Zaius is even referred to by his enemies, the Underdwellers, as being "just...for an ape," and again, this is a sea change in the character's depiction.
From the original  Planet of the Apes  movie, “Flames of Doom” also incorporates other powerful visuals. We see the ape scarecrows on the border of the Forbidden Zone again, and, on a connected note, hear the same gorilla “hunt” horn on the soundtrack. We see a small, yellow rubber raft and a U.S. flag planted in the Forbidden Zone too, as well as the discovery of a first green plant indicating life on the fringe of the desert.
Again, the approach here seems to be to this: take what worked in the apes movie, book and TV series, and then put them all together in a more coherent, cohesive story, smoothing out the bumps and making everything jibe. 

That’s important, because long time  Planet of the Apes  fans will remember some of the more dramatic gaps fouling continuity in the film series. In  Planet of the Apes , for instance, it is the year 3978 when Taylor arrives, but when Brent arrives on his heels in the follow-up,  Beneath,  it is magically 3955.

Similarly, there are discrepancies between  Escape  and  Conquest  in the story of how the apes ascended to superiority in man’s world. Cornelius’s story involves an ape named Aldo (whom we meet in  Battle ), but does not take into account the true ape revolutionary, Caesar.  Coming at essentially the end of the apes cycle,  Return to the Planet of the   Apes  benefits from knowing everything that came before.

Indeed, this is the only artistic reason for the re-imagination of a franchise. Taking what worked in one production and maintaining it; and taking what didn’t work and improving upon it.  It must be done, however, with a degree of love, patience and restraint involving the material. I feel like I see all that here.
Notice that there is not merely change for the sake of change; that characters have not miraculously switched sexes, and whole swaths of mythology have not been removed or altered to suit a developer"s ego, or need to be "creative."

What I’m suggesting is that fundamentally there is a respect in evidence here for the the productions that came before, for the Apes mythos. So yes, a re-imagination can work, and this dedicated animated series is one example, at least in its first chapter, where it did so.

None of this means, however, that  Return to the Planet of the Apes  doesn't sometimes lapse into childishness and silliness.  The series was made, after all, to air on Saturday mornings in the 1970s.  The intended demographic was young children, and yet here I am, writing about it 50 years later  

20 Years/Top Ten Posts #4: The Warriors (1979)

[Originally posted on September 4, 2010, this review is the 4th most-read post on my blog in its first 20 years, racking up nearly 30,000 views).
"The problem in the past has been the man turning us against one another. We have been unable to see the truth, because we have been fighting for ten square feet of ground, our turf, our little piece of turf. That's crap, brothers! The turf is ours by right, because it's our turn. All we have to do is keep up the general truce. We take over one borough at a time. Secure our territory... secure our turf... because it's all our turf
- The "One and Only" Cyrus, The Warriors (1979)

Recently, a reader of this blog asked me in an e-mail to name my "dream" or "fantasy" double feature of the immediate post-Star Wars film period. 

I'm not sure if this is precisely what she had in mind, but almost immediately, my mind seized on two great action fantasies which perfectly capture the unsettled, anxious vibe of that span: Walter Hill's  The Warriors  (1979) and John Carpenter's  Escape from New York  (1981).   
Wouldn't you love to sit down in a darkened auditorium, and watch these two films back-to-back?  I know I would.
Both of these classic action movies are born from of the same historical context: a period of extreme urban decay and blight in the Big Apple.
And -- as great science fiction films often do -- both movies project that considerable societal problem into the immediate but unknowable future.   In the case of  The Warriors , that future date is intentionally left unspecified, but New York is a city overrun by gangs.  And in the world of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), Manhattan becomes a government-run maximum security prison in 1997.
So how did the American fantasy film arrive at this weird, dark juncture...where the criminals are running the prison, so-to-speak?   
Well, if you recall, the mid-1970s was not really a terrific time for big cities in America, specifically NYC.  Much of the metropolitan infrastructure had fallen into disrepair and neglect,  and there was a growing sense of disenfranchisement, politically-speaking.  
Alarmingly, crime rates were sky high and trending higher.  
Poverty was also an enormous problem because of economic stagnation and high unemployment (Carter's age of malaise and America's "crisis of confidence.")   New York City teetered dangerously near bankruptcy in 1975, and President Ford famously refused to bail it out.  This task was left to the Teachers' Union and, utilizing pension funds, it rose to the challenge...to the tune of  a then-whopping 150 million dollars.
Then, in July of 1977, a city-wide power outage shone another light on the social unrest burdening the great city.   During a 25-hour period of black outs, there was a city-wide outbreak of looting and crime, and over 3,000 men and women were arrested.    Prisons virtually overflowed...
In that day and age, no one could have imagined so quick an end to this urban nightmare (which was also featured to great effect in the terrific early eighties flick  Wolfen  [1981].  However, via the corporatization/Disneyfication/Giuliani-fication of the Big Apple in the early 1990's...the problem was resolved in New York, at least to a very large degree. 
Yet filmmakers of the day, like J.C. and Walter Hill, imagined in the late 1970's and early 1980's that the Big Apple would only sink further into crime, into gang-warfare, into blight, and into despair.  The city became a dark, apocalyptic landscape in their highly-visual, action-packed productions.
That's the critical context underlying both  The Warriors  and Escape from New York. In his landmark book,  Cult Movies , film scholar and critic Danny Peary does a terrific and thorough job of comparing and contrasting the novel and the film, but long-story short: the book de-romanticizes the gang members that serve as its protagonists, while the Walter Hill film of the disco-era purposefully mythologizes The Warriors and firmly places them in  a fantasy-styled (if dystopic...) landscape.
Taking a Ride on the Wonder Wheel; Or History Repeats Itself
It is a well-known fact that  The Warriors  (book and film) is loosely based on an event from human antiquity, the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 B.C.  
There, north of Babylon, a leader named Cyrus the Younger led "The Ten Thousand," -- an army of Greek soldiers -- into enemy territory against the Persian Army, which reportedly numbered over a million-strong.  
Cyrus was killed in the battle, leaving his men stranded deep inside enemy territory with no ally, no sanctuary and no supplies.  Clearchus, a Spartan general, assumed command of the fugitives, but there was danger, intrigue and betrayal at every turn.
For instance, a local satrap, Tissaphernes, invited the Greeks to feast with him...and the leaders who accepted the invitation were captured and decapitated.  The remaining Greeks fought superior numbers all the way back to their land, near the Black Sea.  And when they saw the familiar shore-line, they shouted -- famously (and with great relief) -- "Thalatta! Thalatta!" ("The Sea! The Sea!")
The events of the battle at Cunaxa, the subsequent retreat and the return home were assiduously recorded by the Greek soldier, Xenophon in his famous chronicle, Anabasis.   
This historical work is explicitly the source of the adaptations by Walter Hill/David Shaber and Yurick, but the location has been updated to the near-future, to gangland New York sometime near the dawn of the 21st century.  

A gang called "The Warriors" travels deep into enemy territory from their home-land (Coney Island) to attend a "conclave" in the Bronx.  The gang then faces enormous odds (and enemy gangs with names like The Baseball Furies, the Lizzies, the Electric Eliminators, the Moonrunners, the Orphans and the Gramercy Riffs), to return home safely following the assassination of a messianic gang leader.  
The Warriors ultimately know they have reached home, not coincidentally, when they spy the shore at Coney Island.  Thalatta?

