However, we're very close to Hallowe'en.This year I'll be reading the collected edition of Marvel's Man-Wolf, some of which was reprinted in black-and-white in the UK in the late 70s. I think it might've been in Star Wars Weekly but I'm unsure.
Aptly, I'm posting about the Horror Channel first of all; just over a fortnight ago, a repeat run of the first series of Space: 1999 began. It must be about ten years since I last saw it, in an evening slot on ITV4. While some of Barry Gray's orchestral pieces are a bit cheesy and very similar to his scores for Thunderbirds, I was very struck by the visually striking direction: the slo-mo,the close-ups and the fish eye lenses.
My earliest memories of the first series coincide with my dad taking us to the futuristic Mushroom restaurant in East Kilbride for prawn cocktail and gammon steaks. Payday was Thursday, like Space 1999 on STV.
I was motivated to buy and read second copies of the original novels from the mid-70s:
Alien Seed by E.C. Tubb , plus head teacher John Rankine's Android Planet and Rogue Planet. I'd read all the novelisations circa 1976. I remember buying one of the "new" paperbacks somewhere in Galloway- possibly Android Planet in Newton Stewart, although my memory is of a spinner rack in a post office- and reading it at Monreith beach. I wish I'd kept them, especially Breakaway but I think they were jettisoned while moving flats in the early 90s- possibly when I first moved to Dennistoun. I also fervently wish I'd bought 1977's Earthfall, which commands high prices on ebay.
The original novels feel very faithful to the series.I remembered Alien Seed with its vampiric space nymph very vividly.They're also very Seventies- the Kinky Space People of Android Planet are sybaritic and their erotic art is a turn-off for gamine Sandra Benes.
Rankine, in particular, has his quirks as author: his strange insistence on the formation "Earth Planet" and the "elastic bell" of Dr. Russell's hair There's a slangy, informal quality to some of the narration which feels quite gritty. Nipples are mentioned a lot. .Koenig and Helena are clearly lovers in Rankine's novels.
There is a sense of "hard sci-fi" in Rogue Planet where the parasitic Omphalos ages the Alphans to death .Its amdram Shakespeare scenes at the start could've come straight from a tv episode.
The first series has a gloomy, doomy tone, with the (probable) remnants of humanity adrift in an implacable and deadly cosmos but it's also about expanding consciousness, like 2001 or Star Trek The Motion Picture.
There's a fan theory that the second series (which is about monsters and where Victor Bergman and Paul Morrow have been killed off between seasons) is a parallel time track, following another space warp, with a crew from a happier Earth. They laugh much more at episode's end rather than moodily gazing out the window. I feel I know the Maya/Tony episodes less well, since STV relegated them to a kids tv slot in the late 70s but I certainly remember their weakest installments. I actually first encountered Maya in Look-In rather than on tv. I was also a keen reader of all the second season novelisations in Strathaven and East Kilbride Libraries, forty years ago.
Will the Fred Freiberger-produced second season, with its indomitable kickass Space Men ( c.f. Star Trek Voyager) and the Wonder Twins- inspired Spock-analogue be adapted one day by Big Finish? Perhaps so, because just before the Horror Channel premiere, the first volume of audio adventures of the Alphans was released.
Breakaway is reimagined, over two discs by Nicholas Briggs, as he did with The Prisoner. It's a slower-paced story and it's the lethal Queller Drive that opens a space warp, just as the signal from "Meta planet" as Rankine might've put it, generates exotic particles. Briggs replaces the simple, if unscientific, cause of the Moon's odyssey with a more complex one, drawing on the series's own mythos.
Briggs tries to give the Alphans more of a gender balance by making Kano female. The doubling -up of Alan Carter and Paul Morrow works, amazingly- although they can't really be in scenes together. Morrow has an" 'Ey oop, I'm reet Northern accent" here - Prentis Hancock was born in Glasgow and went to Rose Bruford.
Some of Briggs's writing was unintentionally hilarious: Dr. Russell is more of a "potty mouth" and her "Shut the front door!" was really laughable. Bergman says something like "the force would be inconceivable- five times...". Not inconceivable then. But despite the very modern, but not very Nineties, "I was never not behind the project", Koenig's exhaustion and frustration are portrayed well by Mark "The Eleven" Bonnar . It's surprising, therefore, that an Eagle pilot has a terrible "Scoattish" accent.John Scougall could've played that cameo role!
There are rather "cringey" news bulletins in Breakway that use the theme music for the series - BF's arrangement is a bit funkier- but the show's title is used in a more effective way, echoing through the closing seconds of the episode. There's no suspense or surprises in retelling a story from 1975 but it's realised well and I'd listen to further installments.
Again, like The Prisoner, we're told there will be new adventures but which episodes might be re-imagined? Talkier ones, obviously.Voyager's Return is likely, since it's the story of Ernst Queller and his space drive. Black Sun is a dialogue-driven, almost mystical episode, revealing a cosmic intelligence that intervenes for the Alphans. Death's Other Dominion with its cod-Shakespearean monologues from crazy Captain Jack ( no relation) is possible. I think Earthbound should definitely be in the next box-set. The horrible fate of Commissioner Simmonds would be nightmarish on audio.
We're approaching my 450th post and I have plans to blog in November about some Star Trek books and comics.
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