the good old days

The first Buck Rogers film was shown to the public during the second year, 1934 edition, of the Chicago World’s Fair. The Century of Progress International Exposition was held in Chicago in 1933 and 1934 to celebrate the city’s centennial. The theme of the fair was technological innovation…. The “Buck Rogers Show,” as it was called on admission tickets, was located on the Enchanted Island playground for children…. after watching the movie, visitors could purchase the very same toy spaceships and ray guns they had just seen.
– from Matinee at the Bijou

The Tigermen from Mars have broken their treaty and are attacking Earth — with King Growlo in command! OH NO!

Um, kids, stop laughing, you’re supposed to be worried about this.

Ahem. As I was saying, can Buck Rogers save the day?

It’s delightful fun on so many levels. Dr. Huer’s cosmic-radio-television invention not only lets him keep an eye on the action (spaceships flying in circles going BZZZT! BZZZT! BZZZT!), it lets him yells at the battle.

You know how some guys will sit on the couch at home screaming at the quarterback, hoping that if they should really loud, their team will play better? This is the 25th Century version. Mankind doesn’t mature in the next 500 years.

But still, it’s so bad it’s good.

The second episode of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century kept the feature length format, but this one was made exclusively for television.  The production values are a bit lower in Planet of the Slave Girls than in the premier film, but it’s not too noticeable, and the show never looks cheap.  Twiki the robotic midget also starts talking a lot more (and flying a star fighter), but while annoying, this doesn’t ruin the show.

The episode begins with Buck lecturing some cadets on twentieth-century tactics.  He tries using a football metaphor about taking out an enemy squadron by sacking its “quarterback.”  Of course, this requires him to explain tackle football, and the scene degenerates into a brawl between Buck and the students’ regular instructor Major Denton, who is a former lover of Wilma’s.  (Buck is jealous.)  To be fair, they return to the quarterback metaphor for the climactic space battle, but that doesn’t make up for subjecting viewers to two grown men taking turns tackling each other into furniture.

After that, the real plot starts.  Somebody is poisoning the Earth Defense Directorate’s pilots with tainted food.  They trace the contamination to one of Earth’s food-producing vassal worlds, and Buck, in his new capacity as the directorate’s investigative dogsbody, is dispatched with Wilma to investigate.  (Although first, he has to save Dr. Huer from assassination by a female ninja with a razor-edged boomerang. That scene is exciting! The ninja also sabotages Earth’s superintelligent computer, which prevents the medical experts from figuring out how to cure the fighter pilots’ ailment in time.)  It turns out that all the food from the planet Vistula  is produced by slave labor, and the likely culprits are the evil slaver tribes who really control the planet.  (The governor, played by Dr. Cornelius Roddy McDowall, is bumbling fool who can’t seem to see the problems either with slavery or letting obvious traitors dominate his administration.)

Buck figures out how the poison is getting into the food discs bound for Earth, but it’s already too late.  There are too few well pilots to defend the Earth from the attack that is surely coming.  So Buck, now along with Denton, heads into the badlands to find and disable the fleet that must be hidden out there somewhere.  He finds the enemy base, get’s captured, escapes, and eventually leads the ragged remnants of Earth’s defense fleet against a superior number of mercifully inexperienced bad guys.

The stand-out in this episode is Jack Palance.  He plays the villain Kaleel, the megalomaniac master of the planet’s desert wastes, with powerful but limited psychic powers.  Specifically, he can make his hands glow red and kill anyone who believes in him.  Before the adoring throngs of his cult, who are ready to betray their loved ones to him for even the tiniest infractions, he is an over-the-top witch doctor.  Among his intimates, or facing the less impressionable heroes from Earth, he is calmer, more calculating, yet no less mad and conniving.  It’s basically the same role Palance played in Outlaw of Gor, but without the “split-butter-top hat.”  (Prior to the comedic role in City Slickers for which he is best remembered, Palance played a long string of sinister bad guys, and by 1979, he had the style down pat.)

After the regrettable football scene, I found that this episode raced by.  There was little padding; if anything, the story might have seemed a tiny bit rushed.  Watching it immediately after the pilot film, I couldn’t help but notice how much less sexual innuendo there was (although there are moments, like when Buck learns the woman who’s come to his room to ask for his help is actually supposed to be a courtesan at his service).  And although I missed it the first time, I eventually noticed that the story featured an cameo by Buster Crabbe, the original cinematic Buck Rogers; a few lines of mildly humorous dialogue between Crabbe and Gil Gerard become a lot funnier when you realize who the former is.  So far, this might be my favorite of all the Buck Rogers episode; thanks, Mr. Palance!

