UFO

MoonStraker

UFO
Century 21 TV 1970-1971
Network Blu Ray B
26 episodes

UFO was Gerry Anderson’s first crack at a TV show featuring live action performers instead of his Supermarionation puppets of previous shows such as Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 (although he had worked on live action movies before). It was also his first stab at making television for an older, more adult audience and yeah, there are definitely some instances of mild violence, sexual undertones and mature themes explored in the show. It aired for only one series between 1970 - 1971.

And, yeah, I was two to three years old and I loved it. To the extent I had the UFO Interceptor from Dinky. The one with the challenging, pull back lever on the underside which took insane amounts of strength to be able to pull to reload the front missile (look, it was a hard pull for a three year old, okay!) and with the distinctive green metal casing which was completely out of keeping with the white ones seen in the show.

Set in the future world of... 1980... the show starred the great Ed Bishop (who is in a few Bond movies in very minor roles and who was, of course, the voice of Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet) as Ed Straker, the leader of SHADO, which stood for Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation. And it’s amazing how, for a top secret organisation set up to prevent enemy UFOs from attacking the Earth, the SHADO symbol was emblazoned on all the vehicles out in the field. Hmm.

He was backed up by George Sewell (I met him once as a child, his father used to live in the same block of flats as my nan and was friendly with her) and Michael Billington as the primary action man for the show. About two thirds of the way through the show, there was some kind of strike in the studios and, when the balance of the episodes started filming again, Sewell (and a number of actors) were unable to continue (or were fired, I don’t think the American distributors liked Sewell) and so other actors came in, such as Wanda Ventham (mother of Benedict Cumberbatch). Also, the Earth based doctor was played by Vladek Sheybal, who of course plotted to bring about the downfall of 007 in From Russia With Love (reviewed here). 

The series obviously relied on the model making skills and miniature work of Anderson’s regular Supermarionation people and so we had three lines of defence highlighted on the show, each with their own personnel and vehicles. 

So first line of defence was the moon base, where the Interceptors would get launched and all the ladies on the staff wore silvery white, figure hugging costumes and purple wigs (no explanation was given for this). Then you had the ground Earth defence force where Straker was based (an underground base situated beneath the Harlington-Straker film studios, which was their cover operation), which had the trucks with hidden rockets and lasers called SHADOmobiles.  Alas, I never had the Dinky version of the SHADOmobile but always wanted one.

Lastly there was the undersea submarine which launched a kind of hunter plane, it’s rockets somehow igniting under the water and propelling it out of the ocean and into the air. All the people on the submarine... again for no obvious reason... wore string vests. Although the real sexism of the show became apparent here because the female crew were obviously wearing something light in a strategic place below the vest, so you couldn’t see their nipples. C’mon ladies! Equality in the workplace please!

And every week a few guests would appear in the acting roster, some of which would later become famous and some of whom were already big names... but it’s interesting to see ‘unknowns’ such as  Steven Berkoff, David Warbeck and James Cosmo on the show. Along with such stalwarts as George Cole and, even, as a replacement secretary for Straker in a few episodes, Miss Moneypenny herself,  Lois Maxwell. 

And I loved the show then and, finally seeing it again after all this time, I love it now. 

A sign of the times... everybody smokes at work in this (and I mean everybody) and the drinks dispensers on the base are there if you want to help yourself to a refreshing cup of... checks notes... vodka or whiskey while meeting with your boss. So, yeah... the seventies ruled, even if they were pretending to be the eighties (which in no way compared in real life to this wonderful version of that decade). I mean, even the dialogue is almost jaw dropping by today’s standards but we would have thought nothing of lines such as “These clouds give about as much cover as a g-string on a bellydancer!” at the time.

But what strikes me most is the quality of the writing and the stories on this show. I mean, okay, the early episodes were all about showing off the various craft and tech as these defenders of the Earth took out the evil UFOs but, after a while, the show settles down and really tackles interesting issues and gets into real adult drama. Such as the one where Ed’s son is run over in front of his estranged wife’s home (partially his fault) and how he has to put a UFO emergency ahead of flying the required medication needed to save his son using the company’s gadgets, thus resulting in the death of his son. Not to mention stuff like a submarine trapped at the bottom of the ocean with a claustrophobic Straker aboard, an episode where time can be altered and frozen at will by the aliens and a few dealing with alien mind control where ‘friendlies’ are turned into killers. 