There's even a figure in the film named Cyrus -- the aforementioned visionary gang leader assembling an "army" -- who dies early in the proceedings.
By connecting the odyssey of the Coney Island Warriors explicitly to the story told in Anabasis, director Hill successfully casts his unconventional, even criminal protagonists as epic heroes; thus casting them in a romantic, mythological light.  These men are not just street toughs; not merely small-time thugs, but heroes undertaking a terrifying and dangerous journey.  
The Wonder Wheel at Coney Island is the first shot of the film and it's almost as though Hill is using the concept of the wheel itself to take us back in time...to an almost mythological past.  The point is simply to note that, perhaps, unconventional times demand unconventional heroes.
Throughout the film, Hill returns to this important idea of myth making.  First, he cannily utilizes familiar character names to suggest famous figures/characters from history and myth.  It's important to remember, these character names are quite different from those highlighted in Yurick's novel, which sought to reveal gang members as ignorant and foolish, not as heroic, comic-book, fantasy figures.  
In the movie, then, we get a gang leader named Cleon (Dorsey Wright), who leads his Warriors to a "peace" gathering in the city. In Greek history, Cleon was actually a noted critic of the aristocracy, and the film character takes on this particular trait, at least to some extent.  He sees the power and righteousness inherent in Cyrus's vision of gang unity.  It's a way to change things; a way to alter the established (and morally corrupt?) order that has created the desolate, urban landscape.  
Another Warrior is called Cochise (David Harris), and he adopts the guise and characteristics of  a famous Apache war chief in American history.  Cochise's name means, literally "the strength of oak," and accordingly, in the film, Cochise is one of the Warriors' greatest fighters.
Yet another Warrior from Coney Island is named Ajax (James Remar), and this moniker derives from Greek history/myth too, specifically from Homer's  The Iliad.     
Then there's Rembrandt (Marcelino Sanchez), the gang's graffiti-artist...named for the Dutch painter, and Snow (Brian Tyler) -- an African-American who is one "cool" customer.
Even the man who eventually takes over for Cleon, Swan (Michael Beck) is named explicitly for myth.  In Finnish tales, a swan is known as the bird of the underworld, and the "swan song" widely remembered as the "song of death."  Ultimately, it is Swan who takes on the Orphean task of safely leading his fellow-gang members (and a beautiful woman named Mercy...) out of the underworld of New York City, back to the safety and relative sanctuary of Coney Island.
The characters and situations encountered by the Warriors in Hill's 1979 film also relate specifically to stories recounted from Greek Myth; stories that remain well-known today.  For instance, Ajax falls prey in a park to an undercover police officer, a beautiful woman, sitting on a park bench.  She hand-cuffs the impulsive Ajax to that bench, and soon the police have arrived in force to take him into custody.  He does not make it home.  
After a fashion, Ajax's tragic fate is a reflection of the "Procrustean Bed" in Greek legend.  An evil man named Procrustes set up -- on a sacred path, no less -- an iron bed.  He would then invite innocent passersby to rest upon it.  Finally, he would ruthlessly make his occupant fit the bed...even if that "fit" required amputation, dismemberment or other tortures.  Eventually, Procrustes met his fate at the hands of the hero Theseus.  
But the underlying point of the myth was Procrustes' enforcement of conformity...everybody had to fit his bed...or die trying.  

In  The Warriors , Ajax -- an outlaw gang member -- is captured by the police, who enforce conformity to the law.  In this setting (and rather subversively, I might add...), the police represent the corrupt and powerful authority of the land, and the gang members represent an escape from/protest of the establishment
In another important scene in  The Warriors , Cochise, Rembrandt and Vermin are lured from the safety of a train at Union Station by a beautiful all-female gang called "The Lizzies."  On one hand, the Lizzies may be an allusion to the Tissaphernes interlude in Anabasis...the promise of a sumptuous "feast" of sorts that actually leads trusting warriors to their mortal doom.  
Or perhaps, the all-female nature of the gang, and the tantalizing promise of sexual seduction refers to the famous Sirens of Homer's  The Odyssey:  dangerous female creatures who lure sailors to their doom with beguiling music.  Certainly, the latter idea fits well here.  The Warriors are drawn out of the train car, and led to an island of sorts - a locked room -- with the promise of sex.  Only Rembrandt seems to sense the danger.
My favorite scene in  The Warriors  involves the heroic gang engaging battle with another dynamic gang, the Baseball Furies.  These Furies are armed with baseball bats and dressed in baseball uniforms.  Most terrifyingly, they wear war-paint: face-make-up.  You might be tempted to laugh at these characters in broad daylight...but at night -- and in perpetual, relentless motion --  these guys are pure nightmare fodder.  

Importantly, they take their name "The Furies" from another facet of ancient Greek lore.
There, the Furies or "Angry Ones" were known as beasts who exacted brutal punishment against those who had sworn a false oath.  In other words, the Furies punished...liars.  In the film, the Baseball Furies come out of the woodwork to punish the Warriors, who are believed to have broken the city-wide truce; and who (against orders) brought a weapon into that truce at  the conclave.  Of course, the Warriors are not guilty of murdering Cyrus, or of breaking their word, but the Furies don't realize that.
Again and again in  The Warriors , Hill explicitly links the journey of the Coney Island gang to mythological, events, personalities and scenarios.  The end-game is to suggest that they -- like the heroes of antiquity -- are larger-than-life, romantic figures who, one day, will be remembered by history for their great accomplishment.  
The movie's myriad comic-book touches -- specifically framing and captioning -- likewise add to this underlying feeling of myth making.  This is no small matter.  I remember reading as a kid an interview with George Lucas in which he derided the lack of "real" heroes for children in 1970s pop-culture.  He named Dirty Harry and Kojak as role-models I believe, and saw  Star Wars  as a more innocent and appropriate alternative.
The Warriors  in Hill's film represent another such alternative, even if a little unconventional.  They boast such heroic qualities as loyalty, strength and honor...and they are steadfastly trying to make a better life for themselves in the corrupt, urban blight of a city out of control. "sometime in the future."  
By depicting the gangs of New York City in this strange future landscape as colorful, dynamic and interracial (in the spirit of John Carpenter's Street Thunder in  Assault on Precinct 13  [1976]), director Hill reminds the audience that this film does not occur in depressing, kitchen-sink reality, but rather  in a heightened, fantasy reality where people -- even gang members -- can still make heroic choices, and behave in honorable fashion.  In a future where every young person seems to be in a gang (or in a network of gangs, as it were), it's not hard to believe that one gang may be more heroic than other. 
That's why  The Warriors  is not the incitement to violence that some culture warriors mistook it for way back in 1979.  It features gangs to be certain, but the landscape is purposefully classic -- mythological -- and the gangs themselves are fantasy-inspired villains, bearing almost no resemblance to real-life thugs or common gangs.  
I mean, how many gangs do you know that dress up as...mimes?  
Can You Dig It? The Magic of "The One" in The Warriors
In some highly-intriguing fashion,  The Warriors  is not merely a comic-book fantasy about heroes on a "desperate, forced march" but a subversive commentary on its post-counterculture times, on the Crisis-in-Confidence America of the 1970's.  
Here, representatives from warring gangs in peace (and unarmed, even...) attend a conclave in the Bronx.  They go to listen to the inspirational words of a messianic leader, "The One and Only" Cyrus...an African-American visionary and revolutionary.  
Except for one bad apple (David Patrick Kelly's Luther), these gang members stand and listen respectfully to Cyrus, and "nobody is wasting nobody."
Believed to possess a "whole lot of magic," Cyrus is the leader of the biggest gang in the city and he preaches a Gospel of unity...and, importantly, numbers.  "Can you count, suckers?" he asks repeatedly.  Then he provides an entirely logical argument using mathematics as his primary rhetorical tool.  
There are 60,000 gang members in blighted New York, and only 20,000 police he reminds his audience.  "One gang could rule this city," he deliberately suggests.
What Cyrus promises is a new order.  Instead of battling over "turf," over a few hundred meters of territory, these gangs could effectively control the entire city if they just cooperated.  They could control infrastructure, resources and yes, even crime rates.  The city could not move without the okay of the gangs, Cyrus observes.  Power is within reach, but the gang leaders must not be selfish; must not be distracted by the "small" things.
What  The Warriors  never makes clear, or specific, is how exactly Cyrus would utilize his new found power were he to gain control of New York City.  Would he cause a reign of terror, of lawlessness?   Doubtful, I think.
Given the comments by the Warriors (especially Cleon...) regarding Cyrus, as well as Hill's honorable, classic presentation of these fantasy outlaws, there's ample reason to suspect that Cyrus is the real deal, and that his motives are pure.  
The character thus represents political optimism...the belief that, as foot-soldiers for change, we can each help shape the future to our liking.  If only we all row in the same direction.   What's daring about this vision is that Hill seems to suggest that it isn't just the marginalized who recognize the corruption of the system...but actual criminals.  Those outlaws become, ironically, the hope for a more equitable future.
It's downright fascinating how this fantasy movie positions an outlaw gang-leader as the rightful heir to the counter-culture movement of the late 1960's, and how this so-called criminal (as well as his people) openly embraces high moral ideals, like interracial equality and unity of purpose. 

