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Television Media Science

The Early Days of TV Science Fiction 90

Posted by timothy from the what-the-internet-is-truly-for dept.
mcse_knowthyenemy writes: "The very first TV sci-fi shows are covered in detail here. The author, a professor of physics, approaches the topic with academic rigorousness. If you think the original Star Trek was low-budget, consider the $5 per episode these studios could spend."
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The Early Days of TV Science Fiction More

The Early Days of TV Science Fiction

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  • So who dies? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @05:51AM (#2754366)
    At $5 per episode, that's only 1 redshirt.

    bummer.
    • At $5 per episode, that's only 1 redshirt.

      Obviously you have not been watching the shows carefully enough. Wear a red shirt and you were certain to get zapped by whatever the beastie of the week happened to be.

      At $5 an episode there was no way they could afford to risk wearing the red shirts

  • Be nice - I host that site ;) (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:02AM (#2754375)
    That site is one I am hosting for a friend, please be nice to it bandwidth-wise or I will have to take it offline temporarily. If you _really_ have to wget the whole thing, send me a check for $300 in advance, thanks ;)
  • "Space helmet on Captain Video!"
  • ...when The Register [theregister.co.uk] goes offline.

    Still, it's interesting to see the humble beginnings from whence TV sci-fi came. Just think, it only took 52 years to get from Captain Video [imdb.com] to Battlefield Earth: The Animated Series [imdb.com].

    I'm going back to bed now. Wake me if it starts getting clever.

    My theory is, as global population increases, total intelligence remains constant.
    • http://213.40.196.64/
      Albeit only 2 stories in 3 days, but still The Register nonetheless.
      • THANK YOU!!!! I've missed my Vulture Central fix while their DNS was down!
      • So, what happened to them? And what happened to PvP? (Note that I'm not a tremendous fan of the latter, I think the author is as close to a "geek poser" as you can get).

        --
        Evan

        • PVP is having server problems apparently. Current strips are being posted by Greg Dean over at Real Life [reallifecomics.com].
        • PVP is one of the worst examples I can think of of the problem inherent with Web comics. PVP comics are great. They're cool. However, once you get to know a little bit about the cartoonist (he's a dick -- just read some of his rants), you don't really want to enjoy the comics anymore.
          • he's a dick -- just read some of his rants

            I can deal with him being a dick - what sets my teeth on edge is the fact that he gets geek references *wrong*, and then goes on to crow about how much of an ubergeek he is. He clearly has never read LOTRs, I doubt he's done more than casual die and paper gaming... his geek stuff is just - off. And if you're writing a geek strip, for ghod's sakes, at least spell the japanese anime/gaming phrases correctly - even just phonetically. I had to listen to two hours of otaku debate regarding whether to kill him slowly or in a "you're already dead" splurt. Of course, I'm not a computer gaming geek, so I would assume he at least knows what he's talking about in that realm, but I have my doubts considering how he's off in other areas.

            Foxtrot makes minor Linux references, and it's cool, even if it occasionally doesn't quite make sense. But that's because it's not *about* Linux and other geekly activities. It's as if one of the many console RPG strips was done by someone who had never played a console RPG. Or if Marmaduke was written by someone who had only a dim idea of what a dog was. PvP is funny - he's a very good gag writer... but he's about 16 degrees out of phase with what his target is. Subtle, but annoying.

            --
            Evan

  • It reads at 46057 right now.

  • begin: grumpy old man (Score:5, Funny)

    by banky ( 9941 ) <gregg@neur[ ]shing.com ['oba' in gap]> on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:12AM (#2754389) Homepage Journal
    Yeah, but back in my day, we didn't need these fancy "computers" with their "render farms". We just had a guy named Ted, and he drew pictures, on toliet paper, with chalk, and held it up to the camera, and we LIKED it!

    5 dollars would buy the whole crew food for a month, and we'd still have enough left over to put our kids through college. We didn't have trailers, and props, and sets, and we LIKED it!