Probably my favourite episode, though, is a flashback story called Confetti Check A-OK, where we go right back to the start and a freshly married Straker is asked to spend the next ten years setting up SHADO... and we watch it all being built over the course of the episode, as we also watch the work take a toll on Ed and his wife, witnessing the total disintegration of the marriage. This is one of a few amazing episodes of the show which really hits hard and makes you think.

And of course, all the way through the series, we have regular Anderson composer Barry Gray’s toe tapping music accompanying the cast on their various adventures. I used to whistle this all the time as a kid and, of course, it’s still quite an earworm.

So, yeah, I’d have to say my revisiting of UFO was an entirely positive one. I really enjoyed myself on this. Alas for all concerned, the series was successful but cancelled after one series. However, the direction that Anderson had been heading in for series two, which would concentrate more on the moonbase side of things, was quickly converted into the starting idea for a new live action series, which would run for two years and was called Space 1999 (reviewed here). But, yeah, UFO was a solid sci-fi TV series of the time which did what the genre does best, use the fantastic framework to explore real life ideas in a situation where those ideas could be explored beyond the boundaries of the everyday world. I’m pleased that this one lived up to my hazy memories, for sure. Definitely worth a watch.

The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson

No Strings Attached

The Worlds of Gerry 
and Sylvia Anderson
The Story Behind international Rescue 
by Ian Fryer
Foreword by Shane Rimmer
Fonthill Media
ISBN 9681781555040

Ian Fryer’s book, The Worlds Of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, subtitled The Story Behind International Rescue, is perhaps a little off the mark in terms of its title... as the book not only contains the origins of their most popular franchise Thunderbirds (and all but one of the puppets on the cover of the book reflect that show) but gives equal amounts of space for all the other Gerry Anderson created series’ of that era. So it charts his career starting in 1945 when he joined the Colonial Film Unit making British propaganda, then went to Gainsborough to be an editor, then became a freelance sound editor and so on until he was running his own studio for what was, obviously, the brith of supermarionation and, later, his live action productions. 

So this book covers, with a chapter apiece, The Adventures Of Twizzle, Torchy The Battery Boy, Four Feather Falls, Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Thunderbirds Are Go & Thunderbird 6, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, Joe 90, Doppelganger, The Secret Service, UFO, The Protectors, the unaired supermarionation pilot show The Investigator and up to both years of Space 1999, which is when the partnership between the Anderson’s ended in divorce. Throughout the book there are also chapters pushed in between some of these to give a taste of the scene in the UK at the time, or to provide a little more information on important players… such as Lew Grade, Derek Meddings, the state of British Sci-Fi in the 1960s and the collapse of the UK film industry. 

This in addition to providing mini biographies within the main text about important cast and crew including, of course, composer extraordinaire Barry Gray. Due to the scope of the title, the book doesn’t really stray beyond Space 1999 when it gets there but it does have another mini chapter at the end of the book at least acknowledging and providing minor details of his later shows such as Terrahawks, Dick Spanner and Space Precinct. 

Now, although there is a fair bit of information given to some things… I perhaps found it a little less detailed than I would like but, being a novice to the Anderson universe… although I watched most of these as a kid and had some of the toys such as the Dinky Thunderbird 2 and the Joe 90 car (wish I still had that one)... I did pick up on a lot of things I didn’t know. Such as Stanley Kubrick offering Gerry’s studio the chance to do all the effects for his 2001 - A Space Odyssey. Gerry was too busy to be able to take on the job but Kubrick then poached two off his key personnel who did the job for him. Which I thought was an interesting story. 

It also explained to me why Four Feather Falls came about because, obviously (and I remember this from when I was a kid), the American western TV shows dominated all the networks at that time. I found out another fact that Stingray was not only the first Supermarionation show to be shot in colour, it was indeed the first British TV show ever shot in colour, which surprised me somewhat. 

As far as Thunderbirds and the crew at International Rescue goes… The rescue idea was born from real life events of the trapped miners in Lengede-Broustedt mine in Lower Saxony in West Germany in 1963, while the Tracy family itself was ripped straight from the family structure of the Ponderosa on the popular TV western show Bonanza. Indeed, the Jeff Tracy puppet was itself based on Lorne Greene, it turns out. 

