Purple wigs? Who saw them on black and white T.V.? It was just a gimmick, so that your mate at school who had a color T.V. could say to you: “Did you know their hair is actually
purple when they’re on the moon ?

And then you would have to buy a color T.V. to find out, most T.V. series of the time were
up to things like this. In lost in space series 2, they wore colored jumpers with all sorts of
colors, did anyone ask where they got these from in outer space ? In series 1 they wore plain jumpers ! But guess what ? It was in black and white !

It was one of the ‘Aliens’ they captured. It’s the episode where they find out that they have been kidnapping humans to harvest organs to regenerate themselves. They find a DNA match one the aliens heart for a girl that had idsappeared years before in a ‘UFO incident’

http://everything2.com/node/1674714

A UFO:1999 was in the works but they switched it to the moon.

Yes, it was cheesy, but good fun. I got the DVDs a couple years ago and had fun seeing it again. This was Gerry Anderson’s first non-puppet show and the joke at the time was that the acting was even more wooden than on Thunderbirds.

And I do remember that big “1980″ on the screen in the opening credits and thinking “wow, far future”

– Jonathan

The music industry got better.

The Interceptors were pretty much a steal of the F102A Delta Dagger – which as conceived was armed with a single AIR2 Genie: an unguided air-to-air rocket with a nuclear warhead. The idea was to take out the formations of Soviet bombers that would be coming in over the Arctic. The Genie became redundant when the Russians cottoned on to the idea of sending small formations at low level…

Or perhaps you should – they could perhaps trigger the drowning reflex, but also show you that in these situations there’s something fishy about it.

The one episode I remember is the ‘hero’ of the show I think gets kidnapped and assimulated by the aliens. When they rescue him back, they take the space helment off of him and it is full of the liquid the aliens ‘breath’. Apparantely, he was able to breath it as well and choked quite a bit coughing the liquid out and breathing normal air again. It left quite an impression on me and is probably why I fear drowning quite a bit.

Thanks for the memories…

Which is still the basic concept behind ABM’s today. It doesn’t take too much debris to rip up a warhead traveling at Mach 20. Even if you don’t destroy it, you’ll knock it off course enough to (hopefully) have the target survive the blast.

- Jack

Yes. I had cause to re-watch this film recently. I saw it originally in the theaters and wasn’t especially impressed. The special effects (the whole reason for going to see it in the first place) suffered in comparison to “2001,” which had come out the year before. And the plot was silly since even as a high school student, I knew enough astronomy to know we would have inferred the existence of such a planet by the 18th century through its gravitational perturbations. This was also the premise behind a 1950′s comic strip called “Twin Earths.” It’s covered in Chapter 3 of “The Saucer Fleet.”

The most amazing prediction in JttFSotS comes at the very beginning. When the head bad-guy scientist (Herbert Lom) is going through the multi-step security procedure to get into the sooper-seeecret document vault, it’s almost exactly what we all do today in an airport! Right down to emptying his pockets onto a tray, which is scanned separately while he walks through a detector. Creepy.

- Jack

I’ll second that. It’s an incredible collection. My father-in-law occasionally lectures there on the artwork of early automobile advertising.

I think my favorite car in the collection is an Hispano-Suiza Alfonzo XIII with a special lightweight body made my Neuport (the airplane company). It’s a monocoque made of tulip wood fastened with brass nails which weighs less than 100 lbs (45 Kg).

- Jack

OK, then try this one on.

A couple of years ago I was at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy museum in Virginia. One of the exhibits was “ground support” for space programs. I was idly scanning the artifacts when my eyes happened upon a console and memory unit from a Control Data 3800. I’ve mentioned here before that my first job out of school was working ground support for a classified Air Force PR satellite (no, that doesn’t stand for “public relations”). There were only nine 3800′s ever built. Six of them were at Sunnyvale AFS where I worked. Two were at the Hawthorne backup site and the last one was at Temple University in Pennsylvania (Bill Cosby’s alma mater).

Since I doubt this unit came from Temple, there is a 66.667% chance that I sat at that console at some point. The shock of recognition was that I am now officially a museum piece!

- Jack

Anybody here who knows the German science-fiction series “Raumpatroullie Orion”?

That’s about the only scifi series mentioned here that I have seen some of the originals of. (Except TOS of course.)

It was so popular here [Sweden] that I have gotten hold of a series of translated ORION books originally by Hans Kneifel. All very cheesy, sorry to say, but the series video effects were AFAIU considered breakthroughs at the time, especially considering the low budget. I believe the IFO (or whatever: saucer shaped) space ship water start (pictures of a shaped float rising or possibly sinking in a transparent plastic tube) was what originally got me hooked on astronomy. (Sorry, BA!)

Don’t forget that Anderson did Space Precinct with live actors and recently he remade Captain Scarlet in CGI that was very good.

“It also looks like there is going to be a Flight of the Navigator remake.”

Huh?! Flight of the Navigator? If ever there was a movie not in need of a remake, that’s the one. The only reason I can think of is that it’s a Disney flick, and Disney is like a super-concentrated metaphor for Hollywood in general: the idea-bag emptied out a looooong time ago.

That’s what was great about the series. SHADO was well funded and had many, many neat toys- enough to stand off against a technologically superior foe. I particularly like the discrete zones of defense. If the UFO got past one, other defenses came into play. The early episodes even mentioned the difficulty in targeting and hitting enemy ships moving at FTL velocities. I think that was the point of the big interceptor missile. They just placed a large explosion and debris cloud in the path of the UFOs. There was another episode where SHADO’s funding was under scrutiny, but I recall Command Straker eventually spanking the politicians doing the questioning.

That’s why Fringe works well, IMHO, much better than the X-Files. The gang there has the support of their direct superior, and the one guy who gave them a hard time turned out to be working for the enemy. The better seasons of 24 were the ones where Bauer was working in cooperation with the rest of the government (or even head of CTU) and not as a rogue. That’s what kept me going with Sanctuary- it’s a private but well equipped institution. And they had Nikola Tesla show up as a vampire, which is awesome.

So if I had the chance to redo UFO as a series, it would still be a well funded secret organization. Remember the “Omega Sector (The Last Line Of Defense!)” from the movie True Lies? Something like that.

-S

Let’s not forget the Andersons’ live-actor feature film “Doppelganger” a.k.a. “Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun”, from whence all the futuristic cars in UFO originated.

Is that the one where they don’t know if electrical polarity is “backwards” as well when trying to hook something up at the end to get back to Earth? (That’s all I remember from some movie about a “twin” Earth on the other side of the Sun.)

I LOVED this show as a kid, but even then, there was one bit of Ultimate Silliness that I couldn’t get past: the Interceptor fighters on the moonbase. The ones with one. Single. Missile. (If I’m remembering correctly, at least – its been a lot o’years since I saw this show…)

But, don’t you remember the size of that one. Single. Missile? It was nearly half the size of the entire fighter. (Any Freudians out there?)

Go to images.google.com and search for “UFO interceptor” to jog your memory.

The sad part is, I liked it as a kid, and I remembered the opening sequences once I saw them again. (I even had one of the Thunderbirds vehicles, though I’m not sure which.)

And when is NASA going to get with the program and have the female astronauts wear those tight miniskirts like TV promised?

And, hey, if you’re going to be a moon babe, you might as well have purple hair.