I was going to comment when I saw your post. I just finished research to be sure since it's been over 40 years and confirmed my memory of no humanoid Cylon on galactica. I'm getting old
Blake's 7 was one of those shows that PBS would show at night with Doctor Who, and so it was one of the few things my mom would let me stay up and watch. Great stuff.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, KQED in San Francisco would show Doctor Who late at night. KTEH in San Jose would show Red Dwarf, Blake's 7, UFO, The Prisoner, The Invaders, Saphire and Steel and many others as well as British comedy. Great memories.
@@Alfetta158 one of my greatest feats was getting my friends to all watch Red Dwarf when our PBS station started showing it in the early 90s. My one friend could do a spot on impression of The Cat. Great times.
Yeah, first noticed it when they were mixing up details between the original BSG series and the reboot (and it's been a long time since I'd seen the series before that)...
The original Battlestar Galactic is hardly forgotten, it's still got a very strong fanbase, spawned a reboot that ran for six seasons, as well as rumors of more movies at some point in future and numerous novels and comics. For a one season 1970's show it's had incredible staying power.
Land of the Lost should have been on this list. That show totally fascinated me as a child and for a low budget show meant for children filmed in the mid 1970s it was awesome.
@@joemachine4714 As a child I was totally fascinated by the "matrix tables" and the pylons were bigger on the inside than the outside which was also kind of trippy.
Gravity defying hairstyles...Gravity defying hairstyles...Gravity defying hairstyles...Gravity defying hairstyles... in every scene, ok, almost every scene
Buck Rogers deserves honorary mention even if the final episode was filmed in 1981. I thought it was ahead of its time in the sense that the hero was both a larger than life combination of super hero and astronaut having all kinds of wild swashbuckling adventures but at the end of the day he was a very sad and very lonely man who never fully overcame his trauma. That duality was interesting.
@@kpowers Well its pretty iffy because the admittedly awful continuation of Battlestar Galactica called GALACTICA 1980 was filmed in 1980 ergo that show should possibly have been "disqualified".
I can see it both ways, it may have been 1980(81) BUT it definitely had that 70s feel and Star Wars influence so would comfortable fit right in. Like several mentioned I always felt that Buck Rogers could have been so much better if it had not been geared to an audience of 12-year-old boys, same as the original BSG. IF the writers had been willing to be a little more dark and adult with the plot lines.....Buck trying to find a reason to carry on when everything he knew and loved is gone, earth/humanity trying to find its place in the galaxy while still trying to recover from near extinction......yes this series could have been so much better with just a little different direction. IMHO.
@@twilightgamedesigns4887 Not sure if I agree with you about it being aimed for an audience of 12-year-old boys. Lost in Space was for sure aimed at young kids. My parents both big Star Trek fans love the show. There were some things not really aimed for children such as the sexual innuendos throughout the series. Darker??? Well that Space Vampire episode still scares me till today. The episode "The Dorian Secret" was pretty dark for the times. Yeah sure maybe if they showed more of the mutant humans they showed briefly in the movie/pilot when Buck went exploring in down town Chicago would have been interesting. Overall I think it was presented well for the times. For season 1 It was a Sci-Fi show with having Buck as an agent so at times it had that James Bond/Mission Impossible feel to it. Season 2 was was more of a Sci-Fi show with it's Star Trek exploring the Galaxy vibe to it. Some may not like season 2 but I did.
'Return to the Planet of the apes' and the astronauts you mentioned were the cartoon series. The clips you use are from the live action series 'Planet of the Apes' with the astronauts Verdon and Burke. Regarding 'The Tomorrow People' this was actually a British ITV children's program that went out about 5:00PM. Another children's ITV program which is actually better than TTP from the early 1970s is 'Timeslip'.