But there's an important idea here:We have the numbers, if we vote, to unseat those responsible for the status quo; responsible for -- in the era of the movie -- the city that is falling down and failing its citizenry. Unfortunately, in the tradition of inspirational real-life leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy,  The Warriors'  Cyrus is brutally gunned down before his Utopian new order can come to pass.  At his death, those formerly in unity turn on each other, and foster only deeper disunity.   Without the leadership of The One, the gangs turn on their own kind.
So, let's sum up here. A film that begins with great political optimism (the belief that a better world is possible if we work together) ends with great cynicism about the entrenched political process.  Even the media itself (a New York City radio station) is prophetically used throughout the film to "spread the lie" that the Warriors assassinated Cyrus. Fake news?
The Warriors become convenient scapegoats, pursued not just by law enforcement authorities, but by their fellow citizen gang-members and by the powerful media that holds sway over their dangerous world.  In one of the movie's many great moments, the radio DJ marshaling gang forces "in code" against the Warriors plays the song "Nowhere to Run."  It's essentially a rock-and-roll death sentence.
America itself keeps reliving this very cycle of optimism/pessimism/cynicism in our national politics. With overwhelming numbers, we vote for change.  Lately, Reagan, Clinton and Obama all owe their presidencies to "change"-oriented campaigns. 
Yet very early into these periods of "change," powerful (and rich...) voices in the mass media re-assert the power of the entrenched establishment and scare voters about the very change we so enthusiastically and resolutely voted for.  Instead of believing we can work together to make things better for everyone, we soon become mired in convenient scapegoats and ignorant beliefs (like, say, that our President is, you know, the Anti-Christ).  What's worse, sometimes the people "pulling the trigger" on the future - on men like Cyrus -- do it simply to be oppositional. When asked why he killed Cyrus, Luther answers "No reason.  I just like doing things like that."
In  The Warriors , like in life, alas, nothing seems to change fast.  Cynicism supplants optimism, and the problems of the city don't get solved.  The Warriors heroically return home, but even home isn't so great.  "This is what we fought all along to get back to?" Swan asks, upon leading his people successfully back to Coney Island.   A nearly abandoned world of graffiti, boarded-up shops and empty roads?
Is this the promised land that it could have been, in Cyrus's vision? Or simply the last place the Warriors can fight the system, their backs literally braced against the ocean?  
In its conclusion,  The Warriors  suggests a kind of desperation and yearning for change, since even the criminals -- not exactly a future-oriented crowd --  see that something must change, that revolution must come, to make things better in the City.
I want the people to know that the Warriors were there: Change Begins with One Person..or Maybe Two.
I don't want to make it sound as though  The Warriors  is a serious movie all about political systems and cycles.  

On the contrary, this is a visceral, action-packed thriller, and there's a real uplifting, inspiring side to the picture too.  
One fetching and memorable character in the film, Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenbergh) joins up with the Warriors, and returns home with them.   After circling each other suspiciously for a time, Mercy and Swan take the first steps towards trusting...and loving...each other.
In a dark train tunnel in the city, at the height of the action, Mercy talks convincingly and meaningfully about the established world; about the world she was born into and hates.  
"I see what's happening next door and down the block," she tells Swan.  "...I want something new.  This is the life I got left.  You know what I mean?"
There is such yearning expressed in those words; and such power in the (truly great) performance.  It's authentic, it's hungry...its questing.   For Mercy, happiness is still possible, but you have to keep looking for it. 

Like Cyrus, the Warriors (and by extension the audience itself) must have the vision to imagine what a better world could look like...and pursue that vision no matter the cost.  For Swan and Mercy, perhaps, finding each other is the first step towards that unseen Utopia.
This idea is reinforced at the film's end, with the surviving Warriors and Mercy standing together before the timeless, beating waves of the unceasing ocean.  The soundtrack goes to song ("In the City") and the lyrics suggest that "Somewhere out there on that horizon, out beyond the neon lights, I know there must be somethin' better..."
As these lyrics play on, the movie goes to freeze frame, with the Warriors standing heroically on the beach, a beautiful sun hanging low in the morning sky.  Our last view of them shows these heroes unbeaten, unbowed.  Still wearing their colors (holding onto their ideals, in other words) and standing at the precipice of eternity, literally, at the dawn of life beyond the soul-deadening City.
I'll be honest and completely unguarded here. This momentary conjunction of  subject matter, theme, song and film technique represents what is for me a perfect movie moment, one of those inexplicable but wholly magical grace notes that always gives you goosebumps and leaves you on an emotional high.  

In part (personally speaking), this is what the exploration of cinema is for...for finding and excavating such moments.
The whole movie comes together gloriously in this final burst of energy, and, well, you can't resist it. The Warriors have survived the day, and, because of their experiences, can imagine what a better tomorrow looks like.
Or, to put it in the lingo of the flick, the Warriors will...come out to play.  Another day.

20 Years, Top 10 Posts: #5 The Return of Captain Nemo (1978)

[This is the fifth most-read post on this blog, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025. This was originally published on April 25, 2009, and it has had twenty-two thousand (22K) views since then.]

"I am Captain Nemo. I have been asleep for 100 years aboard my submarine, Nautilus. I would probably still be left encapsulated had it not been for two intrepid agents of American Naval Intelligence...who quite by chance came upon my ship trapped by seismic underwater quakes..."-Opening voice-over narration to The Return of Captain Nemo (1978)
On March 8, 1978, CBS began airing in prime-time the latest science fiction TV series from the master of disaster Irwin Allen ( The Towering Inferno, The Swarm , etc.)

In essence, this new venture -- which represented Allen's final attempt at series work -- was an unholy hodgepodge of  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea  (1964-1968)   mixed with a little Jules Verne, and with a huge helping of  Star Wars,  which was still playing in theaters and had become nothing less than a national craze. 

The extremely short-lived series was called  The Return of Captain Nemo , though some viewers may remember it by its foreign, theatrical title,  The Amazing Captain Nemo .

Only three hour-long episodes of  The Return of Captain Nemo  ("Deadly Black Mail," "Duel in The Deep" and "Atlantis Dead Ahead") were produced and aired, and the obscure, extremely rare series has mostly been seen since in an abbreviated compilation movie format. 

This strange broadcast and distribution history has resulted in some apparent confusion about whether or not the original production was a mini-series, a made-for-TV movie or simply a series. All the evidence suggests the latter, since the three 45-minute segments feature individual titles and writer/director/guest star credits. 

The series aired in prime time, drew terrible ratings, was unceremoniously canceled, and then exhumed from its watery grave as the theatrical or TV-movie that many nostalgic folk of my generation remember.

The first episode of  The Return of Captain Nemo , "Deadly Blackmail" commences as a diabolical mad scientist, Dr. Waldo Cunningham (Burgess Meredith) blackmails Washington D.C. for the princely sum of one billion dollars from his perch in the command center of his highly-advanced submarine, the Raven.

Unless the President pays up in one week's time, Cunningham will fire a nuclear "doomsday" missile at the city. To prove his intent is serious, Cunningham destroys a nearby island with a laser called "a delta ray." 


The creature in charge of firing this weapon is a frog-faced golden robot in a silver suit and gloves. Every time the delta ray is fired (over the three episodes...), we cut back to identical footage of this strange frog robot activating the deadly device.

This introductory scene sets the breathless tone and pace for much of the brief series, proving immediately and distinctly reminiscent of George Lucas's  Star Wars . Specifically, Cunningham's right-hand man in the command center is a giant, baritone-voiced robot/man called "Tor." This villain -- when not speaking directly into a communications device that resembles a high-tech bong -- looks and sounds like the cheapest Darth Vader knock-off you can imagine, right down to the rip-off James Earl Jones voice.

Tor even boasts psychic abilities not unlike the power of the Force. When intruders steal aboard the Raven, for instance, Tor can psychically senses their presence there; just as Vader could sense the presence of Obi-Wan aboard the Death Star. Yes, I know Darth Vader isn't actually a robot and his power wasn't actually psychic, but this is the kind of distinction that escaped the creators of  The Return of Captain Nemo.


And speaking of The Death Star, Cunningham -- who essentially plays Governor Tarkin to Tor's Lord Vader -- the submarine Raven's deadly delta ray looks an awful lot like the primary weapon of that destructive imperial space station. 