In addition to all this, each chapter brings an insight into why each show was created and also why each show was cancelled... most of them after just one season, despite their huge ratings hits and popularity with kids and family alike (I guess Dinky toys were happy enough to keep bringing out new die cast models every year, they were making huge profits from them and, rightly so).

My one complaint on this, other than suspecting there’s not quite enough info for someone who is more familiar with the properties than I (I will be watching and reviewing a few of these shows over the next couple of years… at least that’s the plan)… the book is a little sloppily written. For example, here’s part of a sentence… “Probably too large and unwieldy at first for audiences to strongly identify strongly with any particular character…” And that kind of word repetition is not an isolated case, there are a fair few examples going throughout the book. However, it is a well researched tome and I did come away both entertained by Mr. Fryers writing and also quite informed, to an extent… at least enough for me to try and seek out chunkier volumes on the individual TV shows in question (which is a hard task at the moment, it turns out). So ultimately, I’d have to say that I really enjoyed The Worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and got a lot out of it. So maybe, if you’re not too familiar with the subject matter, you might want to take a look at some point. Spectrum Is Green!

UFO Flying Saucers

Close Encounters
Of The Gold Key

Flying Saucers (Dell)
5 issues April 1967 - October 1969

UFO Flying Saucers (Gold Key)
13 issues October 1968 - January 1977 continuing as...
 
UFO And Outer Space (Gold Key)
12 issues June 1978 - February 1980

I thought there used to be a TV show which was on reruns in the very early 1970s, when I was a kid, about Project Blue Book. I’m pretty sure it was a 1960s TV programme but, looking up the info on both the shows Project Blue Book and Project UFO gives me listings on productions which aired in the late 1970s. So I’m really not sure which show I was thinking of, to be honest.

Either way, I was very interested in UFOs as a kid but never saw any of the comics I’m going to talk about today. Starting with DELL Comics’ five issues of Flying Saucers which were basically short stories telling tales which seemed to be a fusion of reported UFO incidents and flights of fancy. These aren’t great and I only found out about this run halfway through reading the Gold Key comics resurrection of the title. When their partnership with Western Publishing finished, Western formed Gold Key Comics and somehow managed to take a load of DELL’s licensed characters and comics with them. Once such was, kind of, their Flying Saucers comic, which was transformed into UFO Flying Saucers. The first four issues of the DELL version are all original tales and the fifth issue, which was published much later during the same time as the Gold Key run, which is surprising in itself, is composed entirely of reprints of one of the earlier issues. I’ll confine my thoughts about the DELL title to the Gold Key version because it’s all pretty much two similar sides of the same coin.

The things that weren’t quite the same for the majority of the Gold Key title was that a) the stories were all much shorter, usually ranging between one and three pages each (so there were obviously a lot more stories per issue) and b) they were mostly presented as real life case reports and I do believe that they were trying to present what they saw in a serious and respectful way, at least when the comic first started, as illustrated versions of actual incidents. And it’s kind of scary in some ways because each is presented with it’s own specific time stamp and you’ll get modern incidents within the same issues as things like the prophet Ezekiel witnessing early alien spacecraft in the 6th century and, I don’t know, something about the mechanism departing the Earth with a sound of powerful running water (like a waterfall) seems to me to come off as something really eerily similar to what one of our modern rockets sound like if described back then. Kind of hard to imagine something terrestrial like this in the 6th Century, I reckon.

At first, stuff like this was keeping me fairly interested and there was some scary or, more often, just intriguing stuff culled from real life case files (some of which I recognised from my own research into the phenomenon more than a couple of decades ago... until I decided to give it up as sleepless nights no longer appealed to me). However, it has to be said, after a while this was getting boring precisely because of those limitations. An average story has various witnesses seeing either a UFO or an alien creature, nothing much really happening and then having said craft or creature departing and nobody believing the various witnesses except, sometimes, those ‘in the know’ who work for the government. There’s no real excitement in these things other than something sighted, something draining power or, occasionally, some human interaction which might or might not result in the death of said human or an animal. And that’s basically it.

