"In the beauty trade, we call this "relaxative" music"
In this episode of The League of Gentlemen a new beauty parlour has in Royston Vasey and is going down a storm... However the services offered aren't all what they seem...
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Saturday, 5 September 2026
COMMENTARY CLUB Minisode 85 - Beauty and the Beast
Sunday, 16 August 2026
HYPNOGORIA 314 - One Season Wonders Part VI - Are We Not Men?
In the final chapter of our investigation into the mysteriously short-lived sci-fi shows that turned up on British TV in the 1970s and 1980s, we finish with one of the most obscure - Beyond Westworld, one of the most derided - Manimal, and the most '80s one of them all - Automan!
Friday, 7 August 2026
COMMENTARY CLUB Minisode 84 - The Medusa Touch
"The safe word is Juliet Bravo. Say it once and you will be released."
In this episode of The League of Gentlemen we dropping in at the Hotel Windermere where aging swingers Alvin and Sunny are hosting a special gathering... which ends badly to say the least!
Sunday, 19 July 2026
HYNOGORIA 312 - One Season Wonders Part V
In this episode we look at two beloved series that very nearly ended up in the Legion of One Season Wonders. First we uncover the story of the Wonder Woman TV series starring Lynda Carter, which was actually cancelled but picked up for further seasons by a more far sighted network. And then we attempted untangle the confusing history of the original Battlestar Galactica - was it really a TV series, or several movies, or two TV series?!? Plus we have a bonus step-side to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century which also nearly ended up cancelled.
Sunday, 5 July 2026
HYPNOGORIA 311 - One Season Wonders Part IV
In the next episode in our series on sci-fi shows that didn't last a single season, we dredge up the lost history of the Man From Atlantis, and find out exactly where Logan ran off to...
Friday, 3 July 2026
COMMENTARY CLUB Minisode 83 - Turn Again Geoff Tipps
"Don't look at me. I'll turn into stone!" Medusa sat there or somethin'"
In this episode we follow the fortunes of the hapless but volatile Geoff, who leaves the safety (?) of Royston Vasey to seek his fortune in London as a stand-up comedian...
Sunday, 7 June 2026
HYPNOGORIA 309 - One Season Wonders Part II
In this episode we discover why a second return to the Planet of the Apes, as a cartoon TV series, vanished too quickly, and examine the strange case of The Invisible Man (1975) in which David McCallum wasn't seen in more ways than one!
Sunday, 24 May 2026
HYPNOGORIA 308 - One Season Wonders Part I
A new mini series we take a look at a string of sci-fi shows from the 1970s and 1980s that everyone remembers, yet lasted only for one season or less! And we start off our exploration of these one season wonders with the ill-fated Planet of the Apes TV series!
Friday, 15 May 2026
COMMENTARY CLUB Minisode 81 - The Lesbian and the Monkey
"It's like one of Aesop's fables!"
In this episode we crack open the third series of the League of Gentlemen, and revisit old characters in a new in-depth format! In this opening episode we have the ballad of Pauline and Mickey...
Thursday, 23 April 2026
COMMENTARY CLUB Minisode 80 - Royston Vasey and the Monster From Hell
In this episode we reach the apocalyptic grand finale of the second series of the League of Gentlemen! Royston Vasey will never be the same again!
Thursday, 26 March 2026
ONE SEASON WONDERS Part IV - Logan's Run
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 hi-tech 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, they will 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 alleged 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 reporting to Sleepshops, now folks on their Lastday met their end in a spectacular ritual performance called Carrousel (yes, spelled with an additional ’r’ for some reason), which allegedly offered 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 characters 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 - the television series. 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. Hence, I strongly suspect CBS, who were making the show, didn’t want a rival comic version kicking around.
Now apparently writer William Nolan and the movie’s producer Saul David had been planning to do a sequel, another movie. In fact, 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 Saul 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 presented to CBS, who liked it. But they had some notes. And apparently 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 hit 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 were Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, 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 that there was a secret council of Elders running the City of Domes, who were all over thirty. And this sinister cabal would offer Francis 7 the chance to live longer and join them... But only if he can take care of Logan 5. They also instituted what was to be the main premise of the series, which was that Logan and co. would discover a new settlement of folks outside the city very week, get into a scrape or two, often with Francis 7 nearly catching him, and then continue on their merry way. Now Nolan was not too pleased with these changes, which he saw as rather dumbing down the concepts, and therefore 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 wasn't 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 could 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 in place, 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). Finally completing the regular cast, Logan’s nemesis Francis 7 would be 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 such a blockbuster that everyone suddenly wanted some science fiction action. So having a space age series already in development, and one that was a spin-off from another big sci-fi 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, 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 in use 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 new high bar set the tale in a galaxy far far away. 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 they looked 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 sci-fi designs, but both 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 of the day did not expect a weekly show to be delivering the same sort of cutting edge effects that a movie with a budget of millions could deliver.