    Props, yeah, we didn't have all these fancy props, your "phasers" and your "pulse pistols". We just stuck out hands out, painted them silver, and went "pew, pew, pow" with out mouths. And the silver paint made you impotent, and no one would talk to you because someone started a rumour that Communists had silver hands, but we LIKED it.

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mESSDan ( 302670 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:14AM (#2754391) Homepage
    This story is worth reading in only one aspect; It gives you a pretty good glimpse at how things have changed for kids since 1950.

    Back then, kids had almost nothing but their imagination, the special effects were not very special, and space was still a very real part of their future.

    Kids today get to watch movies that are entirely computer generated, like Final Fantasy [imdb.com], and if the newest games graphics aren't the best, it must suck. And space, well, I guess it's going to take a little longer than we expected, eh?

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Kamel Jockey ( 409856 )
      This kinda reminds me of how some kids rated the "Bad Dudes vs. Bin Laden" game on newgrounds.com. The game itself was an excellent takeoff of the classic arcade game, everything in it matched or was very close to that game.

      However, many of the kids who rated it said the graphics and sound sucked. It was kinda funny seeing that from a generation which never knew the likes of Pac-Man and Frogger.

      With that in mind...

      The special effects in Star Wars Episodes IV-VI were MUCH more realistic than Star Wars Episode I :)
    • Even when I was a kid, before Gould computers traced the first lightsabre, I hung on old black and white reruns played on Sunday mornings. Weird as the stories seem now, they were enough to spark a lot of imagination to fill the void of special effects, model-like actors, and expensive sets. Kinda like reading a book, the focus is on the story, rather than distractions of bad acting and lots of firey explosions. I don't think I could have enjoyed anything more, as we went out into the back yard and did battle with aliens and conquered new worlds.

    • Ah, nostalgia (Score:5, Informative)

      by renehollan ( 138013 ) <[rhollan] [at] [clearwire.net]> on Thursday December 27, 2001 @02:21PM (#2755344) Homepage Journal
      I didn't grow up in the 50s, but rather the 60s: I was born in 1961, and started school (kindergarten) in 1966. So, from about 1968 to 1974 I spent a lot of free time building things: first with Lego (tm) blocks, then, by the time I was 11 or 12, small electric projects: you know, a battery, light bulbs, and switches, with the battery hidden away in a corner of the room, lights in all sorts of places, and an array of switches in one "control panel".

      By the time I was 12 or 13 I discovered high-voltage (having mistaken a potted transformer for a relay and getting a zap off the secondary as I tried to energize the primary "relay coil" with a battery). I quickly built all sorts of high-voltage circuits. I knew enough about AC, DC, and step-up transformers to be dangerous, though it would still be a while before I'd think to charge up old capacitors salvaged from TV sets via half-wave rectifiers (I was too cheap to get 4 diodes for a full-wave bridge). About this time I got an TI SR-52 calculator to help with practical calculations related to my other interests: calculus, physics (espescially general relativity, which, though I had saved up to buy a college level text, was at the limit of my ability to comprehend), and programming. In 1974, I finally had access to a timesharing computer: an HP 2000, accessed via a teletype and acoustic coupled modem in the "terminal room" in my high school. This was heady stuff.

      In those days, building anything electrical, or electronic was "something". Oh sure, you could get kits, but I wanted to design my own stuff, and the hand-me-down parts I scrounged from my father proved handy. The fact was that anything technical was rare. LCDs didn't exist and LEDs were a novelty.

      We graduated from a black and white TV to colour around 1967, and cable TV shortly thereafter. I remember the first UHF stations, and the difficulty to receive them. My father had a "Super-8" movie camera, and projector for making home movies. I remember him having to send 35mm and movie film away for processing and waiting a couple of weeks to get it back. There were no VCRs, walkmans, or answering machines in the late 1960s. Eight track tape decks were a big thing.

