Back in 1967, writers William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson put their heads together and wrote a dystopian novel entitled Logan’s Run. In this science fiction thriller, we are transported to a future society where every one is young and lives in a futuristic city where a vast computer runs everything. However in this future world everyone has a little clock, a crystalline flower implanted in their palm, and when they reach the age of twenty one, they must report to a Sleepshop where they will receive a gas that brings euphoria and then death. Failure to report to a Sleepshop will summon the Deep Sleep Agents, nicknamed the Sandmen, who will escort you there by force. And should you attempt to escape, become a Runner, summarily pursue and execute you. Our hero is a Sandman, Logan 5 who begins to question what is going on around him and begins to suspect the all-powerful computer is starting to malfunction. Hence he teams up with a citizen, Jessica 6 and attempts to escape and find the fabled Sanctuary, an alternative settlement outside the city, where folks may live as long as they like.
The novel was a hit, and was soon optioned for a film. Michael York was cast as Logan 5 and Jenny Agutter as Jessica 6. Taking the role of Francis 7, the Sandman tasked with hunting down his former comrade was Richard Jordan. David Zelag Goodman, who had scripted films as diverse as Monte Walsh, Straw Dogs and Farewell my Lovely, penned the screenplay, while Michael Anderson, who had helmed classics like The Dam Busters and Around the World in Eighty Days, took the director’s chair. Goodman’s screenplay was mostly faithful to the book, but there were some notable changes. The subplot about the possibly mad computer took a back seat, the age citizens were allowed to live to was raised to thirty, and instead report to Sleepshops, not folks on their Lastday now met their end in a spectacular fashion in a ritual performance called Carrousel (yes, spelled with an additional ’r’ for some reason), which allegedly offer the chance of being reborn. Also the ending was changed too - in the book Sanctuary is a very different place to what Michael York’s Logan will discover in the last act of the movie.
Released in June 1976, Logan’s Run was a big hit, taking $25 million in the US alone, and the movie even won an Oscar for its visual effects. In late 1976 Marvel released a Logan’s Run comic with the legendary George Pérez on art duties. The first five issues retold the movie in comics form, and then set out spinning new adventures for Logan and Jessica. However there was one small snag - Marvel had only acquired the rights to adapt the film, and their license didn’t cover using the character and world in new stories. Hence the comic was abruptly pulled in April 1977, with issue 7 leaving the story on a cliffhanger that would never be resolved.
While the issue of the rights are often cited as the reason for the comic’s cancellation, I suspect there may well have been another motive. For the movie was to have another spin-off - a television version and I’d put good money on the TV series going into production just when Marvel decided to continue the adventures of Logan and co. Yes, I strongly suspect CBS who made the show didn’t want a rival comic version kicking around.
While apparently writer William Nolan and the movie’s producer Saul David had been planning to do a sequel movie, and indeed Nolan had already plotted out the next adventure for Logan and was working on a third with a view to making a movie trilogy. Hence at first they weren’t too keen on the idea of doing a TV series instead. However CBS were very insistent and at the end of the day money talked. Allegedly CBS and MGM Television paid Nolan $9 million to base a television series on the film.
And so David was set up as the series producer with Nolan getting the role of story editor. Together they made a feature length pilot which was duly present to CBS, who liked it but had some notes. Said notes did not sit well with producer David and he ended up getting the sack. A new producer was appointed Leonard Katzman, who previously had worked on series such as Hawaii 5-0 and Petrocelli, but most recently had been in charge of the just shit-canned series The Fantastic Journey. Also coming aboard as executive producers Ivan Goff and Ben Robert, who then were TV’s golden boys for creating Charlie’s Angels the year before.
The new management set about retooling the Nolan and David pilot, most notably adding the new wrinkle that it would be revealed there was a secret council of Elders running the City of Domes, who were all over thirty and over Francis 7 the chance to ling longer and join them if he can take care of Logan 5. They also instituted what was to be the main premise of the series, and that was Logan and co. would discover a new settlement of folks outside the city, get into a scrape or two, often with Francis 7 nearly catching him, and then continue on his merry way. Nolan was not too pleased with these changes which he saw as rather dumbing down the concepts and hence soon followed Saul David out of the door. And so Katzman drafted in DC Fontana, who had worked on for Star Trek and the just cancelled Fantastic Journey, to head up the writing team. And Fontana was the only refugee from The Fantastic Journey - many of the crew were shifted to Logan’s Run after that show was cancelled.