Much more troubling for this fan, however, is the fact that the Raven, Cunningham's powerful submarine, is actually a just barely re-dressed  Space:1999  eagle spaceship, replete with the four rear-mounted rocket engines, the dorsal lattice-work spine, the modular body, and the front, bottle nose capsule. 

Yep, it's all there. 




Many of the underwater sequences in  The Return of Captain Nemo  are incredibly murky and feature superimposed bubbles and dust in the foreground (probably to hide how bad the miniatures look...), but I've attempted to post a few photographs of the Raven here, so you can see for yourself that Cunningham's ship is an underwater Moonbase Alpha eagle transporter.

Anyway, while Washington D.C. puzzles over the nefarious threat of Professor Waldo Cunningham, two Navy frogmen, Commander Tom Franklin (Tom Hallick) and Lt. Jim Porter (Burr De Benning) happen upon an ancient submarine trapped on an undersea reef. From an exterior port hole, they detect a figure trapped inside a smoke-filled glass tube. They board the ship and find that this figure is actually the legendary Captain Nemo...in cryogenic freeze! 


The two men immediately free Captain Nemo (Jose Ferrer) from hibernation and he steps out heroically, wearing a cape and ready for action (after exclaiming "my experiment worked!")

Turns out Nemo has been asleep for one hundred years, and it is now April 9th, 1978. The spry captain reveals to Tom and Jim that Jules Verne was no mere novelist, but actually his biographer...and that all his adventures are true. 

Furthermore, Nemo wants to resume his search for the lost continent of Atlantis immediately. Jim and Tom, meanwhile, are astounded to see that the 127-year old Nautilus is a nuclear-powered submarine, one equipped with all the latest technology...including radar scopes. Interestingly, it is not just any radar device Captain Nemo has invented (along with cryogenic suspension and nuclear-powered submarines...), but rather radar devices that are identical in shape, mode and design to ones we have now on board our state-of-the-art ships. 

Incredible coincidence, no?

Jim and Tom help free the Nautilus from its perch and convince Captain Nemo to return to their headquarters in San Francisco. There, they all report to the leader of an Elite Navy Group commanded by a man named Miller (Walter Stevens). Miller promptly recruits Nemo as a secret agent for the government, and in return the Nautilus gets a refit (though it clearly doesn't really need one...) and a full Navy crew.

At this point in the story, I must admit, I nearly lost my lunch. 

The independent, head-strong, world-weary Captain Nemo of Jules Verne is -- without much argument or debate -- transformed into a dedicated agent for the U.S. government?! After a history of decrying war? After a history of sinking warships? After exiling himself to the "liberating" world under the sea? After leaving the world of man permanently behind? 

This man of science just becomes...a tool of one particular government?

Methinks Irwin Allen (along with Franklin, Porter and Miller) never actually read any Jules Verne.

Instead, Allen must have been secretly screening recent episodes of Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman  Man from Atlantis  (1977), since the series premise (fish-out-of-water individual becomes government agent) of  The Return of Captain Nemo  shares more in common with those seventies superhero TV series than it does the literary work of Jules Verne, or any previous screen incarnations of Captain Nemo, for that matter.

Regardless, here we are presented with the most bizarre film interpretation of Captain Nemo imaginable: as genius creator of suspended animation (!), and as dashing, adventurous secret agent (!) for the United States Navy. This iteration of Nemo boasts not a whit, not a scent, not even an iota of a dark or even melancholy side. 

Instead, this Nemo is an exuberant man of action.

In fairness to Ferrer, he's quite charismatic and physically capable in this leading role, even if the writing (and the entire scenario...) is ridiculous to the point of inanity. One wonders what Ferrer might have accomplished playing the character in a more faithful incarnation of Captain Nemo's world. 

This Nemo gets to voice some flowery language ("We must stroll through this orchard without bruising the fruit," he notes metaphorically of an undersea waste dump, in the second episode), and this Nemo does seem "above" worldly concerns (like  Star Trek's  Spock), but Nemo almost never asks Tom and Jim any questions about the new world he has arrived in. 

He shows no curiosity about the 20th century or its customs, which seems odd. Wouldn't Nemo the scientist wish to see what man has accomplished? Or does he just assume he's already accomplished more?

Captain Nemo's first assignment as a government agent is to prevent Waldo Cunningham from firing his doomsday nuclear missile at Washington D.C. 

The Nautilus hunts the Raven at the bottom of the sea, and Nautilus evades destruction by delta beam when Nemo activates the Nautilus's protective electric force field. 

Deciding he needs to understand his nemesis better, Nemo boldly boards the Raven and is promptly taken hostage by Tor and Cunningham. Together, Nemo and Franklin escape custody and run down an advanced corridor that also appears to have been lifted directly from the Death Star construction blueprints. 



Captain Nemo -- now equipped with a hand-laser, destroys a bevy of Cunningham's storm-trooper-type robot goons in this very corridor, and the music actually sounds remarkably like a sped-up  Star Wars  theme. Again, I kid you not. The imitation is just...brazen.

Eventually, Nemo destroys Cunningham's nuclear missile by firing a laser beam weapon he invented(!), and the Raven slinks away under the sea to fight another day. In case you don't detect the pattern here, the writers left themselves an easy out. 

Whenever threatened with destruction, Captain Nemo has a new invention up his sleeve that saves the day. A suspended animation device, a radar, an electric force field, now a ship-mounted laser beam. Not only is Nemo a genius, I guess, he's a super duper uber genius. There's nothing this guy didn't invent a hundred years ago. Nothing.

Because  Star Wars  is ripped-off so dramatically in the opening episode of  The Return of Captain Nemo,  the series changes tactics in its second episode ("Duel in the Deep") and rips off the premise of  Space:1999  instead. Here, Waldo Cunningham (again!) threatens the safety of the world when the Raven begins ripping up (with grappling hooks...) the radioactive nuclear waste containers at the bottom of the sea, 35,000 feet down, at the Mindanao Trench near the Philippines. 

Just think the dark side of the moon, the atomic waste dumps, and the inaugural  1999  episode "Breakaway."

The Nautilus and Captain Nemo are assigned to repair the breaches in the nuclear waste dumping ground before a wave of radioactivity leaks to the surface, destroying all life there. Two nuclear physicists come aboard to help out, the beautiful Kate (Lynda Day George) and the duplicitous agent, Cook (Mel Ferrer). If you've ever seen any episode of  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , you know that Irwin Allen really loves his submarine saboteurs (secret spies show up in every other episode during the early seasons of that series...) and here the  Nautilus  is drawn off course by undersea magnets, surrounded by sea mines, and Nemo's bathosphere is also sabotaged. 

Fortunately, Kate helps Nemo save the day, defeat Cook, and joins the Nautilus crew, becoming a regular on the series. At the end of the day, Cunningham escapes again and the breach in the nuclear waste dumps is repaired by a lucky rock fall.

The third -- and mercifully -- final episode of  Return of Captain Nemo  boasts the name of Robert Bloch as one of its writers, but one has to assume he was heavily re-written, or had little to do with the show's development. 

"Atlantis Dead Ahead" also features Horst Bucholz as Atlantis's King Tibor and a very young Anthony Geary ( General Hospital's  Luke of "Luke and Laura" fame) as an Atlantean retainer named...Bork. In this adventure, Captain Nemo easily locates Atlantis (did I mention he's a super duper, uber genius?) but finds that Waldo Cunningham has already beaten him to the lost continent and enslaved the underwater people there with dastardly mind-control head-bands.

Cunningham captures Nemo and Tom Franklin and paralyzes the crew of the Nautilus (including Kate) with a "z-ray" that freezes the unlucky crew "in time," whatever the hell that means. Tom is fitted with his own individual brain-washing head-band (which makes him look like he's ready to participate in a Jane Fonda aerobics video...) and forced to torture Nemo.

Nemo himself is attached to a brain-sucking device that will reveal to Cunningham all of his one-hundred-year old secrets, including the formula for Nautilus's laser ray. Since Cunningham already has a death ray, why he needs Nemo's death ray is a bit of a mystery. 

