Retro Science Fiction At Its Best

Lately I have been obsessed with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. One of the few television shows to spawn a radio show (as opposed to the other way around), the adventures of Tom Corbett ran on TV for 5 years and spent time on every national network. Unfortunately, few of the TV episodes seem to exist any more. The radio series, which featured the same cast as the television show, ran twice a week for six months in 1952. Luckily, about 40 of the radio episodes still exist and can downloaded for free on the Internet. Tom Corbett’s adventures also spread to newspaper comic strips, comic books and eight novels.

Teaming up with classmates Roger Manning and Astro to crew the Space Academy rocket ship Polaris under the command of instructor Captain Strong, the boys blast through the solar system training to become members of the Solar Guard. Their adventures are not hard edged science fiction; they are more akin to the Saturday morning matinee science fiction of the 1950s such as Destination Moon or Crash Of Moons (which is actually edited from another early science fiction TV show, Rocky Jones, Space Ranger).

If you want to jump into the rocket powered adventures of Tom Corbett, YouTube is a great place to find the few surviving television episodes. The radio show, sponsored by Kellogg’s cereals (such as Pep, the “build up wheat cereal” which also sponsored the radio adventures of Superman), can be found on old time radio show sites and on Archive.org. Digital copies of the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet novels can be found (for free) on Amazon, Archive.org and other sites carrying Project Gutenberg public domain downloads. I’ve reviewed the first two books, Stand By For Mars and Danger In Deep Space, over on Goodreads (find those here and here).