Not quite what Gerry and Sylvia Anderson had in mind.
My first experience of something So Bad It Was Good involved UFO’s.
This does not mean that I or anyone else I knew in the early 1970’s had seen a UFO, had a close encounter of the googleplex kind, or otherwise was on a first-name basis with Klay-Ti-On, Defender of the Galaxy, or a similar being from somewhere around the orbit of Vulcan. My mother did have a sneaking fondness for Omicron, the little alien who sometimes showed up on Rege Cordic’s radio show, but otherwise family tastes ran much more to Star Trek, the occasional issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or an anthology series called Science Fiction Theater.
No, this was something quite different, and it was all Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s fault.
The Andersons were a British couple who were responsible for a series of remarkably successful, remarkably adult puppet shows in the 1960’s. Using what they called the “Supermarionation process,” their creations eschewed the deliberate unreality of, say, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Topo Gigio, or that all-time favorite Senor Wences in favor of puppets that looked, acted, dressed, and behaved like human beings. Even better, the puppets lived in a world that was very clearly modeled on ours, only with the addition of advanced technology and exciting super-scientific action.
Thunderbirds, the saga of the mysterious Tracy family, who lived on a private island with seemingly unlimited money and a collection of high-tech machines that they used to rescue astronauts, submariners, and airline passengers, as well as their friend and agent Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward…Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, about an elite military unit of highly trained soldiers named after colors as they opposed evil aliens…this sort of adventure was exactly what my young soul needed. They were also far superior to most American animated science fiction or quasi-science fiction shows of the time.
Remember, this was an era when Marvel brought their characters to life by photographing the original art and sliding it about while a narrator read a script, or when Space Angel’s idea of interplanetary thrills was moving human lips superimposed on Alex Toth’s art in a weird forerunner of the Mouth of Sauron. The only American exceptions I can remember was Jonny Quest, which lasted all of a season, or the deliberate kitsch of Batman and Stately Wayne Manor.
Compared to that, the Andersons’ oeuvre looked pretty darn good. They took great pains to make sure that the sets, scripts, and puppetry were as realistic as possible, and never tried to fool the audience into thinking that a Jack Kirby drawing of Captain America sailing over a fence while the camera moved was even remotely real. Even better, the Andersons’ universe was tantalizingly close to what we read in the headlines or saw on the news about the bright, promising world of tomorrow: supersonic planes, orbital satellites, and sleek, streamlined clothing, furniture, and cars.
It’s little wonder that my folks and I were willing to give the Andersons’ first live action series, UFO, a try.
On paper, UFO had everything that had made Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds so much fun. There was an alien threat, strange little creatures in madly whirling spaceships, and a crew of gallant defenders known as SHADO, a clandestine organization tasked with protecting Earth from invasion. A sentient satellite, a lunar base staffed by glamorous women in high-tech costumes, gull wing cars, Nehru jackets on the men and silvery miniskirts on the women…it all was straight out of the exciting world of the Tracy family. Even the bowl cut sported by SHADO’s Colonel Straker and the iridescent purple wigs worn by the moon base crew hinted at the wonders to come in the far-off world of 1980.
Except that what worked so well with puppets didn’t work so well with humans.
I think it was my aunt Betty who first pointed out how ridiculous those purple wigs looked, especially paired with silver eye shadow and heavy false eyelashes. My mother cared more about the plots, which probably would have worked just fine as comic books but fell apart in live action. Even the sets and props that had looked so good in miniature were ridiculous when used and populated by living actors. Nehru jackets were already passé in the early 1970’s, so what were they doing on people in 1980? Why were the little whirling spaceships visibly hanging from fine, glittering wires?
Worst of all: why were the scripts so bad?
Not all of them, of course. There was one episode where several UFO’s attacked a disabled submarine that was genuinely exciting, and there were others that were at least entertaining. But so much of the show simply did not make sense (why were the lunar women in purple wigs and metallic silver? why didn’t anyone in the general public at least guess what was going on? who controlled SHADO, the UN?) that it was hard to take it seriously. Worse, the episodes were not shown in sequence, at least in our area, so if there was an overall story arc we simply couldn’t tell.
UFO aired early on Saturday evenings in Pittsburgh, just after we’d finished dinner, so there was no reason not to watch it while the dishwasher churned and we counted the minutes until All in the Family came on at 8:00 pm. Betty would make the occasional sarcastic comment, Mum would frown, and I’m pretty sure my uncle Oscar would fall asleep while Dad and my uncle Lou had their regular “Betty won’t let us smoke in the house so we’re going to talk about sports in the garage” cigarette break.
As for me...well, I watched because I was a kid and I liked anything to do with space. But the older I get, the more I wonder if my love of the weird, the mediocre, and the just plain stupid has its origins in Colonel Straker tootling around London in his DeLorean while listening to purple-wigged women on the Moon.
UFO also primed me to accept what that bubbling and churning in the sky was the one time I actually did see a UFO on a dark night in 1979 when I was traveling by bus from New York to Scranton, but that’s a story for another day.
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