My Collection
I own a few 'artifacts' that have personal value for me from Space:1999 :
- Two re-release ERTL Eagles
- One re-release ERTL Moonbase Alpha
- Most of the original issue books, which my cousin Don has right now.
- The 'Stun Gun' Watergun - (Don & I bought this in 1976. The trigger is gone now.)
- The RCA record soundtrack LP
- My cousin owns the DVD series of Space:1999 [Year One] and UFO, we take turns with the set.
- Quite a few of the old Space:1999 comics I keep in a weatherproof 50mm ammo box.
- A scrapbook of Space:1999 stuff that I started in 1975, has the box top to my first Eagle model
- A resin model Commlock and Stun Gun by Wilco! Models
- The Columbia House VHS tape series 1-10
- The J2 Productions VHS of "Voyager's Return"
For the love of Space!
I have loved
Space:1999 since the first episode was broadcast. I think it was neat, inovative and just great fun to watch. One of my other possessions that I don't really count along with the rest of the 'tangible collection' is a huge file folder on my computer of everything Space:1999 I have been able to find and download that has been worthy of keeping. This includes a huge array of audio files and jpg photos. I am hoping my kids will stumble onto this stuff when they get older and take an interest in it.Yes, I paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $20.00 each @#$@! tape for the Columbia House series, which they never finished. Then they had the gall to phone me at work for the next two years bugging me about buying a new TV series. Where's the rest of
Space:1999, guys? The entire series, all 10 tapes which represent about $200.00 back in 1999-2000, now sells on Ebay for a mere $10.00, more if you are lucky.Occasionally I will go to a SciFi/Comic convention in Plano, Texas (there is a great one there every 6 months which usually has a lot of actors and actresses from various scifi TV series and movies. Check it out!) This is considered an "autograph meat market". Although you get to meet many stars from different era's of science fiction and there are a good number of comic artists that attend, you pay between $20 and $50 for an autograph and have about 1 minute to talk with said star. There are a lot of Star Wars characters that show up (Kenny Baker R2D2 is a regular guest there), and there have been a wide array of stars from other shows and movies that have come thru there. I med David Carradine (Kung Fu) there when he was promoting the Kill Bill series. He was funny as heck. I also had a long discussion with Daniel Logan (young Boba Fett)
O.k., so I did wear my
Space:1999 TShirt to the last convention, but it paid off - the owner of Wilco! models was on hand, saw my shirt, and made me a deal on the resin Commlock kit [$20.00] and I got the Stun Gun for free - so, there, phhhtttbbbbt. (By the way, "Thanks, Wilco! You're the greatest!")
Wilco! Models
2826 Russell Avenue
Abilene, Texas US 79605
(325) 677-7009
Revisiting the Past - The Good Old 1970's
During the 1970's when
Space:1999 first aired, I was living in Del Rio, Texas at the time. There were only three channels - the three main networks ABC, CBS and NBC being broadcast out of San Antonio, which we picked up on cable along with a fourth local 'weather' channel. Space:1999 was coming on Saturday night right after the news, I think it was at 10:30 PM. That lasted for about 2/3 of the first season. Then, it got moved to 11:30 PM, which made it hard for me to convince my parents I needed to stay up late to see it. Well, the death knell came when it got moved to Sunday night, "It's a school night!". After that, I only got to see Space:1999 more or less vicariously - that is, I read the synopsis of the episode in the local newspaper's TV Guide section. A couple of times I sucessfully sneaked downstairs and watched a couple of episodes with my face 2 feet from the screen with the volume as quiet as I could get it and still hear.Somewhere near this part of the timeline, I made this Commlock out of pieces of 1/4" plywood, gluing it together with Elmers wood glue, and I painted it 'off-white'. I put two AA-batteries in it and soldered it to one of those micro-flashlight bulbs that were popular "pen-lights" at the time. I used a ball-point pen spring to act as the switch when I pushed it down on a screw that was also soldered in line. The bulb was inside a piece of PCV that I had glued on the end, for the "tube". I found a belt clip off of some old walkie-talkie I found at a nearby garage sale. The whole assembly looked like crap, but it was my favorite flashlight for a long time. And I got to where I could make a very convincing "Boop-beep!" that I still find myself doing at doorways when I'm by myself - to this day.