      Things started changing slowly in the early to mid-1970s. "We" had been to the moon, and it was clear that change was afoot. I got a mono cassette deck for Christmas, 1972, though I still coveted my father's open real 2 track 7-1/2 ips reel to reel deck. Open reel decks were to be prefered for "serious" recording for some time after that, though 15ips and stereo. During high school, I had progressed to designing radio-controlled devices and anoying the heck out of neighbours by remote control (remotely-exploded firecrackers in the flower beds, anyone?). Getting time on the HP2000 was a major priority, especially when we got an upgrade to a 300 baud modem and a DECwriter. The big thing for geeks to do then was design multi-terminal spacewar games (text-based)... in BASIC... with files for inter-process communication. Then, in 1975, something big happened: The MITS Altair.

      I never got an Altair, but my father "worked with someone who knew someone who knew someone who worked for someone who got one for his business", seriously. By this time, I had progressed to logic circuits (designing my own state-machine based gizmos, and had multi-channel remote control down to a tee. I got a chance to see the Altair and play with it. I ended up writing much of the initial code for an "invoice" program for the owner of the machine. And what a beauty it was! 16K RAM, and a CRT terminal (about $3000), glowing nicely with blue lettering. BASIC took 8 minutes to load from cassette tape (one of my first projects was to build a second cassette interface), and the invoicing program about 30 seconds. And the printer! Sure, it was upper case only, but it printed at 1200 Baud! (well, it accepted data that fast, most of the time). During lunch, when I didn't have school, I got to play with that computer.

      This brings us to about 1979, when I started on my B.Comp.Sc. degree program. Notice anything? From 1965 to 1979 there were very few innovative things! Colour TV, calculators, bulky video cameras, and finally the first VHS and Beta VCRs. Computers were a real expensive hobby item, only for garage tinkerers, though the Apple ][ was starting to make an impact, as well as this thing called CP/M, which brought order to hardware abstraction. I turned 18 in 1979, the legal start of adulthood where I lived. So, during the course of my childhood, very little change occured. And I thought, at the time, what modern times and things are being invented! After all, the big things for my parents' generation were cars, planes, electricity (with it, phones, radio, and TV) -- I had seen as many new and cool things during my childhood as they had seen during their whole lives.

      My daughter is now 8-1/2 years old. Since 1993 she has seen the advent of the internet (email, www, on-line shopping and payment), cell phones becoming ubiquitous, DVDs, hand-held electronic games, satellite TV. Most importantly, I grew up in an analog world and her's is most certainly digital. My son probably won't even remember the time of the dial-up ISP: we dropped it in favour of DSL when he was 14 months old -- a whole connectivity paradigm shift in half his sister's childhood.

      When people lament that their kids' lives are on some kind of techno-amphetamine induced fast-forward, with little time for imaginative play, I wonder if its just that their world changes so much faster than that of their parents', that keeping up and absorbing all of it results in a short span of attention to any one thing, lest something else be missed. There is no time to imagine: when you return to reality, it will have changed so much, you won't recognize it.

      I do not expect this trend to continue indefinately. Moore's Law and Quantum Physics will collide at some point. Until that is reached however, we will progress at breakneck speed through a socio-economic upheaval that can probably be compared to the industrial revolution. Entire industries will disappear, though not without resistance. New companies will fight to dominate in a digital, information-rich world. Our kids will be caught up in this turmoil, and the usual effects that social upheaval causes, fighting for rights that were impossible to curtail a decade ago, that the point in their lives where they barely realize that such rights are important.

      The world is in the middle of a technological transformation that will result in a new one, without breakneck change, or at least a change of an implementative and not architectural nature. Once that happens, kids will once again be able to take a breather and let their imagination run wild in that frontier of new possibilities.

  • Radar Men from the Moon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zephc ( 225327 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:20AM (#2754395)
    I highly recommend checking out twistedmojo.com's Public Domain Theater redub of Radar Men from the Moon [twistedmojo.com], a truely stinky bit of sci-fi cinema from the 50's (i presume).