So then, I would argue that it was other factors other than a lack of budget for sci-fi flashiness that brought Logan’s Run to a sudden screeching 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 was discovering 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 adventures taking place in a different Time Zone every week.
However viewers will overlook cheap budgets and wonky special effects if the stories are good. But 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 were 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 specific, 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 rinse-and-repeat approach was that recurring villain Francis 7 ended up looking like a bit of a berk. For while the writers attempted to make him a believable character, time and time again he would absolutely fail to catch Logan, and so 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 sci-fi 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 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 was turned into 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 willy-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, network execs were impatient and pulled 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, but thanks to the show suddenly getting the chop never made it to the shops.
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 even 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 when 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 definite has happened yet. So in the meantime Logan remains running on the spot forever, never to find Sanctuary…
Wednesday, 25 March 2026
ONE SEASON WONDERS Part III - Man from Atlantis
We continue our series on short-lived science fiction shows that barely lasted a season and take a look at an early TV superhero. However this wasn’t a familiar costumed crusader from Marvel or DC, rather this was a hero spawned just for TV - Man from Atlantis!
Now like many of the series we are discussing in this series of articles, Man from Atlantis, which I am resisting the urge to abbreviate to MAF, first splashed onto our screens in a TV movie. Airing on NBC on March 4th 1977, Man from Atlantis had a mysterious man washing up on a beach. This unfortunate fellow, played by Patrick Duffy, has amnesia and can offer no clue to his identity or home. However he had webbed fingers and toes, possessed above normal strength, could withstand great depths and high water pressure, and could apparently communicate with some sea life, mostly dolphins and whales. He also swam in a manner similar to a cetacean too.
He is placed in the care of scientist Doctor Elizabeth Merrill, played by Belinda J. Montgomery, and named Mark Harris. Ok, not the most glamorous name, but hey he could have been lumbered with Flipper or Gill-boy! Anyhow in this first adventure, his unique water-based talents are put to good use by the US Navy to locate a lost submarine. However he discovers an underwater lair built by the sinister Mr Schubert, played with gusto by Victor Buono, a scientific genius who has decided time is up for humanity and wants to wipe out the world and start over in a marine-based utopia of his own devising. And in a strange coincidence, this was exactly the same megalomaniac scheme that Bond villain Stromberg was attempting in The Spy Who Loved Me which came out later the same year. Perhaps they both went to the same Evil Villain school…
This TV movie was a huge hit, however a series did not immediately follow. Somewhat unusually, NBC commissioned not just one sequel TV movie, but three more feature length adventures for their newly-minted marine hero. And hence a few months later, on 7th May, the Man from Atlantis rode again, well, swam again, in a new adventure called The Death Scouts. This had Mark and Dr Liz uncovering some aliens lurking the depths of the oceans checking out Earth as a possible invasion target. Mere weeks later, the third TV movie aired, entitled Killer Spores, and this featured, well, killer spores from space. But with the interesting wrinkle that said spores were intelligent and could possess people. And then in early June, the fourth aquatic adventure, The Disappearances aired, in which Dr Liz is, well you guessed it, disappeared, and the Man from Atlantis uncovers a plot to kidnap Earth’s top scientists and bugger off to another planet. And if you think that sounds a little too similar to the plot of the first TV movie, you would be right. Oddly it's also similar to another Bond adventure the movie version Moonraker which would appear several years later in 1979. And perhaps that was an alarm bell that the Man from Atlantis concept perhaps would have been better served staying as a TV movie or two.
However the ratings were good, and that summer the trips to the pool were well and truly ruined by dozens of kids splashing about emulating Mark’s signature dolphin kick swimming style. Hence NBC struck while the iron was hot and commissioned a series which began airing mere months later in September 1977.
The series pretty much picked up where the TV movies had left off, but with the new format in place - now Mark was in charge of the super-duper submarine The Cetacean, and each week would pilot the craft into some new underwater adventure. Now on the face of it this seemed like a great idea. After all, Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had a similar concept, and that show had run for four seasons between 1964 and 1968. Furthermore the set-up was not dissimilar to Star Trek, indeed the bridge of the Cetacean was suspiciously similar to the original Enterprise, and that was not a coincidence as the show’s producer Herbert F. Solow has been one of the execs for original Trek.