Intro - my cousin Don Capps
Don and I have been best friends since we were about 7 years old. As kids we both discovered we liked a lot of the same things - military models and Star Trek, other science fiction from around that time period. When
Space:1999 came out we were both completely amazed and awed by it. We talked endlessly about the Eagles, the Moonbase, Commlocks, and other gizmos. He had taped a couple of the episodes off the TV using a Panasonic cassette recorder, and we listened late into the night to "Dragon's Domain" (not the wisest thing to do before bedtime, unless you like nightmares). Don had also bought his first AMT Eagle model. For some reason, his had not come with any decals, but I don't guess I knew any better. I was crazy about that thing and could hardly wait to get my own. Looking back, it's funny the feeling I got when I was looking at it - it was the coolest thing I had ever seen it seemed like, and I will never forget that feeling - I haven't had it since...Summer, 1976
That summer, we were making the move from Del Rio, Texas up the highway a few miles to the city of Hondo. I wasn't going to be much help to Dad trying to move furniture being skinny as a rail, so I went up to spend a couple of months summer with my cousin Don at Clovis, NM. Space:1999 came on there at various times and often on Saturyday afternoon along with the other typical 70's matinee stuff (Sinbad movies and so on). So I got to see a few of the episodes that I had never seen before while I was there. We used to sit up late nights during the summers and "read" the Space:1999 comic books we had, but substituting our own words for what was in the word-bubbles; we laughed so hard sometimes. Those were great times.
We were young - I had just got my first Eagle model; It was fun to take our Fundamensions Eagle models on reconnaisance missions into the field behind his house. In Clovis, NM the dirt is red sand and may as well been the surface of Mars. It was a lot of fun until Don broke one of the landing pads off his Eagle. Well, we had to make an emergency flight to the house to get to the tube of model glue and get it repaired. For some reason I remember that day so vividly - it had to have been one of the best days of my life. [Over the next five years, various incidents would result in a pad getting broken off; I would re-glue each one until the Eagle was about 2mm shorter than it was when it was new.]
After that I spent the last month of my summer melting in my strange bedroom in Hondo, wondering why all my Star Trek models and stacks of Heinlein paperbacks had been sent to the garbage instead of getting moved from Del Rio. I still had my new Eagle model, several
Space:1999 paperbacks, my bubblegum card set and that was about it. During that fall and the years following, Don and I wrote letters back and forth and drew in cartoons of Eagles attempting to lift off, but crap happening to them. It was fun to try and be creative like that within a 3 frame cartoon. We had some good laughs over that. Having my best friend to write letters to was about the only thing that helped me survive 8th grade that Fall in a new school.One day Mom and I were checking out of a local grocery store in Hondo, there was a strategically placed table of older hair-care products, school supplies, and other leftover stuff from out of the store-room. Right smack in the middle was a Fundamensions Eagle model box. I picked it up - the price had been scratched through, reduced about 3 times, and it was on the clearance table for $3.00 . That's another day that I remember pretty vividly. It was funny to set the finished model nose-to-nose with my first Eagle and see that it was a good deal shorter than the new one (since it had pristine landing pads that had never been snapped off before - haha.
While I went off to college, my bedroom stayed pretty much the same until I arrived home again to look for work. One day two of my nephews came out to the garage where I was. They were holding the two Eagles and flying them around the room "Hey, Uncle Joel - can we play with these?" Well, I just didn't have the heart to pull the Stun Gun on them, so off they went outside and I never did see my Eagles again. I also had the remnants of an Eagle a neighborhood kid had built, destroyed and rebuilt. All that was left was the nose, a service module and the engines all glued in a row. It was effectively a shortened Eagle with no Exit doors (ha). The nephews ran off with that, too.
Come on up to recent history!
