This was a mid-70s drama set on a fictional celestial body called '
The Moon' which, supposedly, orbits the
Earth in the present day - but on September 13th, 1999 in a parallel universe, it is sent flying into space by exploding nuclear waste, complete with
Moonbase Alpha and its stoic crew. Many adventures ensued, usually involving beige jumpsuits with flared trousers. Although hyped in pre-publicity as a more hard-edged, down-to-earth version of '
Star Trek', it combined the scientific accuracy of '
Teletubbies' with the gripping drama of... '
Teletubbies', again.
Space: 1999 was created by Gerry Anderson of 'Thunderbirds' and 'Stingray' fame, and was his second live action series for grownups, after 'UFO', which many people believe to be a prequel of '1999'. The show was produced by ITC, who gave the world 'The Saint' and 'The Persuaders' amongst many other past glories; an unwise move into feature films culminated in the massive and total failure of 'Raise the Titanic' in 1981, and although ITC continued to exist, it was essentially an office and some letterheaded paper thereafter. Gerry Anderson's decline followed a similar path, and Space: 1999 was the first really serious mistake of his career.
Space: 1999 had proper actors and an enormous budget, with production values that made it the 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' of its day (like that show, '1999' was sold to syndication). The production design was impressive, and the show attempted a realistic depiction of then-futuristic technology which still looks quite plausible nowadays - the 'Eagle' spacecraft, in particular, resemble something that NASA might produce today, if they had the money, and a moonbase. Indeed Brian Johnson's Eagle and Hawk spacecraft became the series' iconic images, and are both fascinating designs that spawned best-selling Airfix kits and several modern-day webpages. The rest of the show's modelwork was inspired by '2001', and went on to inspire 'Star Wars', but in the days before computerised motion control, the illusion usually fell apart when things started to move.
Apart from the looks, however, Space: 1999 was something of a disaster. As with 'UFO', the characters were flat and dull - realistic maybe, but not particularly entertaining - whilst the plots were humourless, downbeat, and usually involved several of the cast and much of the moonbase being blown up, although it was always fixed next week. It was as if Gerry Anderson believed that the way to make television for adults was to make Thunderbirds but with the humour and humanity sucked out. His marriage to Sylvia Anderson was failing at the time, which might explain the frosty emotional deadness at the core of the series.
The musical score was by Barry Gray, and was possibly the most intrusively inappropriate score for a television programme of all time ever, combining funk-rock with melodramatic light orchestral music. The main theme is extremely memorable, but seems to belong to something like 'The Sweeney' or 'The Professionals' rather than science fiction.
Series one was very expensive and quite popular in the UK, although less so in the States; series two was overhauled considerably by Star Trek's Fred Freiberger and was almost a different show. It introduced a shape-shifting woman and lots of monsters in rubber suits, and is painful to watch nowadays. Both series are painful, in fact, but at least series one had a certain self-belief, a certain minimalist verve to it. Originally the show was scattered throughout the ITV shedules in the UK, although the BBC bought it in the 1990s and repeated it in remastered form.
Despite this seemingly damning appraisal, the series is likeable enough in a dystopian mid-70s way and, in its defence, a couple of the episodes - the one with the green, tentacled monster that had a big eye, and the one with Christopher Lee and the cryogenic suspension tanks - were quite good, scary fun. The shows were released on DVD in 2001, in which format the wires holding up the spacecraft became sadly visible.
It's also worth noting that the series featured a riot of dated 'futuristic' fonts; Data 70, Countdown, various flavours of Futura and the classic, mid-70s civic centre / council building Eurostile.