Also, it looks like the idea was getting increasingly difficult for Gold Key to sustain by the time they got less than half way into their run. The stories already seemed exactly the same due to, you know, being based on what little they could grab of real life incidents... so they decided to go the whole hog and start asking readers for their true encounters with UFOs or aliens, the best ones sent in getting an adaptation in the comic. So, yeah, I can’t imagine how many people they got writing in and spinning them a yarn just to see their name in print. However, after a few issues of advertising this feature, they started doing exactly that. The readers’ stories are all pretty much just one page long but they are in abundance and, just like the slightly longer stories, they are all pretty much saying the same thing.

I’m guessing, in an effort to at least make some attempt to have some stories lasting longer than about three pages (you know... like five), some of the reported case studies are, I suspect, montaged together by what the writer at the time thought was a common denominator in certain tales... at least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened because, sometimes, some of the dates quoted in the stories seem completely contradictory. For example, in a story linking the deaths of various astronauts, at least one of the recorded deaths is from a fair few years ahead of the time zone of the guy telling his colleagues about them so... yeah, they seem to screw up sometimes.

And I don’t know what was happening in an issue from 1975 when the narrative talks about the ‘late’ famous astrophysicist and extraterrestrial researcher Carl Sagan... since he didn’t die actually for over 20 years later. No idea.

Another thing the writers did to hold interest was to introduce a ‘back up’ feature, which is a strange concept in a comic which would hold maybe ten ‘stories’ anyway, much as the successful Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom (which I reviewed here) had a Professor Harbinger strip. The back up in UFO Flying Saucers was called The Hoaxmaster and this top hatted fellow would talk directly to the audience and tell them the stupid tricks people have resorted to in order to get people to believe in UFOs. I guess it was the production team’s way of holding up the hoaxes to lend veracity to the other stories found in each issue. However, stuff like this was not enough and the magazine stopped publication for a while with issue 13 in January 1977.

However, the magazine returned with a slight name change in June 1978, continuing from issue 14 as UFO & Outer Space... the first two issues of which seem to consist entirely of reprints of stories from earlier issues. So what happened here to give Gold Key the idea to rush the magazine back onto the market after an almost a year and a half hiatus? Well, I can only speculate but I don’t think I’d be far wrong in suggesting that Steven Spielberg happened. December 1977 saw the release in America of his UFO movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and it was really popular (and sort of terrifying in some ways). It wasn’t as popular as Star Wars had been earlier in the year, of course but, it was taking the world by storm (we got it in the UK in 1978 and if I ever get around to reviewing it for this blog, I’ll tell of my terrifying experience after seeing that movie).

So my guess is that Gold Key saw the opportunity in the market and put the comic back out, filling it with selected reprints while the writers and artists, whoever these unsung folk were, beavered away on creating new material to capture the lightning in a bottle that was Spielberg’s film before the next trend came along. So before long we had... all the usual stuff again but also two new features. One was a two page text story each issue... the first two or three of which seem to be concentrating on paranormal investigation rather than anything else, so I suspect the first couple were filler reprinted from one of Gold Key’s horror titles. The other thing was a ‘What If...?’ story each month. The plus points on those stories were the fact that the stories could be both a little longer and, since they were being presented as a fiction, go a little further in terms of the various alien encounters in each tale. The minus points were... most of them were still pretty dull and dismal, perhaps to add to the authenticity. Oh... and there was also an attempt to have a running serial about a funny alien for light relief but... I suspect that wasn’t very well received because it vanished mid story after two or three issues (it just wasn’t funny).

By the end of the comic’s run in February 1980, reprints were once more beginning to creep in and the stories, as intriguing and worthy of exploration in real life, still seemed really dull in comic strip form... or at least they did to me. The very last issue looks like it was printed to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation and, once again, consists entirely of reprints. I suspect the comic wasn’t that much missed by anyone when it finally stopped publication.

That being said, although it felt like I was reading more or less the same stories over and over again in each issue, the comic book is something of a curio and it does hold a certain appeal... especially if you have an interest in the subject matter in the first place. It’s not really a comic I could recommend to anyone but some people would probably get a kick out of it and, as per usual with the Gold Key and DELL comics, the painted artwork covers for these things are absolutely superb. It’s just a shame the stories within those covers never really lived up to the spectacle on the front.