    The redub, however, is great (beware: its in RM format)
    • a truely stinky bit of sci-fi cinema

      Forget the redub - I wish I could find the original - or even better, Tom Corbitt. Some of those old serials were great. I have the radio versions in MP3, and I'd love to get the whole series. Time to add them to my Amazon and Blackstar perpectual search list...

      --
      Evan



      • www.movielandexpress.com has the whole Radar Men series on VHS for $30--and somethingweird.com might have it, too, but their site's search almost never works, so who knows. Both companies offer endless heaps of classic tv/drive-in trash.

    • You can buy that terrible Commando Cody serial on VHS tape. But you don't want to. Really.

  • great design (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "this site powered by vi"... and it SHOWS!

  • Back here they are replaying the 'Blue Book Serie', a kind of X-Files of the 50's or 60's. In color with lot of flying objects. And every episode there seems to be a scientific explanation for the phenomenon. There is always a non UFO.
    It's funny to see the non 'special effects0 of those days. Part of the fun is to see who they see the aliens. Short guys with black clothes/'skin/ and white eyes.
    • Maybe I'm thinking of something different, but I recall a show we watched in the 70's called "Project Blue Book". It was one of those weekly TV shows along the lines of "Unsolved Mysteries" or something, except it told 2 or 3 UFO stories on each episode. They'd do the standard interviews with people, show some photos when they were available, and give explanations (if scientists offered any). Haven't seen that on the air in a long time..... forgot all about it until now. Oh well.
    • American TV had some equivalent to this (if it's not the exact same series) in the mid/late 70's... I believe it was on NBC, and it was called 'Operation Blue Book'(after a military investigation of the same name). It did have a bit of an X-files feel to it, but was much tamer than X-files, and I don't recall it having any grossout monsters like X does.
    • "Project: UFO" was the name of the series, aired in '77 or '78. Producer (or exec producer) was...dang it, whatsisname, Joe Friday from "Dragnet." (I really know his name, I'm just drawing a blank for the minute.)

      Some people mentioned the title "Project Bluebook," but I think that the name was changed in syndication a la "Have Gun Will Travel/Paladin."

      • That's it: "Project: UFO" (26 episodes). The Project Bluebook is the name of the USAF organization the actors are always talking about. It is in the 70s, of course is color. The sets are very naive and Mulder&Scully are two Air Force guys, a Major and a Sargent. In each episode they have to decide if a new UFO sightseeing is a real one or a strange combination of factors. The plots are not very good, some episodes the solution is a bit alien.

  • Sci-fi dictating future reality.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bo0push3r ( 456800 ) <boopusher@gmCOBOLx.co.uk minus language> on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:26AM (#2754405) Homepage
    i think it's great how space exploration was and continues to be such a huge tennant of sci-fi.. i've heard from a number of people who grew up in the era in question that their love affair with sci-fi ended when they freaked out over the realization of how closely science-fact tails science fiction.

    now, if you're one of those bone-headed types who believes everything they see on FOX, you may even think that the trips to the moon never actually happened.

    in reality, the logistics of space travel have been a frequent oversight in science fiction since it's inception. in 'The Physics of Star Trek', when asked how the Heisenberg Compensator works, the engineering officer replies, "Very well, thank you!" for fear of sounding like a commercial for IBM i'm almost afraid to ask where my flying car is..

    now, in the 21st century, technology that usually starts as military-grade is fed to the populace like an iv drip. if the governments of the world poured half the money into space travel and other future tech that they do into $900,000 bombs and stealth planes that are obsolete before they ever leave the tarmac we might actually be realizing a lot more sci-FACT than we have been..

    wow, that was pretty incoherent..

    -j0nah
    • Space exploration was and continues to be such a huge tennant (tenet?) of sci-fi

      That's because space holds the most possibilities and unknowns... and because exploration of that other great unknown, the Earth's oceans, tends to be a lot more expensive to shoot than 'space' stuff. And yet we're still finding things in the oceans [yahoo.com] that we've never seen and can't quite explain yet.