However perhaps they should have taken a little more time developing the show’s concepts, for the series soon hit several snags. Firstly filming underwater sequences every week was fiddly and expensive. Secondly, and more seriously, the series struggled to invent a convincing rogues gallery for the Man from Atlantis, something essential for any budding superhero. While Mr Schubert would return several times, becoming the nearest thing Mark had to an arch enemy, the show failed to build up any real recurring villains or threats. There was a conman character named Muldoon - sort of like a marine Harry Mudd - but having him appear twice within a half dozen episodes felt like the writers had no real idea what to do with Man from Atlantis.
This suspicion is supported by the fact that several episodes ditched any marine theme at all, with adventures that had Mark transported to an alien planet, thrown back in time to the Wild West, and even, somewhat bizarrely, turning up in Renaissance Verona to become embroiled with the events of Romeo and Juliet. Now possibly these out of the water adventures were a means to cut costs and use existing sets and costumes, but it felt like the show was running out of ideas fast.
Now considering Marvel’s Submariner and DC’s Aquaman had been having undersea adventures for years at this point, and as we mentioned, on the small screen Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea clocked up four seasons and over a hundred episodes, there was really no excuse for struggling to find suitable thrilling stories set beneath the waves.
Similarly the characters weren't very well served either. Mark's mysterious past was never really explored, missing a huge opportunity for stories building up the lore of lost Atlantis. Schubert quickly became a generic baddie rather than a proper themed villain. But worst of all, poor old Dr Elizabeth’s role was often reduced to standing around on the bridge and very little else. In fact she was getting so badly served by the scripts, Belinda J Montgomery called her lawyers to get her out of her contract, and hence left the series in episode eleven. A new female lead was cast, Dr Jenny Reynolds, played by Lisa Blake Richards, but by this point the ratings were sinking fast, and the show came to an abrupt end with episode thirteen which aired on 6th June 1978. Unlucky for some indeed.
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The series has also been a hit around the world. In the UK, ITV acquired the TV movies and series and began airing them on a Saturday tea time, in competition with the scifi juggernaut that was Doctor Who, then in its fifteen season and still with Tom Baker helming the TARDIS. Stiff competition indeed. And yet for a few weeks Man from Atlantis won the ratings battle with the venerable Time Lord.
In February 1978, ITV’s own children's magazine, Look-In began running a Man From Atlantis comic strip drawn by Mike Noble. But of course, like its Marvel-ous sibling, the strip ended in June 1978 when the series sank beneath the waves. However there was a Man from Atlantis annual for Christmas 1978. Plus, again mirroring events over the pond, a range of Man from Atlantis toys from Denys Fisher was planned, but never made it to the shops thanks to the TV show getting cancelled.
It is true the ratings were down, but might it have been wiser to let the show rest, develop some stronger concepts and scripts, and come back hopefully bigger and better for a second season… And maybe, just maybe, they could have - shock horror - given the show a bit more money? Considering there was plenty of merch out there, clearly other folks still believed Man from Atlantis had legs. Or fins. Whatever…
As it was, the Man from Atlantis was not to return to our screens, but Mark would eventually resurface again, albeit many many years later and in print. For while Patrick Duffy had gone on to bigger and better things, starring in Dallas and so forth, he clearly still had an affinity for the character. For, in June 2016, he published his own Man from Atlantis novel, which picked the action up many years after the events of the TV series. The book’s blurb outlined Duffy's grand ambitions for the book -
Not needing to confine his imagination to the special effects limitations of the 1970s, he has fleshed out an incredible life history of not just Mark Harris but of his entire Atlantean race
And apparently it was going to be a trilogy, but as of yet no further books have surfaced. Whether their publication was nobbled by the villainous Schubert or just poor sales, I will leave for you to decide…
Tuesday, 24 March 2026
ONE SEASON WONDERS Part II - The Fantastic Journey
After The Gemini Man bombed, a replacement show also with a science fiction theme was hastily slotted in the schedules. Now if The Gemini Man had failed to engage viewers with its admittedly slim premise of invisibility via digital watch, one couldn’t accuse its replacement of lacking imagination. For The Fantastic Journey very much took a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. And so we had a series that featured time travel, the Bermuda Triangle, aliens, pirates, psychic powers and Atlantis!