Nolan incidentally did produce his own vision of the continuing adventures of Logan 5 in two novels, Logan’s World (1977) and Logan’s Search (1980) which show us how a film trilogy might have turned out and the direction the TV series would have taken. However one key element of Nolan’s original vision for the series was retained - the new android character REM (an acronym for Reclective Entity Mobile), who would join Logan and Jessica on their run. Nolan has said he invented the REM character to serve as a kind of Mr Spock figure in the show, someone to explain the science and be the voice of logic and reason. However this Star Trek connection would prove to cut both ways, for in more recent years, science fiction fans looking back at the Logan’s Run series see REM as being very much the prototype for Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation!
Anyhow with new producers and a fresh pool of writers the series went into production. Gregory Harrison was cast as Logan, and would later find fame as Dr Alonzo Gates on Trapper John, M.D. and William Sharpe on Falcon Crest. Taking on the role of Jessica 5 was Heather Menzies who had played Louisa Von Trapp in the classic movie The Sound of Music. And bringing android REM to life was legendary character actor Donald Moffat, now best remembered by film fans as station commander Garry in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Logan’s nemesis Francis 7 was played by Randy Powell, who would later play Alan Beam in Dallas.
The series began airing on September 16th 1977 and it seemed all the omens were good. The Logan’s Run movie had been very popular and the television series seemingly had come along at exactly the right time. For Star Wars had hit the big screens that summer and was proving to be such a surprise blockbuster that everyone suddenly wanted some science fiction action. So having a scifi series already in development and a spin-off from another big hot movie, it looked like CBS couldn’t lose. The show even had an iconic space vehicle of its own, the solar hover car which ferried our heroes from one adventure to another.
However ratings gold would prove to be as elusive as Sanctuary and the series was cancelled after airing only eleven of the fourteen episodes made. Hence like Bono, Logan still hasn’t found what he was looking for…
So what went wrong? Well, somewhat ironically rather than boosting the show’s fortunes, Star Wars may have been something of a curse. George Lucas’s space epic had radically redefined what people expected from science fiction. We had ground-breaking designs, pioneering special effects and perhaps most insidiously Star Wars brought us a convincing universe of aliens, robots and starships that looked real. And hence post-Star Wars you could no longer paint an actor green and put them in an unflattering leotard and pass them off as an alien. Likewise, in Star Wars we saw a universe where everything not only looked convincingly real but looked like it has been used for years. And so, making props and sets just using tinfoil, spare Christmas lights, and random offcuts of perplex tubing was no longer going to cut it.
So then rather than benefiting from Star Wars, Logan’s Run, and indeed several other scifi movies and TV shows, ended up faring badly as they fell way short of the high bar that tale in a galaxy far far away had now set. It is interesting to note that apparently the folks making Logan’s Run were quite pleased at the time with the look of the sets and props, with even William Nolan despite his misgivings over the qualities of the stories thought were great. But after seeing Star Wars that perception radically changed, and the execs in charge, and apparently the viewing public too, felt that Logan’s Run just wasn’t cutting it. As Heather Menzies later opined “I think they needed to spend more money on the visuals. Star Wars came out around that time and we couldn’t really compete with that”.
But was it failing to deliver the same kind of space age razzmatazz as Star Wars that killed Logan’s Run? For other scifi shows of the era such as Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were equally limited by TV budgets and dated scifi designs but had managed a few seasons. Indeed while Star Wars had raised the bar for what science fiction could look like on the big screen, it was by no means the first - Silent Running, 2001 and even the movie Logan’s Run had given us realistic spaceships and interesting designs for robots and aliens. And back then, there was a big gap between the production values of a movie and a television series, and viewers back then did not expect a weekly show to be delivering the sort of cutting edge effects a movie with a budget of millions could deliver.
So then, I would argue that it was other factors other than the look of the things and a lack of budget for scifi flashiness that brought Logan’s Run to a sudden halt. And looking at the show in the context of other short-lived SF series of the era you can see the problems were baked into the very format of the show itself from the beginning. To begin with, as Logan discovered different strange people and places outside the City of Domes every week, clearly this was going to be costly as it would require new sets, new props and new costumes for every single episode. And that should have been obvious as the just cancelled Fantastic Journey had had the same problem with its adventure taking place in a different Time Zone every week.