The Tomorrow People was my favourite tv show when I was a kid. Absolutely loved it! It's worth including for the opening credits alone. Particularly the fantastic music! :)
Get your shows straight. Number Six, the humanoid Cylon was in the reboot with Edward James Olmos, not the 70s original with Lorne Greene. You people don't ever get it right.
Blake's 7!!!! My favorite! Correction. Avon was NOT an assassin; he was a computer genius who had stolen millions of credits from the Federation bank. On Quark, Ficus was NOT an android. Fantastic Journey...Android? What android? Are you thinking about the TV series based on Logan's Run? Ummm...You mixed up Planet of the Apes series and the animated series.
Couldn't even use wiki for these shows. He got the characters wrong so many times. Quark didn't have a shape changing character. Ficus was a humanoid plant, gene/jene was transmute aka both male and female, Plus, Betty 1 and betty 2 didn't know who was the real person and who was the clone. On the fantastic journey, he called Scott a robot when he was the son of a scientist, and Fred was a doctor. Sorry but poor research on these shows.
yes while the story line were pretty good and great weird costumes it did suffer from pacing too many long closeups and long reaction shots with little reaction it was kind of spaced out
Well, there's no reason we couldn't have hoped for both shows. UFO definitely needed more budget for a greater variety than the canned space battles. In this era of remakes, someone could take up the torch and add to the UFO canon. (and I don't mean Abrams)
There were several points in the summary that combined the original and the reboot, such as both the humans and the Cylons contemplating their place in the universe.
In a line of dialog, it was mentioned that Baltar’s assistant, Lucifer, was a 6000 series Cylon. Ron Moore said he incorporated as much as possible from the original into the reboot that he could in one way or another. If you binge watch and pay attention to the original series then the reboot you will notice what he incorporated and surprised at some that he twisted up a bit.
“Underappreciated and forgotten…” Many of these shows are iconic, and far from forgotten. Classic BSG in particular was never forgotten. Insanely well remembered for a one season show, in fact! Still gets new novels and comic books to this day.
@@Fred-gu6pk No, that's 100% an error. I stopped watching at that point, as it sounds like information copied and pasted together by someone who didn't understand the context.
For the Starlost, a I commend a great retrospective by Harlan Ellison, who won a WGA award for the original screenplay, "Phoenix without Ashes." He goes into great detail about how it went sideways and crashed and burned.
That was horrible. You mixed up the live action "Planet of the Apes" series with the separate animated one. Added elements of the 2004 "Battlestar Galactica" to the 1978 series. The "Logan's Run" series barely touched on "ageism" (or any of the other points you mentioned). That was the original movie. The series was basically a random "chase and fix problems" series. It was interchangeable with "The Starlost". Speaking of "The Starlost", you mentioned it starred 2001's Keir Dullea, but not that it was co-created by 2001's legendary special effects wizard Doug Trumbull, who brought Dullea in with him. As far as saying it tells writers "what not to do", the series bible was written by Harlan Ellison, who won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay for the pilot episode "Phoenix Without Ashes". Another episode was adapted from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin. There were episodes by legends like Norman Klenman, Arthur Heinemann, and Norman Klenman. If anything, it's a lesson in how not to produce a series. As was "Space: 1999".
Good choices, good to see Blake's 7 in there. Saphire and Steel started in '79 and is an incredibly unique series, way beyond anything else in the 70s or 80s. If you haven't seen it I can't recommend it enough.
Sapphire and Steel freaked me out as a kid and gave me nightmares particurly the one where the building was made from living animals. The one about the ghosts in the train station is skin crawingly creepy, I saw it a couple of of years ago and it's still creepy!
I am amazed that you did not know that Space 1999 was originally made as a sequel to U.F.O, many of the writers, directors and others are shared. Also the Tomorrow people was remade twice.
Well its dated now since 1999 was 25 years ago and we still cannot get back to the moon but if they ever film a remake how about calling it Space 2099?
@@Alfetta158 Yes, Space 1999 was originally conceived to be season 2 of UFO but UFO got cancelled and they needed a new Sci-Fi show they could sell in the US.