The series kicked off as was usual for the time with a gesture length pilot in which a group of folks on a boating jaunt who failed to heed Barry Manilow’s warning and blundered into the Bermuda Triangle. And indeed they did disappear, vanishing is a glowing cloud and finding themselves trapped on a mysterious island. And it turns out that this island featured different overlapping pockets of time and space, which the plot dubs Time Zones, linked by invisible doorways. They meet a man from the 23rd century, a stranded time traveller called Varian, played by Jared Marti. And with him they set out to find a particular Time Zone, named Evoland, that can get them home again.
When the pilot was optioned a series, there was a little rejigging of the cast, with most of the passengers being sent back to their own times. So in the series proper, we still had Fabian, who became the group’s leader, plus we have Scott Jordan (played by Ike Eisenmann) who was the sort of kid character TV execs seem to think we will like but often don’t, and Doctor Fred Waters (Carl Franklin) who is young, hot-headed and streetwise, all flared trousers and jive talk. In the second episode they are joined by a lady who is half Atlantean and half alien, Liana (Katie Saylor). Thanks to her extra-terrestrial parentage, she possesses super powers, but to be honest she was mostly there to deliver what used to be termed “something for the Dads”, and hence ends up doing more standing about in short skirts than feats of super strength.
Joining the regular cast in a later episode was slightly suspicious scientist Dr Jonathan Willoway played by the legendary Roddy McDowall. Willoway was a scientist from the 1960s who initially is something of a bounder in the a Dr Smith from Lost in Space mould, but quickly mellowed and joins forces with our happy bandy of temporal wanderers. Oh and there also was Sil-El, Liana’s cat who she could talk too telepathically because, well, why not throw psychic pets into this heady mix too.
Of course hopping to a different Time Zone every week meant different guest stars, and so episodes were graced by the likes of John Saxon, Cheryl Ladd, Mel Ferrer and Joan Collins. Plus a young Ian McShane appears as the 17th century ship’s captain in the pilot episode!
Behind the scenes, Star Trek veteran DC Fontana led the writing team, and she recalls they did not have long to turn around the scripts before filming began, which explains a good deal about the somewhat eclectic nature of the plotting. Apparently the original concept would have seen our merry band traversing various Time Zones and having more historically based adventures, however the Powers That Be soon ordered that aliens and futuristic stuff was to the order of the day, and so episodes regularly featured more science fiction orientated fare with various Time Zones effectively standing in for alien planets.
In that respect, The Fantastic Journey was very much mirroring the tonal trajectory of classic Doctor Who, which had begun with the intention of having educational adventures in history before monsters and aliens began to dominate the stories. However while classic Doctor Who took several seasons to morph into full blown science fiction, The Fantastic Journey managed it in a handful of episodes. Such is the power of memos from ratings hungry producers! However it would seem that Doctor Who was a key influence on the show, for Varian had an odd device that looked like a cross between a tuning fork and some stray Christmas decorations, called the Sonic Energizer…
Over the pond, the BBC picked up the show and started airing it on 4th March, just a few weeks after its US debut. The feature length pilot was shown on a Saturday night, with episodes of the series airing in an early evening slot on Fridays every week afterwards. The entire series would be repeated in December 1978, when it was shown on a morning as part of the Christmas holiday schedule, sandwiched between episodes of the 1939 Buster Crabbe Buck Rogers serial and assorted cartoons.
However the imaginative mix of scifi tropes and guest stars dressed in disco-galactic outfits never quite gelled, and ratings gold proved elusive as Evoland. While the concept promised a visit to a different exotic Time Zone every week, in practice this was a huge strain on the show’s budget and, to be honest, many of the sets, costumes and effects were less than impressive. Plus being scheduled up against the insanely popular Waltons didn’t help the show’s fortunes either. Hence the series was cancelled after just nine episodes, with a final tenth episode limping out a couple of months later. Somewhat ironically the axe fell on the show in April 1977, literally weeks away from a little movie called Star Wars being released, becoming an instant smash hit, and leaving TV execs hastily highlighting anything vaguely spacey to grab a piece of scifi pie…
Even more ironically, most of the folks who had worked on The Fantastic Journey found themselves making another hurriedly green-lit science fiction show which would also not last a full season…But that’s a story for another day. And what of Fabian and co? Well, that hasty cancellation meant their travels in the Time Zones just stopped, and so the poor sods are still trapped in the Bermuda Triangle…
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