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century kicked off with a feature film.  It’s not entirely clear whether the film was originally intended to serve as a pilot for a broadcast show (or whether it stared out as a feature-length TV pilot, then got turned into a film — like Star Trek: the Motion Picture – then did well enough to convince NBC to make the series after all).  I mention this for a couple reasons.  For one thing, there are two different versions of this story — the theatrical release and the television version.  The latter included a couple extra scenes that helped set up the ongoing series and omitted the death of a character who would show up in later episodes of the show.  I’ve found several statements online that only the film version was included with the DVD set.  Now, I don’t know what was pressed onto any of the physical disks, but I can say for certain that what I watched with Netflix’s streaming video was the television version.  It had a television opening, complete with an episode title (Awakening, whereas the movie was just called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), and the supposedly missing scenes were quite present.

Buck starts the movie frozen — by a combination of gasses, including ozone and “methylon,” which somehow put him into perfect suspended animation.  Suspended animation apparently meant covering Gil Gerard in soap flakes.  Buck’s space shuttle is discovered by a capital ship from the Draconian empire (who are — you guessed it — EVIL!) and Captain Rogers is taken aboard, where his revived in the presence of Kane (played by Henry Silva — “for all your Henry Silva needs”), a traitor against his home planet of Earth, and Princess Ardala, heir to the Draconian throne.  The pair are based on Buck’s classic enemies, Killer Kane and his mistress Ardala; but while it was the man, Kane, who was the pair’s leader on the radio show, in this isntance it’s clearly Ardala who has the upper hand.  There’s a whiff of a sexual relationship between the two, but given that Ardala seems to mate with all the discrimination of a mink, it would almost seem odd if she and Kane didn’t have some sordid personal history.

The two villains decide to send Buck ahead of them to Earth — where they intend to cause trouble — to cause even more trouble.  They place a tracer on Buck’s craft, which will give them information about the Earth’s defenses, and, if it’s uncovered, implicate Buck as a traitor.  Sure enough, the Earth authorities, led by Wilma Deering and Dr. Huer (Buck’s main allies in just about any incarnation) and a member of the “computer council” that may or may not rule Earth (along with an ambiguously Jewish robot midget who carries the sessile computer council member around), decide Rogers is an agent of the space pirates.  (Did I mention there were space pirates?  They are secretly working for the Draconians.)  So Buck goes on trial before Earth’s electronic masters, although this seems to worry him less than knowing the details of the nuclear holocaust that destroyed twentieth-century civilization.

The plot seemed to be rushed at times.  Buck’s trial is barely shown, and his sudden death sentence seems rather abrupt.  Just before the trial, he sneaks out to visit the ruins of ancient Chicago which surround the “inner city” where the Earth Defense Directorate holds sway.  His wanderings there, which appear to occupy the best part of a day, last only a few minutes on screen.  Yet in that time, he manages to locate a highly significant graveyard in old Chicago, be attacked by a horde of slavering Unforgiven, get rescued by Wilma and her henchfolk, and come to a personal epiphany about his role in this new future world.  (Incidentally, the Unforgiven — who, as we well know, populate the wilds between the new cities, along with Beasts and manshonyaggers — never seem to be mentioned again in the series, although it is uncommon for any of the heroes to be found on the ground outside the protected metropoleis.)

Shortly after rescuing Buck, Col. Deering herself seems to have an exceedingly rapid change or heart.  Since the ancient astronaut’s arrival, she had been struggling mightily with whether to trust him.  Abruptly, at a party thrown by the Terran gulls in honor of Ardala’s arrival on Earth, Wilma decides that that she definitely trusts Buck.  What’s more, she wants him between her legs immediately.  (Maybe she’d had too much punch while she was waiting for a chance to talk with him.)  She even starts talking about how she’s been experiencing “the most amazing tenderness.”

However, Buck blows her off and runs away with Ardala, who wants him for her sexual slave.  (For the rest of the series, she is consistently more interested in mating with this man from the twentieth century than obeying her father’s commands or even conquering Earth).  Once he gets back to the princess’s ship, Buck drugs her, slips away, and sabotages her fighters as they make ready to lay waste to Earth.  With the help of the annoying robot types, he makes his escape — having saved the planet and proved his devotion to Earth’s cause.  Henceforth, he’s free to go on weekly adventures for the Earth Defense Directorate.

The movie is actually pretty good.  The acting is never really outstanding, but the characters are supposed to be noble or villainous archetypes.  It’s space opera, and Buck Rogers is The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  The special effects were pretty good.  They were not “up to date”; the space battles are not at the level of Star Wars; but the producers were making an honest effort.  Their special effects budget must have been lower for the series, since many of the battle shots get reused in later episodes, with little or no modification.  Personally, I liked a number of the later episodes better.  There’s some overacting, and while this works for the villains, the humorlessness of Erin Gray as Col. Deering detracts from her character; and the changeover from being a Col. Nicholson-esque military stooge to a romantic sop is extremely jarring.  The set and costume design, on the other hand, are significantly better than most later shows.  The artistic minds appear to have put real thought into designing outfits, decorations, and dances that are not obviously based on late 1970s trends.  (By and large, the hair is 1970s though, and at one point, Buck puts on a disco boogie show for the straightlaced aristocrats of the future.)  The level of sexual innuendo is way above that typical of the television run, but I guess they could get away with a lot more in a feature film.  There’s also a fair amount of getting high on the future equivalent of aspirin, and while the drug certainly doesn’t go away in the TV episodes, when it’s used on people they act a lot less high.  Ultimately, Buck Rogers’s Awakening is not on the list of things that I have to watch again soon, but maybe in four or five years.

