Star Schlock Space Cadet

I really did my level best to thin the white paint that makes up most of this space cadet's uniform, but it still looks lumpy in extreme closeup. Ay, me! 

Still, I got ambitious and decided to dry painting in eyes, eyebrows, lips, and a shoulder patch. I used my tiniest brush, barely any paint, and my telescopic lenses for the attempt. My hands shook a little, even stabilized, so it took several attempts to get the result you see here, which I characterize as "not bad for Earl." 
 

Revisiting Buck Rogers

Over the last couple of weeks I've been making my way through the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century DVD set that I picked up 11 years ago. 11 YEARS AGO? And I thought my book backlog was bad.

In any event, revisiting a show that I first watched as a 10-to-12-year old has been entertaining. Even as a kid I knew the show was, on some level, derivative, unpolished and badly written, but I still enjoyed it because, hey...spaceships, aliens, scantily-clad space princesses, Erin Gray as Wilma Deering. Whatever the show's faults, the producer knew their audience: young boys (and hopefully a few girls inspired by Erin Gray's steely performance of the first season).

Like Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers presents a potentially interesting central conceit marred by lacklustre writing. The setup is simple but poignant: frozen in time for 500 years, astronaut Buck Rogers wakes up in the late 25th century to an Earth still recovering from a nuclear holocaust (one that happened, as it turned out, just after Buck left earth).

The pilot and a handful of episodes touch on Buck's sense of loss; unique in the world, this is a man who has truly lost everything in a way no one else ever could: not just a loved one, but all his loved ones; not just a country and a culture, but an entire civilization and all its complexity. (In a second season episode we discover that the Pyramids, Chichen Itza and Mount Rushmore are the only human artifacts to have survived to the 25th century.) Aside from a handful of scenes, though, the dramatic potential of Buck's displacement is virtually ignored in favour of pretty standard space villainy.

Were I to reinvent the series, I'd spend a lot more time exploring what a post-nuclear holocaust world would look like after 500 years of healing, and how Buck adapts. I'd probably ignore outer space entirely, relying instead on experts to come up with the sorts of real-world challenges such a society might face. I imagine everything would change, from manufacturing to agriculture to relationship customs to art. The art would be fascinating, one would think. You could even borrow an idea from the second season of Buck Rogers, in which the format changes to a more Star Trek-like exploration show; just keep the setting on Earth and have Buck and Wilma take on an HMS Beagle-style scouting expedition, roaming the world to catalogue mutant life and castoff pockets of survivors, not to mention any remaining valuable resources.

(As a kid I stopped watching Buck Rogers early in the second season, right after the Mark-Lenard-removes-his-head episode. Aside from the sarcastic new robot Chricton, season two really doesn't have much to recommend it.)

With Twin Peaks and The X-Files coming back to TV, it's not too far-fetched to imagine Buck Rogers might come back. It might even be good this time around. 

What Memories Real?

A few days ago Jeff commented on the opening montage of the film version of the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century pilot, surmising that not only did Buck spend 500 years dreaming about scantily clad space women, but that the events of the series itself are merely a continuation of that dream. I dismissed the notion out of hand, but then I started to think about the idea more seriously, particularly after watching "The Guardians," a second-season episode in which Buck has a vision of being back on Earth before his ill-fated trip on Ranger 3.

In the vision, Buck awakens at his mother's home back in 1987. He's at the end of a two-week furlough, and Ranger 3 launches the next day. At first he's shocked to find himself back on Earth in his own time, but within a few seconds admits to his mother that his life in the 25th century must have been just a dream. The Ranger 3 mission goes forward...and ends in exactly the same way, with Buck in suspended animation.

During the course of the episode other cast members have visions of their own, and by the end the series' status quo is comfortably reached. And yet now I can't get the notion out of my mind, because the pilot movie explicitly says Buck dreams for centuries, and when he "wakes up," at least two of the women in his dreams - Wilma Deering and Princess Ardala - become, respectively, a leading figure and a recurring figure in the show. This of course suggests the events of the series are merely a continuation of his erotic dreams.

Note, too, the lyrics to "Suspension," the song that plays atop the film's opening credits. Here are a couple of lines:

What thoughts are fantasies, what memories real? 

Is it my life or just something I dreamed? 

All of a sudden the dream scenario almost seems deliberate. The only drawback to this theory is that the show itself isn't particularly dreamlike, aside from its conventional SF trappings. The storytelling, direction, visual effects and costuming are all pretty straightforward for the genre. Plus it's a pretty unhappy ending for Buck...it implies he never wakes up, and that his new relationships and adventures in the 25th century are just fantasies. In fact, you could even surmise that Buck never enters suspended animation at all, that he's simply flash-frozen and dies in a few seconds. And in dreams, instants can seem to take centuries...all two seasons of the show could simply be the last synaptic jerks in the mind of a dying man. 

Tonight's Episode

70s SF television takes a lot of flak for being cheesy, but Gil Gerard deserves a lot of credit for his subtle but emotionally tortured performance in "A Dream of Jennifer," in which Buck Rogers must confront the loss of the woman he left behind in the 20th century. For all the accolades granted more prestigious fare, there are many more artists whose good work goes unrecognized. Maybe it's 35 years too late, but good job, Gil.

Battlestar Galactica in the 25th Century

After watching a few episodes of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century this week, it struck me that the show shared a lot of commonalities with the contemporaneous Battlestar Galactica: creators, behind-the scenes personnel, ship models, sound effects. Buck Rogers outlasted Battlestar by a few months, but Glen A. Larson must have seen that Buck Rogers would soon follow suit. I wonder if he ever considered a fun series finale for Buck and a belated farewell for Battlestar Galactica; he could have had the Galactica finally reach Earth in the last episode of Buck Rogers. How cool would that have been, to see Gil Gerard and Lorne Greene team up to beat the Cylons back from post-holocaust, 25th-century Earth?

Back When the Future Was Innocent

I had a pretty stressful day at work today, so to wind down I decided to lose myself in pop culture. Not quite at random, I picked up my Buck Rogers in the 25th Century DVD set and watched a two-part episode from the show's first season: "The Plot to Kill a City."

It turned out to be a fortuitous choice. While no one would ever mistake Buck Rogers for high art, it was clearly produced with care and affection. These are simple stories of high adventure, entertainment aimed at children and young teens, heaps of fun for the young and the young at heart.

While the costumes, sets and special effects might seem primitive by today's standards, the creators did a remarkable job of building a believable future society within the limits of their time and budget. Yes, the show can be embarrassingly cheesy at moments - but it's also very earnest. I have a weakness for stories in which people of good character work together to solve problems, and this is exactly that sort of show. Despite taking place in a post-apocalyptic future, the series is optimistic, cheerful, and there's not a trace of cynicism to be found. It's the sort of approach that's rarely found in series television today, save, perhaps, New Girl.

So thank you, Glen A. Larson and the writers, actors and technicians who gave us two seasons of science fiction silliness and derring-do. It was definitely what I needed tonight.