However viewers will overlook cheap budgets and wonky special effects if the stories are good, and unfortunately for Logan’s Run there were also in-built problems there too. Now one of the reasons writer William Nolan’s ideas for the series were unpopular with the suits at the network was that he wanted to tell a developing story. However the predominant template for a weekly TV show at the time was very much “reset at the end of every episode”. That is to say after every adventure the show returned to its starting premise and every adventure was self contained. So on-going plot arcs and character development was right out of the window. And this was for a simple but rather stupid reason, TV execs wanted episodes that could be shown out of order, indeed in any order at all for repeats.
Now for series like Star Trek and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, this edict didn’t matter too much - the respective ships encountered something or found a location, an adventure was had. and then the crew went on their way to meet something else next week. However this reset and repeat format actively harmed the storylines of a show like Logan’s Run. Again here, lessons weren’t learned from The Fantastic Journey. If your characters are on a journey to get somewhere, and the over-arcing story line and motivation for the characters is that quest, viewers get a bit tired when the show delivers random adventures and encounters that don’t advance that quest in the slightest.
A further problem with this reset-and-rinse approach was that recurring villain Francis 7 ended up looking like a bit of a berk. For while the writer attempted to make him a believable character as time and time again he would absolutely fail to catch Logan, Francis ended up looking like an incompetent goon. Now in a light-hearted show, say like The Dukes of Hazard, it was fine for those Dukes boys to make officer Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane look a twit every week, but in a supposedly serious scifi saga, that it did not play so well, and added to the repetitive nature of the episodes.
Apparently according to DC Fontana there were plans to advance the plot along and move past the strange settlement-in-the-wasteland-of-the-week format. In fact, there was a plot arc planned which would have seen a reckoning between Logan and Francis which would lead to the two Sandmen returning to the City of Domes in order to fight against the secret Cabal of Elders. But sadly the show got cancelled before that could have come to pass. And whether they would have been allowed to do so is open to question. For frequently the scripts that had been produced were often tampered with by the producers Goff and Roberts. While at the outset the writers were assured that they would be in charge of the storylines and as they knew science fiction, according to Fontana “they persisted in coming behind us and re-writing, often adding stupid ideas”.
And the rewrites could be very severe, the episode Crypt came from a treatment by legendary scribe Harlan Ellison and turning to a screenplay by Star Trek veteran David Gerrold. However the script was so extensively rewritten by other interfering hands Gerrold demanded his name be removed from it, and hence the episode was credited to Noah Ward. So then, given the network’s addiction to self-contained episodes that could be shown will-nilly, plus the extent of tampering with the scripts, I doubt whether Fontana and co would have been allowed to build that sort of story arc.
One can’t help feeling that this series was a missed opportunity, especially as it seemed the writers at least had a plan to reinvigorate the show. But once again studio execs were impatient and plugged the plug. Much like Man from Atlantis, the show had been initially popular enough for toy makers Mego to start work on Logan’s Run range of figures and accessories, which thanks to the show suddenly getting the chop next made it to the chops.
Once again, like other short lived series we have looked at, Logan’s Run seemed to fare better abroad and certainly seemed to have been better received in the UK. The series had been acquired by ITV and began screening in early 1978, showing in most regions on a Saturday tea-time. Over here all fourteen episodes were shown - over in the US the last three adventures wouldn’t be shown until several years later when it was repeated on TNT in the late 1980s. Back in the UK, the series spawned a Logan’s Run annual and a weekly comic strip in Look-in magazine, written by Angus P. Allan and drawn by Arthur Ranson, the strip ran from April to September 1978.
Most of the stars went on to bigger and better things, and in 1983 the solar hovercar made a come-back, appearing in the video for “You Got Lucky” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Logan has returned to comics twice - firstly in 1990 Adventure Comics adapted the original novel as a five issue mini series and followed it up in 1992 with an adaptation of Nolan’s first sequel Logan’s World. Later in 2010, TidalWave Productions (previously known as Bluewater Productions) in collaboration with William Nolan, began issuing a string of Logan’s Run comics in various mini series which adapted the novel and added new adventures along the way, concluding in 2017 with Logan’s Run: Blackflower. Meanwhile there has been talk of another movie version of Logan’s Run since the late 1990s, but nothing solid has happened yet. So in the meantime Logan remains running on the spot forever, never to find Sanctuary…
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