When I was growing up, my whole family enjoyed watching Dr. Who.  A lot of other science fiction reruns, however, I watched strictly on my own.  My favorite among these was Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.  Although I actually watched a lot more Star Trek (due to its being on much more consistently), Buck Rogers was my hands-down favorite (although I once skipped an episode because I thought it had been replaced in the schedule by Diff’rent Strokes; how that could have happened, I’ll explain down the line).  Battlestar Galacactica (which — let’s admit it — was just Bonanza in space) was a distant third.

Buck Rogers was a man from the twentieth century who had somehow been frozen and thawed out five hundred years later.  How precisely this occurred depends on which incarnation of the character we’re talking about.  In the 1979-81 television show, he was an astronaut, whose craft drifted for centuries with Buck luckily having subsided into suspended animation.  That’s about all the explanation we got.  Frankly, I didn’t care.  I didn’t find the contemporary origins of the hero very interesting; I don’t need a fictional character to be “like me” to be able to admire or emphathize with him.  After getting thawed out from his freeze, Buck joined the forces of good and went on adventures small and large in typical episodic sci-fi fashion.

I liked the show a lot; it had reasonably up-to-date special effects and a likable hero and heroine — the estimable Wilma Deering.  (The rest of the characters were rather middling, especially the robot buddy.)  It wasn’t high art, but it was great for a child of eight or nine.  There are a few episodes that I still remember quite well; Buck’s adventures on a planet that gradually turned all me into satyrs is most notable among them.

Responding to my interest in the show,  mother bought me a record with four classic Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century radio episodes from the 1930s.  While it was intersting to listen to, there were two problems.  The radio serials ran four days a week, and most of the time, each week contained a semi-self-contained storyline.  Other radio shows of the era were similar.  I had another record of four Superman episodes, during which the Man of Steel fought the Wolf, a criminal mastermind who was attempting to undermine public confidence in the safety of the railroad system.  After the Wolf’s capture in the fourth installment, there was a cliff-hanger ending, with the Wolf’s master — the Yellow Mask — calling Perry White and threatening to destroy the Daily Planet within the day.  Not exactly a complete resolution, but at least the threat posed by the Wolf was taken care of neatly.  Anyway, the first three episodes of the Buck Rogers record followed a plot set on the moons of Jupiter.  The problem was that the fourth episode was completely unrelated.  The evolving plot, nearing its climax, was completely dropped, in favor of a one-episode outtake from an underground adventure.  I guess the conclusion of that particular week was probably missing — but then why choose that particular storyline for the record at all?  (Unless there were simply no complete week-long storylines that had survived, which hardly seems likely.  I’ve seen claims on the Internet Archive that only fourteen episodes of the radio show are still around, but the fact that they were selling four episodes on LP that aren’t among those fourteen rather puts the lie to that.)

The second problem I had with the old radio plays was more subtle.  Other than having a name in common and nominally taking place during the same epoch of future history, the two versions of Buck Rogers had next to nothing in common.  The radio serials weren’t bad, but the mere fact that the hero was named Buck wasn’t going to make me a fan.  Honestly, I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t have this same of attitude toward fandom.  Myself, I am a huge fan of Star Wars and the New Gods.  Yet, with all due respect to the likes of Walt Simonson, I have no interest in the ever-abundant Star Wars novels or the occasional new comic series featuring Orion and Lightray.  It’s not the characters in these epics that I’m attached to, it’s the stories themselves, each of which was a product of a unique creative team at a particular time.  Anyone can copy the heroes and the settings, but the result is usually drek.  The various versions of Buck Rogers had complete different formats moods.  I was a fan of the NBC television show.  The rest — I could take them or leave them.

What old sci-fi I get to watch now is determined primarily by what happens to be on the channels we get at home, plus what is available through Netflix.  Shows that are available as streaming video, rather than just on a physical DVD, are especially nice.  Perusing the selections Netflix had to offer, I noticed the NBC Buck Rogers series listed, and so many childhood memories came flooding back.  Initially, I was afraid that the show would turn out to be a lot worse than I remembered it.  Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised; the episodes are still quite enjoyable, despite the changes in special effects technology and my own more advanced age.

Unlike Dr. Who, the Twilight Zone, and Star Trek, Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century is not a staple for classic sci-fi television fans.  But for me, it has a special place.  So this Sunday, I will be offering the first of what I expect will be many reviews of Buck’s adventures.  The series began with a feature film pilot, and that’s where my coverage will pick up.