I have to tell you that one of my happiest moments of my life was when, right after Teresa and I married, Columbia House came out with their VHS video tape set. I of course, ordered it right away. When the first tape came, it was "Breakaway" / "The Metamorph" . I had not seen "Breakaway" since the first time I'd seen it air, and I have to tell you I was blown away all over again. It was awesome! I was o.k. the Metamorph I guess - it seems the first episode of both seasons probably had the most work packed into them. But I was sure glad to get to see the starting episode that started everything off for me.
Interestingly enough, in all that time there were a couple of episodes that I didn't see until just a few years ago. "The Full Circle" comes to mind, "The Troubled Spirit" and it seems like there was another one that I didn't get a good full look at until Don sent me his DVD collection to watch. I've only for sure seen about 11 episodes of the Year Two series, and some of them I oouldn't get all the way thru without shutting it down..
Thankfully, in 1999 someone got the bright idea that if they re-issued the Fundamensions Eagle and Moonbase Alpha models, they might sell - being 1999 and all. I was able to purchase two of them and a new Moonbase Alpha model, so somehow I bought back a little piece of my childhood again. If I had any notion they'd be selling for nearly $30.00 on Ebay these days, I would have bought the whole model section at Hobby Lobby in Abilene. That would have been about a 300 percent return on my investment - ha. I probably would have built them all and not had one to sell. Isn't it interesting that even the built-up ones that are painted kinda crazy looking also sell for around $25-$27 ? Wow.
I keep hoping one of these days that I'll get to break down and buy another one just for the fun of it, but right now my money and I have different priorities.
As I complete my workshop, one of the areas inside is going to be a display for my Space:1999 items. My plan is to locate some of those cheap fiber-optic flashlights they sell at football games and parades, salvage those and use the fibers to light up my Moonbase Alpha model's windows. I have also seen some great modifications to that model that include two Eagles up on poles so they look like they're flying, one on a launch pad with cotton "gas" underneath to make it look like it's taking off, and another which drills into a pad so it looks like the Eagle hasn't quite been jacked all the way up to the surface yet.
My other plan is to print the graphics I have created for the Main Mission screens to exact scale and put those where the decals are, and to print the graphics to scale for the computers and paste those to the wall so it looks a lot better. I also have some transluscent plastic which I may try to cut to size and Dremel out the holes for the wall panels so that light will "leak in" from the sides. It should look pretty good when finished I think.
I want to clean up my Eagle models and hopefully find some 1/72 scale pilots to go inside - I have a ton of yellow rectangular LED's to light it up, so hopefully that will be another winter weekend project I can do with my boys. I'd also like to build decent looking interior decals for the module so one can look in thru the top windows and see inside.
Technology Nitpicks
Having spent my career in Electronics Technology, it has really given me some insight into where the levels of technology would have stood in the year 1999. Especially now having the luxury of retrospect view, so this isn't so much a criticism, it's just a retro-view. Here's a few of the things that I would like to have seen done a little differently:
- Main Mission View Screen
- Main Mission Desks
- Eagle Cockpit Control panels
- Eagle Laser Weapons
- Medical Monitors
While this looks all right on the show, randomly blinking lights and odd symbols, we now understand it to be about as useful as the moving lamps on Star Trek:TOS's view screen - worthless. I propose these lights should be able to display in green, blue, yellow, orange, and red. Each lamp should have a 3-letter abbreviation to show what item of status it is representing. If a system is powered down, it should be gray or the natural frosted translucent color of the rectangle, but the letters should still be visible. That way, when there is an emergency, say an attack or something, we can see all the different systems going to yellow and orange with a few flashing reds. When everything is normal and the aliens are hanging out in a pub far away, these lights could be green or blue, even flashing slowly.