UFO, Space 1999, Battlestar Galactica, yup watch them often. Now I just ordered The Starlost and Blakes 7. These were truly imaginative shows. I've never seen Quark, so I'll have to get that. It looks campy like Lost in Space, which I watch every Saturday.
Vila: "Kerr Avon. When it comes to computers, he's the number two man in all the Federated worlds." Bystander: "Who's number one?" Vila: "The guy who caught him."
Did this script get written by an AI? It keeps making ALMOST right statements about these shows. (Avon was not an assasin, but a hacker, Number Six is not a character in the 1970's version of Battlestar, Return to the Planet of the Apes was not animated, etc).
I watched Blake's 7 in the 90's on PBS here in the US. I was an automatic fan of the show. I have seen it all the way through 2 times and would love to own it.
I love all of these shows, especially Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica. But there's a little goof here. Return to the Planet of the Apes was the animated series. The live action series was just called Planet of the Apes. It's really cool though that the footage shown here from that show was from the episode that guest starred William Smith(a frequent sci-fi and horror actor) and Marc Singer(from V and Beastmaster). The 70's was a great decade for sci-fi.
Since you mentioned them in your first sentence Battlestar has a reputation for being the first TV show to use modern special effects but I personally think that designation is deserved by Space 1999.
He did say 'animated' a couple of times while discussing it, which made me wonder why he mentiond it, and not the Planet of the Apes TV show he was using footage from.
A trip down memory lane. I watch all these shows as kid on first airing. Blake 7 like so many other British BBC shows the budget was no where near that of its American counterparts so had to rely on many corridor runs, quarry shots and wobbly sets. However at the time there was no CGI, Hi Def animations so we at the time were more engrossed in the story line. Also Avon Kerr was not an assasin rather a Computer "programmer" who embezzled lots of money from the federation.
Yep, back then the BBC had to rely on quality scriptwriting and well-crafted character development. Oh, and when they wanted to present some theme/topic, they understood that they needed to be carefully woven into an engaging story. These days they have shiny, flashy, hyper-realistic effects and their writing sucks (or is so weighted down with "the message" that there's no room for an actual plot).
I was always partial to _The Man From Atlantis_ with a young Patrick Duffy and _The Invisible Man_ with David McCallum. They're not space (not that all ten of these were), but they're still sci-fi (according to imdb).
Yea, that threw me for a loop. I thought for sure I would have remembered a human cylon from 1978. Since Tricia Helfer did such a great job in that role in the reboot. I wanted to see who her character was based on in the original series. But my IMDB/wiki search came up empty. Now I know why. Darn.
Wrong again. The shape shifting alien was Space:1999 not QUARK. Quark had the Betty Clone, the gender fluid officer and the plant based science officer.
Notice that 70s scifi prophecies the 90s and 2000s so very well! I miss those shows and I'd give about anything to go back and raise my grandkids there.
When I was a young boy, I watched reruns from the 60s such as Star Trek (favorite sci fi show out of any in my youth), Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, and The Land Of The Giants. From the actual 70s, Battlestar Galactica (2nd favorite overall), Space 1999, Project UFO, Buck Rogers, The Six Million Dollar Man, Planet Of The Apes, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and Man from Atlantis.
I still keep hoping someone will remember Jack Webb's Project UFO, it only lasted two seasons, but i really enjoyed it and made me think of the later X-Files.
