UK tv series (1975-1977). A Gerry Anderson Production for ITC. Created Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Producers Sylvia Anderson (season 1), Fred Freiberger (season 2). Executive producer Gerry Anderson. Story consultant Christopher Penfold. Special effects Brian Johnson. Two seasons, 48 50-minute episodes in all. Colour.
This UK-made series, created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson – who had previously produced a number of television series (Stingray, Thunderbirds and others) with puppets and UFO and the film Doppelganger (1969) with real actors – was obviously inspired in part by the success of Star Trek. The format has a group of people – live actors again – travelling through the Galaxy, visiting various planets and encountering strange lifeforms; but, where the Star Trek characters travelled on a spaceship, the Space: 1999 personnel do their interplanetary wandering on Earth's runaway Moon – an unwieldy gimmick that must have caused many frustrations to the writers. Despite good special effects and sometimes imaginative sets the series, with its stereotyped characters and humourless scripts, was remarkably wooden, eliciting predictable jokes about puppets. The other major flaw was a scandalous disregard for basic science (> Scientific Errors): Stars are confused with Asteroids, the Moon's progress through space follows no physical laws, and Parsecs are assumed to be a unit of velocity. The series was cancelled in 1977, though one episode was delayed until 1978. The regular cast included Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse (season 1), Nick Tate, Catherine Schell (season 2), Tony Anholt (season 2), Zienia Merton. Directors included Ray Austin, Lee H Katzin, Charles Crichton, David Tomblin, Val Guest, Tom Clegg. Writers included Christopher Penfold, Johnny Byrne, Terence Feely, Donald James and Charles Woodgrove (pseudonym of Freiberger). The series did better in the USA than in the UK, perhaps because of lower expectations, perhaps because of the deliberately international cast.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, eight episodes were cobbled together in pairs and recycled by ITC in the guise of four made-for-tv movies; the words "Space: 1999" nowhere appeared in their titles. We have been unable to trace any theatrical release. The movies are: Alien Attack (1976) directed by Charles Crichton and Lee H Katzin; Destination Moonbase-Alpha (1978), directed by Tom Clegg (based on a two-episode story, "The Bringers of Wonder", by Terence Feely); Cosmic Princess (1982), directed by Charles Crichton and Peter Medak; and Journey through the Black Sun (1982), directed by Ray Austin and Lee H Katzin (based on the episodes "Collision Course" by Anthony Terpiloff and "The Black Sun" by David Weir).
A book about the series is The Making of Space 1999: A Gerry Anderson Production (1976) by Tim Heald. A number of novelizations appeared. Brian N Ball wrote The Space Guardians * (1975). Michael Butterworth wrote Planets of Peril * (1977), Mind-Breaks of Space * (1977) with Jeff Jones, The Space-Jackers * (1977), The Psychomorph * (1977), The Time Fighters * (1977) and The Edge of the Infinite * (1977). John Rankine (Douglas R Mason) wrote Moon Odyssey * (1975), Lunar Attack * (1975), Astral Quest * (1975), Android Planet * (1976) and Phoenix of Megaron * (1976). E C Tubb wrote Breakaway * (1975), Collision Course * (1975), Alien Seed * (1976), Rogue Planet * (1976), Earthfall * (1977) and Earthbound * (2003). [JB/PN/DRL]
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