While the point is well-taken, we can see the actors' faces, they have cool lamps - sadly, they don't have near enough buttons to do any functions. Paul Morrow is the only one with enough buttons to have activated something, but they are reserved for remote controlling an Eagle. And while we're on the subject, have you ever watched Paul remote-flying an Eagle? What was he doing with those joysticks??? Nothing related to the motion of the Eagle! To have some added realism, they could have kept the shallow desks, but embedded an typewriter-like keyboard, or even a 5x32 rectangular keypad and used the small, upangle part of the desk as a text/graphic display. This is one thing they seem to have investigated a little in Year Two, but the results were loathsome (see "The Metamorph" just so you can cringe). Had they made the desks to have about a 6" backspash, it could have housed a small 4" CRT and looked just fine. A quick glance at Mission Control NASA would have given some good inputs here.
I'm working on some graphics for this, but the Eagle control panels are a maze of keys labeled A-thru-M and with various Greek lettering and a few German pronunciation symbols like the umlaut "a" and so on. While the buttons, switches and lamps looked o.k., again we have a string of blinking lamps (which is great for TV entertainment, but not something you want to see if you are flying an aircraft for instance). They should have appropriate labels. Most modern aircraft use abbreviation forms that either indicate a system or a common term that a pilot would quickly recognize. A little more likeness to aircraft or Apollo-type controls would have been more expected than the meaningless labels we see.
While the laser beam technology was not well-known by the public at that point, it still hasn't developed to the level we saw on the Eagle. It looked great for TV entertainment, but wouldn't something like a guided missile which outgassed steering jets as it flew been more acceptable? It could have looked just like a Sparrow missile and made a great effect for the Eagle as well as being technologically accepted for the time frame.
2001:A Space Odyssey did a marvelous job of showing accurate medical monitor wave-forms long before those waves became common-place in todays ER's. The primary waves: ECG, SPO2, Respiration would have been more appropriate on the monitors - it was also quite apparent to those of us who had walked into any electronics shop that the Oscilloscope does not make a good piece of medical hardware (e.g. - Breakaway).
This are is especially sensitive for me, as I spent 18 years working as a Biomedical Equipment Technician. Dr. Russell wouldn't have called Dr. Mathias to fix the monitor [Force of Life], she would've called in the "Biomed guy".
Again, while this looked great on TV, it was too far ahead of the technology. We were hoping we'd have some type of ray gun by then (Prof. Bergman actually refers to it as a "Ray Gun" in one scene), but the technology just isn't near there, even now. It would have been better to have a Logan's Run gun with various shells like 1) Bullet, 2) Knock-out Gas, 3) Taser projectile, 4) entrapment web, or whatever. Think "5th Element"
The way Computer was treated on Year One is still one of my biggest gripes with the series. Again, in 1974 the general population had no exposure to computers at all, and didn't have any concept how they'd work, especially in the year 1999. There were no home PC's, the idea of having a computer in some businesses was still even considered foreign. Heinlein even wrote of an android shaped robot which was used to proof-read documents, so it's understandable that most script writers new far less about computers. It would have been exciting if they considered the HAL 9000 a little bit more. Instead, we have rows of meaningless keys with no labels on them. Screens with line-graphs on them, and all this time I'm wondering what they're going to do when they run out of spools of thermal paper to tear off computer "read-outs". Maybe that's what is being housed in that huge computer building (check your ERTL Alpha Moonbase model diagram), millions of paper rolls.
I could probably write a whole book on just this mis-treatment of computer alone. People in general had the view that computers would screw up everything, those who were actually trying to conform their previously paper-driven systems into a format that a 1975-era computer could use were suffering from the shortfalls of the software and computing capacity available during that time. They were being very vocal about it, and this even bled well into the scripts of Space:1999 as well. Any time there was a problem, Computer was malfunctioning. It couldn't make a definite decision about returning to Earth in Breakaway.
Poor Kano was given the crap role of being Computer's sole defender, too:
[Black Sun]
KANO: "Commander, Moonbase Alpha can't survive without Computer!"
KOENIG: "Is that so?" and walks off.
[Guardian of Piri]
CARTER: "Times, distances; Kano, you couldn't have gotten this thing more in the about-face!"
KANO: "But Computer doesn't make those kinds of mistakes!"
