Classic TV

Classic shows that have almost been forgotten, as well as shows that should probably have been forgotten

Classic TV

Weird old title sequences: The Fantastic Journey (1977)

23 February 2010 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

The Fantastic Journey

Why do all those boats and planes keep disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle? Is it storms and poor weather conditions? A simple coincidence? Urban myth, and actually the Bermuda Triangle is no worse than any other arbitrary piece of near-coastal tropical water?

No, you great silly, it’s because of a time rift. If you’d bothered to watch 70s TV show The Fantastic Journey, you’d have known that.

The basic plot was this: a group of people, most of them related, one of them Ike Eisenmann from Race to Witch Mountain, go out into the Caribbean on a boat. Spooky green mist comes down and before you know it they’ve disappeared and wound up on an island, which has gone all weird thanks to bits of it being in different time zones. So there’s futuristic cities, bits stuck in the past and so on, and you have to find invisible gateways to cross from one zone to another – something that usually happened at the end of each episode for easy syndication purposes.

As the group explores the island, it crosses into different zones and meets different people from different times and even different worlds, most notably Jared Martin of War of the Worlds, who plays a sort of futuristic hippie-musician-pacifist (aka ‘loser’) from the 23rd century. He, with his suspiciously phallic magic pan pipe instrument (which, as with Kung Fu, isn’t to be used for violence but somehow ends up being used as a weapon each episode), soon takes charge and tries to help them and himself get off the island.

This turned out to be a bit dull, so after the pilot, three characters got dropped and a new “Doctor Smith from Lost in Space“-type character called Willaway – played by Roddie McDowall – turned up to try to spice things up. If that wasn’t spicy enough, they got a girl from outer space in a mini-skirt with super-strength to help out, too.

Unfortunately, even with the power of the mini-skirted, outer space, super girl and one of the monkeys from Planet of the Apes, The Fantastic Journey was up against the even greater power of The Waltons, so got cancelled after 10 episodes, so that poor little family never did get off the island.

Enjoy its weird old title sequence and groovy theme tune.

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Codename Icarus (1981)

12 February 2010 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

Codename Icarus

It’s been nearly four years since I wrote the original version of this for Off The Telly, but seeing as Off The Telly is busily playing the National Anthem and getting ready to turn the lights off, I thought I’d move it to its natural place – here, on Lost Gems. Besides, I can add video and pictures to it here.

For most of its history, children’s television has been childish. Shows with simplistic plots and large casts of children have long dominated the afternoon schedules, with dreary adaptations of classic novels the only real exceptions.

Yet during the 1970s, commissioners slowly began to experiment with more mature programming, bringing in adult themes in disguise through science-fiction and fantasy shows such as Ace of Wands, The Tomorrow People and Timeslip. Sapphire and Steel even went from being a show for children to a show for adults, through the simple exclusion of juvenile leads and child-friendly characters.

By the late ’70s and early ’80s, this pushing of boundaries meant it was possible to have a programme on children’s television that was firmly embedded in an adult genre, with mainly adult leads and adult dialogue, and for it still to be accepted as a children’s show.

Codename: Icarus, which aired on BBC1 in 1981, was the purest examples of this new breed of programme. It’s only available on DVD in America not in the UK, although you can watch it on YouTube (or below) if you want – it’s a Lost Gem. But I’m also going to be covering a few other shows along the way, including Knights of God, Dark Season, Chocky’s Children, the 90s remake of The Tomorrow People and Press Gang, complete with videos, so stick around.

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Weird old title sequences: Vision On

5 February 2010 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

If you’re old enough and British, you probably remember Morph and Take Hart. If you’re very slightly older you’ll just about remember their precursor, Vision On, a show designed to educate, inform, entertain and hopefully even get children fired up about art – particularly if they were deaf.

Vision On was the brainchild of producer Patrick Dowling, who went on to produce The Adventure Game. It was designed to replace For The Deaf but quickly picked up a wider audience. The aim of the programme was to entertain but also to encourage imagination, with a fast-paced flow of contrasting ideas, both sane and silly.

The presenters were Pat Keysell, an actress who also taught deaf children, and Tony Hart who made pictures in a variety of sizes and media, and encouraging children to submit their own paintings to “The Gallery”, which they did in their thousands. ‘Actor’ Sylvester “Sylveste” McCoy also mucked around in true silent comedy/mime style.

The show aired on BBC1 for 12 years, from 1964 to 1976, and even afterwards, its legacy lived on through other programmes, including Take Hart starring the now-vocal Tony Hart, and Jigsaw, which was developed by one of Vision On‘s later producers, Clive Doig, and featured Sylvester McCoy as well as the silent “Nosey Bonk”; Eureka, another Doig show, also saw Vision On/Jigsaw contributor and mad inventor Wilf Lunn doing his shtick for another generation.

In its mission to fire up kids about art, it worked. It’s a hazard of the job knowing graphic designers and I know a number who were inspired to become designers purely thanks to Vision On and Take Hart. I doubt any of them were inspired by its very weird old title sequence though.

Weird old title sequences: The Phoenix

29 January 2010 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

I never watched this show. I don’t think it even aired in the UK. If it had, it shouldn’t have because it looks awful. But it stars that bloke who played Khan’s son in Star Trek II and the title sequence is both old and weird – as well as ridiculously funny – so here you go. No explanations needed – the voiceover man will tell you everything you need to know in hysterical detail – but the hero was Bennu and got his powers from the sun, and his opponent was Yago and got his powers from the moon (and ‘The Black Moonball’ and ‘The Bells of Thon’).

Classic TV

Weird old title sequences: The Invaders (1967)

22 January 2010 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

The Invaders

Back in the 60s and 70s, there was a kind of show that we don’t really see any more: “the fixing-up wanderer” show. Whether it was The Immortal, Branded, Coronet Blue, The Fugitive, The Incredible Hulk, Kung Fu or any of the others, the format was essentially the same and designed to allow shows to be broadcast in any order during syndication, re-runs, etc, without anyone getting lost: a man (it was always a man) would travel from town to town, doing his best to evade some horrible authority or person chasing after them; he’d try to stay low profile, but sooner or later, he’d discover some drama in the town that needed fixing. The situation would get fixed and the hero would move on to another town for the next episode, typically without anything happening that would change the overall show format (unless it was the first or last episode of a season).

Many of these shows were from Quinn Martin Productions, and after the popular The Fugitive started to draw to close in 1967, producers started looking for a replacement show of the same ilk. Larry Cohen, the creator of both Branded and Coronet Blue, came up with something that hooked into the flying saucer craze that had gripped the nation since the late 50s. It was The Invaders and it had a weird old title sequence.

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