Gerry Anderson belonged to a TV era in which viewers had a choice of 1, 2 or at best 3 channels to watch. He tried to make shows that appealed to a broad audience. So Thunderbirds: 5, 4, 3 ,2, 1 for the toddlers, rocketships for the boys, fashion for the girls etc. Thunderbirds was followed by Captain Scarlet - an almost prophetic show with nihilistic aliens creating suicide bombers and crashing planes into things. But, can you have such adult themes in a puppet show? Is it for kids, adults? When do you screen it (the UK pushed it as a kids show)? UFO had the same problem. Adult themes with amazing spaceship models and forward fashions. Total failure as SF with no comprehension of the issues of interstellar travel. No one knew who the show was for; even the UK had trouble deciding when to air it. Space 1999 was nuts. Essentially it was Star Trek with the Enterprise replaced by the Moon! No explanation of interstellar FTL travel needed, of course??!! The best thing about Anderson's shows was the music. The composer, Barry Gray, left generations of Brits with a series of iconic musical memories. The incidental music peaked on Thunderbirds, but so many of the theme tunes are etched on our collective memories; Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, UFO, and Space 1999.
Barry Gray's music was great. UFO was essentially a live action Captain Scarlet without the indestructability. UFO remains my favorite science fiction TV show. So much effort was put into it to make it look realistic and good. It wasn't cheesy and the writing was good. The characters were memorable. It wasn't really for kids, apart from the model work. I thought it was first rate.
@@Munenushi Just the underlying craziness of the moon traveling between the stars, presumably at FTL speeds. The episode stories though are thoughtful. There are several famous guest stars.
QUARK forever! Buck Henry could not catch a break. As with his collaboration with Mel Brooks ("when things were rotten"), both shows relied on a kind of silliness that either someone did get or didn't get. Everyone should check it out though because if it hits you the right way it's a lot of fun to watch. Just like Galaxy Quest, it goes after every stereotypical trope from any notable Sci-Fi TV movie or series...
brings back memories Thankyou :), I would have added a few more shows like Saphire & Steel, Doomwatch, and Survivors to mention but a few well worth a look f you can find them
Great Video, Lovely nostalgia. I remember about half of them but the most memorable protagonist, bad ass girl boss of them all , who gave many a teenager such as me much fantasy thoughts was not even shown! That being Jaqueline Pierce as Servalan the Supreme Commander in Blake 7. She had the best wardrobe by a mile or too!
Also, something nobody seemed to acknowledge about Space:1999. What happened to the Earth after the Moon left orbit and what happened to the other planets when such a large almost planet sized object entered their vicinity? There had to be major devastating effects.
Well as far as the Earths’ fate went I’m pretty sure there was an episode where Earth was now in the future and reached out to Alpha. They had some kind of teleport device I think. The Earth had been ravaged by the consequences of losing the moon and was now an earthquake-ridden desert. The remaining humans lived in futuristic towers elevated above the ground. Memory a bit sketchy but the humans were friendly and offered to use their version of a teleporter to bring over the Alphans. Who were like “nah, we’re good” 🤣 6:56
@timlemmon2332 Not really, in the 1st series episode, "another time, another place," the moon passed through an anomaly that duplicated everything with Alpha, and they ended back in earth's orbit. That episode showed us an earth completely devastated from the loss of the moon. It also showed a second moon ( believed to be the duplicate moon ) already in orbit as well. They find people that are their future self's with children on earth as the only living beings. In the second series, " Journey to Where?" The earth suffers badly, but the people survived. After contacting Alpha, they can transfer them back, but the moon will still be lost in space. This is just one problem with both seasons not matching up with each other. Both have different fates for earth losing its moon. For the different styles, some fans reject the 2nd series, while others will say it's the duplicate moon that passed through a portal in a new universe.
What about Salvage One, Future Cop,Holmes Yo-Yo,Time Express Gemini Man,Far Out Space Nuts,,Lost Saucer,Ark 2,Space Academy,Man From Atlantis,Six Million Dollar Man,Bionic Woman ,Buck Rodgers in the 25th. century all these above 1970,s tv shows from the 8track tape days era
Space 1999 = Trippy as hell with very cool concepts and ideas. Blake's 7 = Strong characters that will have you rooting for them by season 2. Battlestar Galactica = strong blend of FX and camp for maximum entertainment. Starlost = Cool concept hamstrung by being forced to shoot on tape instead of film (see Ben Bova's Exiles books). Quark = best sci-fi comedy of the 70s that punched above its weight class (likely inspired Space Quest). UFO = Hottest space girls ever. The Tomorrow People = Almost incomprehensible (with pacing issues). Logan's Run = Not even close to the level of the film and even deviates from in in a number of ways. Regardless, it's still reasonably entertaining.