Anyway, Nemo outsmarts Cunningham by re-playing in his mind (and broadcasting his thoughts on the view screen...), information about the Navy and U.S. government that re-activates Tom's sense of patriotic loyalty. They escape together and there's yet another shoot-out between Cunningham's robot storm troopers and our heroes in the very same Death Star corridor. Still, Cunningham proves more dangerous than ever because he posses twenty pellets of a poisonous element called "Crosar" which he plans to release in 20 world cities.

After an undersea battle between Nautilus and Raven -- in which the Raven is apparently destroyed-- Captain Nemo decides to leave the freed Atlantis behind, "untouched by our progress." King Tibor thanks him and then jumps into the water, never to be seen again.

Then, apparently with nothing left to accomplish, Nemo turns to Kate (a possible love interest...) and suggests they head back to San Francisco and have a meeting with Mr. Miller, so the boss can give the Nautilus new orders. Yep, the inventive and brilliant captain Nemo can think of nothing else to do with Nautilus, and just wants a new assignment from a government bureaucrat. 


A sad end for a sad re-vamp.

I was nine years old when  Return of Captain Nemo  first aired on CBS, and I have to confess...I loved it at that age. It had lasers, submarines, evil robots, Captain Nemo, underwater adventure...everything a young, imaginative mind could ask for. 

As an innocent, impressionable youngster I had no inkling just how nonsensical, how ridiculous, how vapid, how inane and how derivative the Allen series was. Seeing the program today, I'm amazed but just how craven it remains: how desperate and frenzied it is to latch on to the latest trend in the pop culture ( Star Wars ) and artlessly exploit it.

I've blogged many, many TV movies and series here -- and if you read my blog often, you know I endeavor to highlight the positive -- but off the top of my head, I can't recall another TV series so regularly, so routinely, dreadful.  The Return of Captain Nemo  is so bad, so confused about itself, that it's actually baffling at points.

Tor, for instance, is not only a robot sidekick with psychic powers (why? why?), but also a xenophobic bigot! For some reason, he is constantly seen railing against "aliens." 


Only problem, there are no aliens on the show. Tor keeps blaming aliens for everything...and there aren't any aliens around.

Why would Cunningham program a robot with this weirdo tic? If Tor is not a robot, what the hell is he, and why is he working for Cunningham in the first place? 

He can't be an alien and hate aliens, can he? 

It's clear the character was just thrown in to the mix, apparently at random, to appeal to the demographic that thought Darth Vader was super cool. But no real thought was ever given to Tor as a character. No thought was given to his background, his creation, his very nature.

Tor's not alone, either. The two Navy officers, Tom and Jim, continually play second fiddle to Nemo and have absolutely nothing of interest to do but issue orders from the bridge of Nautilus in Nemo's absence. In  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,  Captain Crane suffered from some of the same issues (always proving far less interesting than his boss, Admiral Nelson), but Tom and Jim are approximately a million times more uninteresting even then Crane.

And for Cunningham to act as the primary villain of all three episodes, escaping and returning, forever escaping and returning, makes the series seem repetitive and dull. And that's being polite. 

Imagine if The Master were the only villain the Doctor ever encountered, and you'll understand what I mean. Some essential sense of jeopardy is lost because you just know here that Waldo is always going to get beaten, always escape, always return, always gets beaten and always escape, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Burgess Meredith is a good actor, of course, but at times (particularly in one view screen exchange with Nemo...) you can see the veteran glancing down out of shot and then back...apparently to read the off-screen lines.

A talented writer could probably tell a Captain Nemo story with a flavor of  Star Wars  thrown in and get away with it if he or she had an airtight narrative, interesting characters and some sense of style. But  The Return of Captain Nemo  is bereft of all those ingredients. It is poorly-written and seems dashed off from the Irwin Allen assembly line in order to exploit  Star Wars  before the craze wore off.

Again, you have to feel sorry for Jose Ferrer. He's got the gusto, the presence, the intelligence, the wit, the attitude, and the physicality to make an excellent Captain Nemo, but the scripts here require him to speedily race from one crisis to another, saving the day like a campy superhero, and the result is that he never seems like a fully-developed human being.

Many genre fans of my generation have -- like me -- spent an inordinate amount of time seeking out  The Return of Captain Nemo.  It's an item of nostalgic remembrance, something that appeared on a major network (and remember, in those days of the disco decade there were only three networks...) and then disappeared, never to be heard from again. 

The pull of such a production is tantalizing. Did I really see that? Did it really exist? Have I lost my mind? Was I dreaming? Was it any good? 

Indeed, this is the very journey I undertook.

Unfortunately, in the case of  The Return of Captain Nemo,  this is but a dismal voyage to the bottom of the barrel. 

Go ahead and watch it if you dare, but sometimes old memories -- like Captain Nemo himself -- are best left in stasis. 

I'll always cherish my memory of watching (and loving) the show as a nine year old kid, but I dare not re-visit this series again as an adult. Not trying to be mean here. Believe me, I'm being as charitable as possible. The great Captain Nemo deserves so much better than this travesty.

40 Years Ago: Godzilla 1985

Godzilla: 1985 , or  Return of Godzilla  (1985) is the first and only Godzilla movie I was fortunate enough to see theatrically in my youth.  (I saw Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster in a drive-in theater, but I was so young, I don't really remember the experience).

Godzilla: 1985 showed at the Center Theater in Bloomfield, New Jersey, close to my home in Glen Ridge, and my best friend Bob and I went to see it together.  I don’t believe I liked the film very much at the time. It seemed cheap and overly-sentimental.

All I knew was that I really liked Godzilla himself. 

Always did.

I can write definitively -- after a re-watch and four decades later -- that I admire  Godzilla: 1985  and now consider it to be one of the most underrated films in the entire  Godzilla  canon. Many critics and audiences at the time were only able to view the film in terms of its special effects, which in America were considered primitive.  

Like my teenage self, those critics missed the forest for the trees.

Godzilla: 1985  kicks off the Heisei period of Godzilla film history, a deliberate un-writing all Godzilla movies post-1954.  And while I don’t think it was necessary to reboot the franchise quite so aggressively, I certainly understand the desire to get back to basics, or to tweak beloved material so it remains current, and vital.

In terms of metaphor,  Godzilla: 1985  works very effectively indeed because it was produced at a time that might be considered a corollary for the 1950s, the era that shaped  King of Monsters . 

In the eighties, the Cold War was burning hot following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, and President Reagan was a right-wing hawk who called the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” and joked on an open mic about “bombing” Russia in five minutes.  

These points are important because the fears that had given rise to  Godzilla  in the first place were so blatantly rearing their heads again as the Cold War grew hot. Other genre films from this era including  The Day After  (1983),  Dreamscape  (1984),  Testament  (1984) and  Threads  (1984), and they all obsessed on nuclear war and the environmental fall-out that would follow.

Accordingly, Godzilla returns in  Godzilla: 1985  to threaten Japan at this important historical juncture, when nuclear tensions were as high as they had been since the early 1960's and the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

A key character in the film is Japan’s Prime Minister, a man who must balance the aggression/agendas of the United States and the U.S.S.R. as they pertain to Japan and its involvement in its own defense.  He must decide if he should stand by a principle -- no nuclear weapons to be used on Japanese soil, ever -- or kowtow to the demands of international partners.
I have read that some fans consider  Godzilla: 1985  too “political” an entry in the series because of this plot l, but I believe the  Godzilla  films always  work best when they play off of specific real life fears or dreads, and react meaningfully to the dangers of their era.   Godzilla: 1985  certainly qualifies on that front.

Boasting surprisingly artful compositions and a screenplay that explicitly understands why Godzilla is “tragic” and “innocent,” but not evil,  Godzilla: 1985  is actually a smart, well-crafted entry in the franchise.

Raymond Burr returns to his role of Steve Martin from the Americanized film,  Godzilla: King of Monsters , and his character notes trenchantly here that “when mankind falls into conflict with nature, monsters are born.”  

Those portentous words not only define the spirit and purpose of the kaiju films in general, they comment on the 1980s Cold War period, a period that threatened to very quickly spiral out of control if tempers were not controlled.  

“One lizard is down for the count.”

The great monster Godzilla, not seen in Japan for thirty years, is learned to be near the beleaguered country once more.  Godzilla attacks a fishing boat, Yahata Maru, and also a Russian submarine, precipitating a nuclear stand-off between Cold War enemies East and West.