Here's another fine example:
[Earthbound]
KOENIG: "I asked Computer to give me one name; it gave me three. Classic case of Computer buck-passing!"
Very seldom is Computer seen as a good tool that the Alphans have to work with, it is always being taken over by some force (how is that possible?) or spewing lines of garbled English. At one point, Kano even has to deliver the line "Computer is transmitting into his brain, and his brain is transmitting to the planet" or some such crap. Must have been a great modem, that one.
Kano beats Computer in chess. Is that really a practical analogy? Well, he did program it after all. We are shown too many weaknesses of Computer, it is rarely seen as the good helper that it was designed to be.
What should have happened is that Computer should have been responsible for maintaining the environment, heat, cooling, light usage, power management. Other jobs include site management for the Commlocks to admit people in and out of areas. It also should have had the task of coordinating all the radio-signal and other spectrum monitors and reporting.
KANO: "Computer, identify approaching object."
COMPUTER: "Approaching object is configured similar to a Voyager spacecraft. Recommend moving intercepting Eagles to 25KM distance from object immediately. Radiation danger is possible."
Now, that's a helpful computer!
I can't get a good look at these, but it looks like it had mechanical gauges or metal stop-watches attached. Hmm. Not too sure, but I'd have to say Star Trek:TOS cheesy rip-off. Obviously these weren't anywhere on the books at the time, but gee wouldn't it have been great if they were carrying say an 8x10 sized flat panel Tablet PC? Now that would have been high-tech! While we're on the same subject, we see people carrying and filing papers protected inside colored plastic transparent binders, especially wandering around near the Computer banks.
One thing I do recognize that from NASA even thru today, flight-books are used to clarify procedures, which buttons to hit in what order, maps and so on. That probably would have been o.k. at the consoles, but it seemed a shame that such a great place as Moonbase Alpha was still carring around reems of paper to run their reports on. This is the same peeve I have with Computer having to spit out little 2 inch wide strips of paper to deliver its results. What did they do with all these? Throw them on the floor? There's no trash cans around!
Again, the public knew precious little about reactors and electrical power. The problem is people mostly thought you had some radioactive elements in a heavy metal casing, and you just plugged in the power wires and away we go! That sounds nice, but electrical power is generated when steam or some liquid is heated and passed by some vanes to turn a turbine. It's a noisy process as well. And any Eagle engines that contained a Hydrogen fusion reaction were going to have similar results to the Voyager's engine - spewing vast amounts of radiation, heat, and light. It would have been better in that case to simply have used some type of liquid fuel rocket motors. Granted the Eagle is my favorite spaceship ever, and I don't really care if it wasn't too realistic, especially for planetary landings, but it made the storylines a lot easier to work with!
This goes in the same bucket with "Gravity Screens", "Gravity Generators", "Meteor Shields" and "Heat Shields to full power!" - Uhmmm, can we just say "bullcrap!" and be done with this? If the setting was 1999, and the viewership was 1975, it sure would have been better if they had just left some of this stuff out all-together. Now if you want to fast forward a few years and make it, say Space:2299, it might have passed. But the setting was too close to the present, and this stuff just wasn't believable.
The technology wasn't anywhere near close to this and it would have taken some great quantum leaps in superconduction beyond where we are even now to come up with a field or beam of energy (aside from say Microwave transmissions).
Sorry, these were a little too convenient and not very realistic. Computer could tell you when someone had died, but how was it monitoring all these folks? Now we can scan for radio signals, thermal emissions and xray emissions, so the story lines could have been taylored to this and it would have sounded some better. "We're picking up spurious UHF emissions, several harmonics, but nothing identifiable". Wow! What a great script line! Sorry, but no one has quite figured out how to "scan for life signs" yet either without the patient being directly wired to a medical monitoring device.
I still love the Commlock, what a great device and idea! But now cellular telephone technology has really killed that, along with the Pocket PC and combinations thereof.
Well, that's about it for my take on things. Don't take me too seriously, I certainly don't. Feel free to write me and tell me what you think! What are some things you would like to have seen done differently? Thanks for visiting this web page!
Joel
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