      • definitely.. there's something to be said for sea exploration also. sci-fi sometimes skims the surface of the possibilities therein, but almost never ignoring the depth/pressure problem..

        thanks for correcting my typos too. :)

        OPS: Slash needs a spell check for people like me!!

  • Future Boy!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:33AM (#2754411) Homepage Journal
    I wasn't able to read the article. Ever since @Home went down I've had wonky DNS issues.

    However, the description of the story reminded me of an episode of Quantum Leap called "Future Boy". Sam had lept into one of the actors for a show called "Time Patrol", a '$5 per episode' serial in the mid-50's.

    What I found interesting about this episode, in relation to this article, was the argument between the show's Star and the show's Producer. The script originally called for the time travellers (Same co-starred as 'Future Boy') to overhear a conversation between two aliens (or twisted humans... my memory has faded) conspiring about the destruction of Earth. Moe, the star of the show, aborted filming and argued with the producer about people being evil in the future. He was very passionate about the show portraying a bright future where people were happy. He didn't want it ruined by having stories about people trying to destroy it.

    I can't help but think this character was inspired by Gene Roddenberry. Gene also had a vision that the future would be bright and welcoming vs. dark and gloomy. It's possible, though, that this character reflected somebody even earlier in the time period.

    I'm curious, has anybody seen this episode that thinks Moe was modeled after somebody influential in the sci-fi industry?

  • ROCKY JONES!! Heh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 )
    Oh man... do I remember Rocky Jones. If any of you are curious about some of these old Scifi-shows, find an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 called "Crash of the Moons". This movie stars Rocky Jones and crew and is mentioned in the article.

    You can watch the movie without Joel and the bots at MovieFlix.com for a small price. I warn you, though: the movie's a lot more fun with the MST3k crew.

  • Dr. Who STILL doesn't spend more than that :-) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @06:49AM (#2754422) Journal
    OK, so they built the Tardis, and occasionally invest in some styrofoam rocks or cardboard monster robots, but it's nice to have a show where they don't let special effects budget drive *too* much of the plot :-)

  • Found these while going on my usual manic spurt of new google and ebay searches when an interestng story comes up. ( :-] >

    ClassicSciFi.com [classicscifi.com]
    Ebay's old school sci-fi toys section [ebay.com]
  • and the counter reads 47349 either they're being kind or this is just not that interesting...

  • Man, I remember reading some old Tom Corbett books when I was a teenager. I don't remember any more whether they belonged to my parents or if we dug them out of a dusty corner of the house we moved into. I remember Astro's troubles with classes, and the Roger/Tom boxing match. After growing up on ST:TOS reruns, it was neat to read earlier sci-fi with nuclear-powered rockets, canals on Mars, and Venusian jungles.

    The space cadet patch logo looks just like the one on the front of the books.

    Does anybody know if the books came before the show, or vice versa?

  • I rilly apreshiated the rigorisness and thoroughsity of the artikle. Its rair to find this type of insightfulous and comprehenstable matereal in a acedemical orientated analisis.
  • Another look at the fabulous CAPTAIN VIDEO miniature sets and models of Russell, Haberstroh and Persanis. We recall that the Video Rangers had a spaceport in an isolated mountainous region of earth, and another on an asteroid. We suspect this set served for both; note the terrestrial pine trees on the left edge of the set, and the wild "alien" vegetation on the right edge. Choosing the proper camera angle would switch from earth to asteroids

    Ahhhh, the sheer elegance of simple set design. These days it would all be several hundred hours of CGI dev time, depending on where you were going


    • Ahhhh, the sheer elegance of simple set design. These days it would all be several hundred hours of CGI dev time, depending on where you were going

      But that CGI time cost much less than the time spent on the miniatures, especially when you consider inflation (time value of money, $$ spent in the '50s are worth more than $$ spent in the '00s). CGI is becoming popular in large part because it's cheaper. Remember, dollars drive Hollywood! That's not to say CGI doesn't allow for much more interesting visuals, as there are many camera angles which are pretty much impossible with miniatures. But the dollars are the driving force, especially with the knowledge that it's just getting cheaper every day. Babylon 5 [midwinter.com] was possible in 1992/93 because they were able to render thoses scenes on the Amigas, and therefore did not have to build models of the station, Starfuries, etc.