Armed with evidence that Godzilla is responsible for the sunken submarine, the Japanese Prime Minister, Seiki Mitamura (Keiju Kobayashi) announces the truth to the world.  Before long, both the Americans and the Russians are eager to destroy Godzilla using nuclear weapons, but Prime Minister Mitamura is unequivocal. There will be no nuclear weapons used on Japanese soil, no matter Godzilla’s destruction.

After absorbing the energy from a nuclear reactor, Godzilla lands in Tokyo Bay, and is confronted by the new military weapon, Super X. The plane’s cadmium missiles knock Godzilla out, but an accidental detonation high in the atmosphere of a Russian nuke soon brings him back to life.

While American Steve Martin (Raymond Burr), the “only American to survive” the disaster of 1954 consults with the American military, a scientist in Japan, Dr. Hayashida (Yasuke Natsuki) realizes that Godzilla -- whose brain is apparently like that of a bird -- responds to bird calls.  

Hayashida plans to lead Godzilla to the lip of a volcano, where controlled explosions will destroy the ground beneath him, and send the monster careening into the magma below…

“Sayonara, sucker…”

In  Godzilla: 1985,  Godzilla destroys a Russian nuclear submarine, and tensions between Cold War enemies escalate.  The Japanese Prime Minister, Mitamura, quickly makes a statement affirming Godzilla’s responsibility in the matter.  

After doing this -- to defuse nuclear war -- the prime minister, however, must deal with two nations that want him to act in a specific way.  Specifically, the matter of using nuclear weapons on Japanese soil is raised, and the prime minister expressly forbids it.

Impressively,  Godzilla: 1985  sets up a nice visual framework here, suggesting the nature of the pressure the prime minister faces.  

In two separate compositions, we see the fluttering flags of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. on diplomatic cars as they speed their representatives to a diplomatic conference. The impression is that these two states are rushing to an answer, but not really considering the problem. Nationalism is the overriding concern, as represented by the flags, and the issue is accelerating towards a boiling point, as represented by the fluttering, wavy flags.

A few minutes later, Prime Minister Mitamura is lobbied by both an American and Russian representative at the conference.  The very shots here reveal the kind of pressure he faces.  His face is seen in the corner of the frame, edged-out, virtually, as the representative in question makes his point, literally taking center stage. Then we see the same shot, but with the other nationalist.

Taken together, these two compositions suggest that the Japanese official is actually caught between a rock and a hard place. If he doesn’t satisfy both suitors, as it were, nuclear war could be the terrifying outcome.

Godzilla: 1985  also suggests that, born of nuclear or atomic power, Godzilla craves it as a form of nourishment or energy.  He absorbs a Japanese nuclear reactor and goes on his merry way, but the metaphorical implication is that once nuclear power is used, the door on its use can’t be easily closed.

Godzilla isn’t a one time “event.”  

Instead, he constantly craves the nourishment that reactors provide, and we can parse that idea to mean that once we incorporate nuclear energy into our regular usage patterns, it is impossible to remove it easily.  
Godzilla -- and the civilized world – is “addicted” to the power that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy provide.  And nuclear energy is, by its mere nature, dangerous.

The nuclear tensions between the Russians and Americans actually strengthen Godzilla, as we see in the film. A detonation over Tokyo -- caused by the Soviets -- provides the energy the goliath needs to overcome the cadmium missiles of Japan’s flying weapon, the Super X.  

I also admire the subplot in  Godzilla: 1985 , largely brought forward in the American version by Raymond Burr’s character, Martin.  It states, essentially, that to conquer Godzilla, one must not use weapons of war.  

Instead, one must seek to understand his nature.  “He’s looking for something…searching,” Martin tells the military.  “If we can find out what it is before too late…”

That line may sound silly in the cold light of day, but it’s an important expression about understanding – and listening -- to nature.

Although I am a big fan of the colorful and mostly kid-friendly  Godzilla  movies of the 1970's, I also admire how  Godzilla: 1985  attempts to maintain the menace and mystery of Godzilla.  

Almost every scene involving the big green lizard is set at night, in darkness. Somehow, under an impenetrable, ebony sky, Godzilla looks all the more real, and terrifying. His landing in Tokyo Bay is a great set-piece, and the miniature work of his destructive stomp through the city is a great improvement over similar scenes in the 1970s. 

I also dig the moment at the reactor when a guard spots Godzilla, and the camera pans up and up and up and up, to his roaring mouth. This moment does a fine job of suggesting Godzilla’s sheer size.

Similarly, there are more moments here than in previous  Godzilla  films wherein the camera is tilted up, gazing at the beast from a low angle, thus demonstrating his massive scale.  In many cases, Godzilla really looks “huge” and not just like a man on a suit, stomping through a miniature sound-stage.  The right angle and the right point of view matter.
Finally,  Godzilla: 1985  does a terrific job of walking the line about the monster’s contradictions.  Godzilla is a terror, to be certain, and yet he is also in Martin’s words “strangely innocent and tragic.”  

This description is a knowing and sympathetic way of acknowledging that Godzilla is both a monster, and, in a weird way, a beloved character to the audience. My biggest complaint about the American  Godzilla  (1998) is that it never decides how the audience should feel about the monster. Should we love him or hate him?
Godzilla: 1985  makes a choice in that regard, and a good one. It reminds us that Godzilla is a terrible natural threat -- a hurricane or a volcano with thunderous thighs, essentially -- but that we can still feel sorry for him as a living being out of his time, and out of his place. We can have empathy or him, because we made him what he is…

40 Years Ago: My Science Project (1985)

If a movie-goer desires to seek out a perfect time capsule of the year 1985, he or she should be immediately directed to Jonathan R. Betuel’s  My Science Project  (1985), a science fiction film that very strongly reflects the age in which it was made...right down to a scene of high school typing class and electric typewriters.

Described broadly,  My Science Project  is a “teens meet science fiction” action-adventure from the same year that gave audiences  Weird Science  (1985) and  Real Genius  (1985). All these films combine raucous teen humor and juvenile characters with sf imagery and concepts.

My Science Project  is also, specifically, a teenager time travel adventure that landed smack-dab in the age of  Back to the Future  (1985) and  Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure  (1988). 
Again, young characters are suddenly faced with scenarios out of H.G. Wells, and must contend not only with denizens of other times, but, often, temporal paradoxes as well. At the same time, they are concerned about flunking their classes.

Beyond these touches,  My Science Project  is packed, wall-to-wall, frame-by-frame with self-reflexive jokes about pop culture, evidencing a protean trend that would fully come into its own in the 1990s, particularly in the horror genre. 
In the mid-to-late eighties,  however, some young filmmakers who had grown up with television and film as constant background noise began utilizing allusions to those media as “touch stones” for an aging generation.  My Science Project  is at the tip of that spear.

Finally,  My Science Project  even attempts -- in the Reagan Era, no less -- to grapple with the divisive legacy of the 1960s and, among other issues, the Vietnam War and the anti-war counter-culture.  
Again, this was precisely where the culture soon headed in films such as  Platoon  (1986) and  Casualties of War  (1989).

With all this happening during its 95 minute confines,  My Science Project  should be nothing less than wall-to-wall excitement and invention. And though it’s true that the film’s pace is generally frenetic,  My Science Project  -- a box office bomb -- never fully manages to fully succeed on its own creative terms.
The movie is loud, busy, and buoyed by occasionally effective imagery (especially for the 1980s), but no single scene or set-piece really stands out, and none of the characters are entirely memorable, either.  Some scenes really fly, and other simply never take off.

But succeed or fail, this cult Betuel film will make you nostalgic for 1985.


“Do something special…do something original…”

At Kit Carson High School, grease monkey Michael Harlan (John Stockwell) meets with an ultimatum from his science teacher, Bob Roberts (Dennis Hopper): If he doesn’t submit an amazing final science project, he will fail the class.

While out on a pseudo-date with nerdy school reporter Ellie (Danielle Von Zerneck), Michael visits a Department of Defense Disposal Depot. 
There, in a subterranean storage facility, he discovers a strange unearthly "gizmo," an engine, or energy generator. Unbeknownst to Harlan, the instrument hails from an alien flying saucer that President Eisenhower ordered destroyed in 1957.

