 There, that wasn't so bad, was it? I mean, sure, there wasn't the urgent, dymanic sense the Bleat usually has, ripped from the headlines and all that. (cough) No tales of daughter or Target or long accounts of retail adventures, or TV reviews you couldn't care about -
No, hold on. Checking the folder of . . . ah.
Let's end this week with a look at a TV show from 1979:
Wikipedia's summary:
The president (Lew Ayres) of the United States announces that the three men and their ship will be the nucleus of a new nation, and asks Americans to turn their lights on that night to show support for the project. The astronauts take photos of the Earth's surface as they orbit, to be processed later to determine the level of public support for the idea. The results indicate widespread support for a new nation in outer space.
Got it? The US builds a huge space station, with the intention of making it a separate country, which is granted legal status by . . . well, the power of illumination, I guess. (Sorry.) Then we skip ahead a few years to show the station already constructed.
About the plot, and the acting, and little things like that - eh, I don't care. It's the look that interests me. The "nation" of Earth II, named after the thing it is not on:
You have to have a bridge. After Star Trek, everyone had to have a bridge:
It's quite spare, as you see. The movie was shot in 1970-71, before Star Wars changed the aesthetics. It's more suburban boardroom now:
Well, let's see who's joined the station:
Tony F! He's a hot-tempered . . . scientist, and he wants the station to be more aggressive towards Red China, which sent them up the bomb. They send out a shuttle to examine the bomb - and here's the role that got her that Polaroid gig!
Nothing dates the future like computers.
You have to respect the decision not to go unitard / jump-suit like some 70s sci-fi shows . . .
But it looks a lot like 1971.
To give it absolute cred for its era:
And for all your nerds out there:
Technical advisor . . . for SPACE! Bucky! That was the stuff that showed up in sci-fi mags and got you all excited. Maybe this would be better than Star Trek - nah, that wouldn't happen, but it might fill the void.
This was a pilot. It wasn't picked up.
Since Friday is usually devoted to old radio, here's . . . some old radio. But this is different. WCOL airchecks. I have no idea where I found them; a friend gave me some files many years ago, salvaged from reel-to-reels.
Service Merchandise, by the way, was a "catalogue showroom" store. Wikipedia: "Unlike a self-serve retail store, most of the items are not displayed; customers select the products from printed catalogs in the store and fill out an order form. The order is brought to the sales counter, where a clerk retrieves the items from the warehouse area to a payment and checkout station."
Very Soviet, in a way. But they had a wide variety of goods, so not very Soviet at all.
More next week! Now let's go back a decade and preview something an upcoming feature in 2018. Bad singles. Lousy 60s songs.
That’ll do - see you tomorrow. Remember, the Bleat Index has the links. You could eat them all up today.
Why would you do that. |