      Of course you are right, for the time, building the miniatures like that was quite elegant.

      Milalwi
    • Budget, not technology, is the issue. See "Destination Moon", a big-budget special effects film from the 1950s, to see what could be done back then.
  • At the beginning of the show Lisa and Bart are watching one of those early sci-fi movies. It's a riot: "space air is leaking in! put on your googles!"
  • Wasn't there some sort of Captain Video TV show in the late 80's/early 90's? The name is familiar, it was some sort of post-apocalyptic humans vs robots thing. One part I do remember is there was a line of toys that you could use to shoot at teh tv show at certain points and the tv show would shoot back (there was some weird strobe effect going on on the screen).
    • Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future. Great series, and I wish it hadn't cut off when it did; the series was NOT afraid to seriously stick it to the heroes; alot of their victories were bitter/sweet, if not downright Phyrric. They wern't afraid to pull punches with the badguys, too; using humans to carry engineered plagues, for example. Some of the best episodes were penned by J. Michael Stracynzci, which I've probably spelled incorrectly, who is most famous for creating Babylon 5.
  • "gasp, space-air is leaking in!"
    "Quick, put on your goggles!"
    Put on protective glasses only covering the eyes and lightes a smoke.

    Anyone see that EP of Futurama? A perfect example. :-)
  • I had the opportunity to meet and listen to Jan Merlin (Roger Manning from 'Tom Corbett - Space Cadet') a few years back at a Wild West days festival. He's a very engaging speaker with a huge repertoire of tales of the Golden Age of Hollywood, some taller than others [grin].

    If you get the chance, Jan's going to be appearing at the Williamsburg Film Festival 28-Feb thru 2-Mar next year. As the website notes, guest stars appear subject to their availability and health. Opportunities to meet people like Jan and have them share their memories with you are becoming more and more rare as the years go by, so if you can fit it into your schedule you should. I personally found it definitely worth my time and money to go when I did.

    "Williamsburg Film Festival" [tripod.com]

  • "Star Trek" low budget??? (Score:2, Informative)

    by nedron ( 5294 )
    Why would Star Trek be considered low budget? Its original pilot (The Cage) was one of the most expensive pilots ever given the green light. The second pilot wasn't significantly cheaper. And the first season of the series was very expensive for Desilu. It wasn't until the third season that they were on a woefully limited budget that meant most episodes that season had to take place onboard using the standing sets.

    Even the third season looks very good, due to the work of the lighting and camera crews.

    I doubt you'll find a show that was costing the studio as much during the same time period.

  • The page talks about the fun of live broadcasts. Imagine if a Star Trek series was done as _live TV_. Just pre-render the CGI and pray the actors remember the script.

    Actually, given Shatner's admission that his... unique... speakingstyle as... Kirk in ST:TOS was due to the need to pause to remember his just-given-that-day lines, maybe we sort of had that once.

    Still, watching live actors attempting to remember the current crop of technobabble would at least improve Star Trek scriptwriting.
  • The future just isn't what it used to be.
  • Flying Nun?

  • 1940s Sci-Fi TV (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jonathanpost ( 415904 )
    Type "science fiction television" into GOOGLE and the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide comes in #5 in the world, this week. There a lot about Sci-Fi TV of the 1950s (including the Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein connections). Some of what it says about Sci-Fi TV of the 1940s:

    1940s: Science Fiction TV 1940-1949

    Captain Video and His Video Rangers, Dumont,
    27 Jun 1949-1 Apr 1955
    This was a historically significant show, despite the astonishingly stingy prop budget of $25 per week. Why? Because it was the first and most successful of three children's science fiction shows that seduced kids into the axioms of the Space Opera genre, the other two being "Space Patrol" and "Tom Corbett--Space Cadet." It can be argued that this created some of the popular support that allowed for a genuine space program only a few years later. A wonderful book about these shows is "The Great Television Heroes" by Donald F. Glut and Jim Harmon.
    The government played no significant role in scientific genius Captain Video single-handedly saving the world out of a sense of civic duty. By so doing, he not only defeated evildoers such as Dr. Clysmok, Dahoumie, Heng Foo Seeng, Kul of Eos, Mook the Moon Man, and Nargola, but also had a chance to field-test his gadgets, including The Atomic Rifle, the Discatron, the Optical Scillometer, the Radio Scillograph, and the Cosmic Ray Vibrator (stop giggling, will you?).
    His most fiendish adversary was Dr. Pauli, who had his own set of super-duper hardware, including the Barrier of Silence (later parodied on "Get Smart"), the Cloak of Invisibility, and the Trisonic Compensator. The Dumont Network (whose demise alone could end this popular show) sold to their viewers such premiums as Decoder Rings, Space Helmets, and plastic copies of Captain Video's weaponry, almost all of which are highly collectable today.
    Late in its life, the show was retitled "The Secret Files of Captain Video" and they stopped editing in stock footage of Westerns through the money-saving "Remote Carrier Beam."
    Captain Video's spaceship was called the "Galaxy" -- and every child wished to be Captain Video's sidekick "The Ranger" and ride the Galaxy to exotic destinations, whether or not the instruments on the control panel were obviously painted on.
    Captain Video (1949-50) -- Richard Coogan
    Captain Video (1950-55) -- Al Hodge (formerly the voice of "The Green Hornet" on radio)
    The Ranger -- Don Hastings
    Dr. Pauli (1949) -- Bran Mossen
    Dr. Pauli (1949-55) -- Hal Conklin
    Creator/Producer -- James Caddigan
    Producer -- Larry Menkin
    Writer -- Maurice C. Brockhauser, and later: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Sheckley, and Jack Vance
    Music -- Wagner's Overture to the Flying Dutchman

    Lights Out, NBC, 19 July 1949-29 Sep 1952
    Spun off from the hit radio show which began in 1934, there were four television specials produced by Fred Coe (Goodyear TV Playhouse,
    Producer's Showcase, 1955 Emmy for Best Producer of a Live Series) in 1946, and then after three years of development hell, this fine suspense anthology. Each epsiode opened with an extreme close-up of a pair of eyes, cutting to a close-up of a bloody hand reaching for the light switch, and a voice-over of a chilling laugh and the catch-phrase "lights out, everybody!"
    Each episode was shot live. Some were adaptations of classic short stories, others were developed specially for this series.
    Narrator (1949-50) -- Jack LaRue
    Narrator (1950-52) -- Frank Gallop
    Musical Effects:
    Theremin -- Paul Lipman (1949)
    Organ (1949-52) -- Arlo Hults
    Harp (1950-52) -- Doris Johnson
    Began on radio (1934) and 4 specials
    (produced by Fred Coe) on TV (1946)
    Guest Stars: Boris Karloff, Eddie Albert, Billie Burke, Yvonne DeCarlo, Raymond Massey, Burgess Meredith, Leslie Nielsen, Basil Rathbone

    The Secret Files of Captain Video -- see Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1940s)

    Starring Boris Karloff, ABC, Sep 1949-Dec 1949
    starting with 27 Oct 1949 episode name changed to "Mystery Playhouse Starring Boris Karloff."
    Host -- Boris Karloff

    The Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide is in the last couple of months of its 6th year online. Go to http:/magicdragon.com and click on "Science Fiction", and then click on TV, or Movies, or Authors, or Genres, or Countries, or whatever. See why this labor-of-love free information domain gets over 1,200,000 visitors a year...

    The co-webmaster, who posted this teaser, is in the Open Source Community, was once on the Board of Directors of Brave New Worlds, Inc., and still has 3,600 shares of VALinux, umm, I mean VA Software left from VA's acquisition of Brave New Worlds...

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