Michael, his wise-cracking friend, Vince (Fisher Stevens) and Ellie return to the high school with the device, which promptly absorbs energy from any technology nearby, including flashlights and car batteries.  Mr. Roberts is fascinated by the device and hooks it up to a power outlet in his science lab, an act which gives the extra-terrestrial machine access to almost infinite power.

The machine creates a vortex or warp over the school and sucks Mr. Roberts inside of it. Then, epochs from the past appear inside the high school itself.  
Michael and his friends soon encounter Neanderthals, Roman gladiators, the Viet Cong, and even a hungry T-Rex (in the school gym) in their efforts to shut down the alien generator.

“My ears are ringing like The Gong Show.”

Perhaps the biggest reason that  My Science Project  remains largely obscure today involves the characters.  

Not one of them is particularly memorable, or played with a lot of color. Fisher Steven’s quipping Vincent is the obvious candidate for break-out status here, but his character quickly wears out his welcome with a constant stream of pop-culture allusions and wise cracks. He seems so determined to reference TV shows and movies that it is not clear he is ever a real "person."

John Stockwell -- a fine actor (and now, director…) in films such as  Christine  (1983) and  Top Gun  (1986) -- leads the cast ably, and does a good job, but the script does him no favors. The scenes between Michael and his father and new step-mother go nowhere and have no emotional pay-off. They may be important thematically (as we'll see later in this review) but they are given no punctuation.
Worse, the “romantic” angle with Von Zerneck is never compelling or convincing (see Joe Dante’s  Explorers  [1985] for an innocent teen-romance that seems a bit more natural).

Additionally, the frenetic nature of the story requires the actors to run back and forth a lot, attempting to deal with surprises around every high school corridor. This approach leaves little time for character-based humor, or even a sense of a story arc. The overall feeling is of racing from one scene to the next, so that none carries any more weight than another.
The film also appears to have been heavily tampered with in the editing stage. The great Richard Masur is introduced as a Texas detective with great fanfare, and then has almost zero impact on the narrative.  

Visually, the film is hampered -- and made to look ugly at times -- by the near constant use of fog machines and neon strobes. 

Still, some moments are genuinely impressive in terms of imagery. The visual effects involving the vortex (and the dance of energy around Hopper’s character…) are really solid, and hold up nicely today. 
And for a pre-CGI age film, the sequence with the T-Rex in the gymnasium is particularly well-rendered.  In fact, it is well-rendered enough that it should be the highlight of the whole movie, except for the fact that the teenagers gun it down with Vietnam Era army rifles.  
Sure, the dinosaur is dangerous, but the scene has no sense of awe, no sense of majesty, and doesn’t build to anything beyond a quick “high.”

The explicit fun of teen movies like  Explorers  or  Back to the Future  is their comical interludes with danger, but somehow the presence of grenades and machine guns here (used against -- let’s face it -- a confused dinosaur) isn’t fun in the slightest.  
A better outcome would have been to see the T-Rex somehow trapped in the gym instead of gunned down.  All sense of fun disappears, after all, when viewers are left to gape at a dinosaur's blown-up chest cavity for a sustained length of time.

This is a prime occasion when the movie needs a light touch, but settles for flashy pyrotechnics.

Certainly,  My Science Project  is ahead of its time in terms of its post-modern or meta-approach to its story. 
Vince is a constant font of pop-culture information, referencing  Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, The Gong Show, The Twilight Zone  and even  McCloud.  
It’s possible that these allusions were meant to welcome viewers and let them know that the movie shares their language and cultural history.  But the references don’t amount to much overall, except perhaps for the clip of the Morlocks from  The Time Machine  (1960).  
That (great) film spearheaded time travel adventures in the cinema, and warned of the downfall of man in the distant future. Here, the preoccupied teenage kids learn about an impending (neon) apocalypse, replete with mutants, and yet can’t be bothered to think about it, or try to stop it, even.  
The downfall of man has begun in earnest, perhaps.

My Science Project’s  negotiation of 1960s issues is worthy of examination too. Good laughs are drawn from Hopper’s ‘hippie’ teacher who drives off, at one point, to “an anti-war alumni meeting.”  
He goes on the greatest trip of all, thanks to the alien machine, reliving his days at Woodstock, and so forth.  Hopper is a perfect casting choice, given his participation in  Easy Rider  (1969), not to mention  The Last Movie  (1971)
But implicit in these Hopper-based scenes is the sense of closure: the professor is an old guy living, resolutely, in the past, looking to relive past glories.  He is not a person of the present, or dealing with present concerns. The conflicts of the sixties are behind us,  My Science Project  suggests.
My Science Project  puts the Vietnam Era -- and the deep-seated psychological fear it spawned of America military adventurism overseas -- behind us by thoughtlessly arming its citizen protagonists, and having them gun-battle their way through hordes of future mutants, as well as the aforementioned T-Rex. 
The under-the-surface message seems to be that it is okay for America to love guns and militarism again; that the diffidence that came with the Vietnam Era is gone in the Age of Reagan.  We all know how well this so-called "New Patriotism" eventually turned out (see: The Iraq War).

Writing at Tor.com in 2010, critic Jacob Steingroot offers audiences another intriguing (and, I think, valid) way of reading this Betuel film. 
He suggests that Harlan’s unsettled life (dealing with a break-up and a changing situation on the domestic front), is paralleled by the energy generator’s time/hopping alterations of reality.

Steingroot writes:

“Betuel depicts the nebulous feeling of being a teen. Things that seem concrete one day change dramatically the next. Harlan’s relationship with his girlfriend ends for reasons he can’t understand. He comes home to find that his single dad has remarried and their house has been refurnished with pink pillows and drapery. Vince, because of his parents’ divorce, is forced to leave Brooklyn for New Mexico....The confusing uncertainty of being a teen, the feeling that the world is out of control is echoed and expanded through the notion of the space/time warp.”

I appreciate Steingroot’s explanation of the film's leitmotif or modus operandi, here, and feel that it holds up well. Space/time does seem to operate in strange ways when you’re a teenager.  Life either moves too fast, or too slow, right?  Friendships change, perceptions change, and even bodies change, day-to-day.  Steingroot's thesis makes a re-watch of  My Science Project  much richer and much more thought-provoking.
Hailing from the age that brought us  Back to the Future, Real Genius , and Explorers, to name just a few,  My Science Project  doesn’t earn an automatic “A,” perhaps, despite such a  worthwhile (and thoughtful) attempt to fully rehabilitate the picture.
Why? Well, for much of its running time,  My Science Project  lacks the visual and narrative classicism of a Spielberg or Dante film, missing that mark by quite a margin. 
But perhaps the movie deserves some extra credit all these years later for its self-reflexive approach to culture, and its (not-always-successful) attempt to put the sixties squarely in Harlan’s rear-view mirror. 
And if we accept the time warp as a metaphor for turbulent adolescence, perhaps there’s even more to like and appreciate in  My Science Project  than meets the eye.

40 Years Ago: Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985)

This forty year old comedy remains a deft and amusing collaboration between Tim Burton and the late Paul Reubens, a comedian who, in the early 1980s, created the character of Pee Wee Herman and saw that persona rise to national fame.  

If you're unfamiliar with Pee Wee Herman, he's essentially a big-hearted but emotionally-stunted man-child dressed in a suit. Pee Wee is both charmingly innocent in nature and yet diabolically aggressive when he doesn't get his way.  

In other words, Pee Wee Herman is the Peter Pan Syndrome personified, or -- as Ralph Emerson described the mercurial child -- a "curly, dimpled lunatic."    
Although the Pee Wee Herman persona was originally aimed at adult audiences, the character increasingly became popular with children over the years, eventually starring in an Award-winning Saturday morning TV series,  Pee Wee's Playhouse.    
Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure  retains the character's spiky edges, and in doing so acknowledges the difficulties of the adult world at the same time that it reveals Pee Wee's essentially good -- with some lapses -- childish nature.
To one extent or another, all of Tim Burton's films involve quirky misfits or oddballs, and perhaps there is no protagonist in the canon more quirky, or more oddball than Reuben's Pee Wee Herman. 
He's desperately afraid of girls, holds down no job, and focuses all of his obsessive  love upon a single, perfect object or toy: his bicycle. Pee Wee thrives in a bubble of self-indulgent childhood and play, and when he looks outside that bubble, gazes enviously at those who may appear "cooler" than he does.