The narrator says that the Planet of the Apes show was animated even as it shows live action clips behind it, and the description of the show is NOT about the live action version. There was an animated version so I guess they were just too lazy to bother trying to find clips from that. They also claimed Battlestar Galactica had a humanoid Cylon named Number 6. WTF!? There is no such character in the old BG series! Judging by other comments these were not the only "mistakes" made! Watch this for the old clips, but doubt everything you hear in it until you watch the shows for yourself!
As you described the ‘animated’ Return to the Planet of the Apes, did you actually bother looking at the live action series you were actually describing? And I loved The Tomorrow People as a kid but Nicolas Young was never “famous”!
I love how the stories, the imagination, and the personal human element was more important than whether it lined up with scientific reality....space was just fun and cool. The sky was not even the limit. It's 2024 and I still don't have my jaunting belt.
Starlost's best plot line was Oro (Walter Koenig/Chekov), the advanced alien trying to restart the ship and hijack it to his resources depleted home world, so he would become wealthy and powerful.
Spent youth. Seriously these, as a kid, were awesome. The ones I didn't see I can only assume they were not in America. Seen them: 1999 Blake 7 Battlestar Gallatica (Own it) UFO The Fantastic Journey Return to the Planet of The Apes Logan's Run (own it -ha) Didn't See The Starlost Quark The Tomorrow People (I did watch the CW remake) Marvelous Verdict
Despite the crudeness of the special effects and a few lapses in scientific accuracy, these films were much more interesting and mature than the current ones, which are nothing more than primary stories for children in adult bodies, sustained either by horror, the exploration of aberrant, absurd, incoherent and irrational behaviour by the members of a crew that should be expert and professional, in events that contribute to an anomaly turning into a disaster of epic proportions and whose probability borders on impossibility. These films and series, without claiming to be the model of science, at least made us dream of extraordinary tomorrows, of progress and human resilience, or simply made us have a good time in front of the telly
What about Land of the Lost? It may have been labeled as a kid's show but it had some of the best science fiction writers of the time and many great episodes.
My favorite among these is UFO. So well done with futuristic looking technology for that time. Second is Space 1999. Only problem with it is how many aliens they encounter. How many populated worlds can there be in the short distance they have traveled.
Blake 7 and Quark are the only I have never heard of. 5:05 wait "Six" was in the original series? Who played them 9:34 Space: 1999 was originally suppose to be the second season of U.F.O. that was going to be more centered on the Moon base. Not sure how much was carried over.
This is what happens when you have ChatGPT write a script instead of researching the source material for yourself. As others have said Six aka Caprica was in the reboot. Space 1999 season two was Star Trek lite. At least Galactica 1980 amd Buck Rogers weren't listed.....
@@jackwells8107 I asked chatGPT "describe a Rickenbacker" It described the Rickenbacker bridge instead of a bass or guitar... That's why it was so bad doing this article.
We we know who did not live in the 1970s. Battlestar Galactica was a major show though it went on for a while too long. You are mixing US and British shows. And the special effects were very good for the time.
as a kid in the 80s, I used to watch BSG as much as I watch Star Trek now-a-days..also considering that they recently did a remake of the BSG series, I should hardly think it was "underappreciated and forgotten" you don't do remakes of old shows that were forgotten.. ;)
I wish Quark had lasted longer; it was fun, and Ficus was a Vegeton, not an android. Battlestar Galactica was a must watch. I loved The Starlost and its varied storylines. I never got into Space: 1999; it just didn't click.