In the course of  Pee Wee's Big Adventure , Pee Wee meets hostility from the "real" (adult) world in the form of an escaped criminal, a biker gang, the jealous boyfriend of an acquaintance, and not least of all, Francis Buxton.  Francis is a rich, indulged man-child, a kind of dark reflection of Pee Wee.  In all cases, except for Francis -- who is truly incorrigible and thus irredeemable -- Pee Wee works his child's magic upon his enemies, transforming them into friends and supporters.

The inference is obvious: unless you're a monster (like Francis...) you just can't hate Pee Wee for long. Whatever his failings in terms of fitting in, Pee Wee is indomitable, and people around him pick-up on that admirable quality.
So what audiences get here is, basically, a very funny commentary on childhood; or perhaps upon society's view of children.  What makes the film so unrelentingly funny, however is that Pee Wee is most definitely not all sunshine and roses, and, certainly, neither are kids in real life.  Like any child, Pee Wee can be abundantly vindictive, capricious, out-of-control, and even ego maniacal.  The film often attains the pinnacle of silliness when Pee Wee -- in pursuit of his perfect bike -- must call upon his juvenile "id" to attain his goal.
It has been widely suggested by critics that Pee Wee Herman is an acquired taste, or that one's "mileage" for the character may vary. Yet to some extent,  Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure  thrives even beyond one's appreciation or approval for the central character because of the wild, visual flights of fancy evident here. Even if Pee Wee fails to impress as a character or a comedic concept, his dazzling fantasy world of Rube Goldberg-esque inventions and colorful, strange misfits proves eminently memorable.  With  Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure,  you get just not Pee Wee himself to enjoy, but access to Pee Wee's world.  In the final analysis, it's a pretty wild and imaginative place to visit.
Specifically, Burton executes a number of  clever visual jokes that reveal the essence of the unusual lead character and his world view.  In other words, Burton finds way to express with the camera the inner workings of Pee Wee's childish but ultimately admirable psyche.  To some degree, this practice makes the inscrutable, juvenile Pee Wee more sympathetic and heroic.  

And, of course, that's the point.
"Life can be so unfair."


Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) sets out on one lovely day to pick up a new horn for his beloved bike at Chuck's Bike-o-rama.  

Unfortunately, Herman's nasty nemesis, Francis Buxton (Mark Holton) hires someone to steal his  bike.  But when Herman goes on the radio to detail his campaign to get the stolen bike back, Buxton re-hires his underling to get rid of it so he won't get into trouble with his Dad.

After visiting a fortune teller, Herman learns that the missing bike may be "in the basement of the Alamo," and sets off for Texas.  Along the way, he meets an escaped criminal, a waitress who longs to see Paris, a ghost named "Large Marge," a hobo on a train and even a biker gang.  Through it all, Pee Wee admirably keeps his focus on his bike...and makes friends in the process.

Finally, when he learns that a famous child star, Kevin Morton (Jason Hervey) has possession of the bicycle, Pee Wee goes to Hollywood and sneaks onto the Warner Bros. lot to get it back.  Pee Wee recovers his stolen treasure, and after a lengthy chase, becomes a star in his own right.  

As it turns out, a studio exec at Warners think that Pee Wee's big adventure would make a hell of a movie, especially if it starred James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild...

"Everyone has a big "but"..."


Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure  works so well as a comedy because Tim Burton unabashedly forgoes any sense of realism, and instead allows the audience to feel (Heaven forbid...) what it would be like to live in Pee Wee's world for ninety minutes.

For instance, as Pee Wee learns of the criminal and shocking theft of his bike, the camera goes cockeyed, Danny Elfman's score turns portentous, and we get extreme close-ups of a sinister-appearing robot Clown.  The bike had been chained to that clown, but now the clown seems to mock Pee Wee with it's very presence.  It's an evil Leviathan, passing judgment; mocking him.

In almost the very next scene, Pee Wee grows despondent over his loss of the bike, and once again, we seem to peek directly into his fevered brain.  Suddenly, everybody (even a mime...) rides by on wheels, implicitly mocking Pee Wee's lack of conveyance.  This is a particularly funny scene, as Pee Wee can't look anywhere without being reminded of the amazing treasure he has lost.  And we absolutely know that bike is amazing, because Pee Wee is practically blinded by the bike's radiance on the first occasion it is depicted in the film.

Soon, Pee Wee's unhappiness turns him into something of a monster, a fact we see expressed visually during a sequence set in a rain-swept alley.  Pee Wee enters the scene first as a shadow, as a giant, hunched over monster.  This image reveals how (an unfair) loss has informed the character's view of the world.  Again and again, Burton's exaggerated use of mise-en-scene tells us something critical about the emotional context of Pee Wee's world and his thoughts.


The film's first scene, in fact, is a pretty terrific reflection of Pee Wee's universe and psyche.  It's a dream sequence in which Pee Wee envisions himself racing in the tour de France.  

As the movie and scene commence, Pee Wee -- on his beloved bike -- passes the other racers effortlessly.  At first, he does so with that trademark little giggle of his.  Then, as he increases speed and vanquishes all of his opponents, the giggle turns to a cackle of ego maniacal glee.  There's something driving and a little out-of-control about this desire to win the race, to be the best, and the escalating insanity of Pee Wee's laughter reveals that.

He wins the race, but as Pee Wee is about to be crowned victorious, his alarm clock rings, exposing the scene as a dream. Instead of ending abruptly, however, the dream continues to unfold, and the gathered attendees just sort of wander away and disperse, a moment which reveals how "deflating" an awakening from fantasy can be.  And indeed, Pee Wee's whole world is fantasy.  When he awakens from it -- as is the case with the bike theft -- it's devastating to him.  Without making  Pee Wee's Big Adventure  sound like deep social commentary, there's clearly something here about a child's first experience countenancing the world. Witness Pee Wee's disappointment upon learning that the Alamo doesn't actually have a basement.  Why don't they tell kids thing like that, he practically asks.

As I wrote above,  Pee Wee's Big Adventure  seems to work at its apex of humor when the character's dark side is allowed free rein.  Pee Wee tackles Francis in a pool, and nearly drowns the cad, for instance.  At another point, Pee Wee is debauched when other bicycle riders in the park perform riding tricks, and he can't match them. Suddenly, he sets about to do so.  And when he fails rather clumsily, he nonetheless triumphantly opines "I meant to do that."

The idea here is of a child's id unloosed in a man's body and it is the very thing that makes  Pee Wee's Big Adventure  so funny.  We all possess an inner child making demands on us, and yet we can't act on those demands or impulses if we wish to be taken seriously.  When confronted with a name-calling bully, we can't just say "I know you are, but what am I?"  No, we must act like adults, even when we are challenged and insulted. The funny thing about Pee Wee Herman is that he possesses no such restraints.  Perhaps, Pee Wee's persona, in some way, is based on wish-fulfilment.


Sometimes, the childish id we carry inside is just about being recognized; about being the center of attention.  With that idea in mind, witness the wondrous and very funny moment in which Pee Wee -- playing a hotel clerk in a movie of his life -- almost unconsciously inches his way to center screen, upstaging "stars" James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild.

Pee Wee is not making this attention-grabbing move out of malice.  Rather it's as if the gravity of his own unquenchable ego pulls him towards the camera, demanding he take center stage.  Aren't we all like that, some days?  

Perhaps most of all,  Pee Wee's Big Adventure  is a delight because of the whimsical world Burton creates for Pee Wee to inhabit.  Hollywood is littered with instances of successful comedians trying to make a go of it in the movie business and failing (think Tom Green, or Andrew Dice Clay).   In such instances, the comedians transplanted themselves to the silver screen, but did not provide a compelling world to alongside their popular "characters."  

In the case of the late, great Paul Reubens, the comedian was clever to collaborate with Burton, a man who could build a cinematic world from the ground up, and more that, assure that it would work in conjunction with Pee Wee's essential nature.  
It's pretty clear Tim Burton "gets" Pee Wee, or at least understands the concept of being different from the rest of the world.  That act of sympathy -- as well as a sense of daring visual imagination -- underlines all of  Pee Wee's Big Adventure  and it is also the quality, that, in some circles, earn this movie the descriptor of "classic."