Space Patrol (1962 TV series)

For the 1950s television series, see Space Patrol (1950 TV series). For the German television series also known as Space Patrol, see Raumpatrouille.
Space Patrol
Series titles over aplanet
Also known as 'Planet Patrol (United States)
Genre Action
Adventure
Children's
Science fiction
Space Western
Created by Roberta Leigh
Written by Roberta Leigh
Directed by Frank Goulding
Voices of Dick Vosburgh
Libby Morris
Ysanne Churchman
Ronnie Stevens
Murray Kash
Composer(s) Roberta Leigh
Country of origin United Kingdom
Original language(s) English
No. of series 3
No. of episodes 39
Production
Producer(s) Roberta Leigh
Arthur Provis
Cinematography Arthur Provis
Editor(s) John Beaton
Roy Hyde
Len Walter
Camera setup Single
Running time 24-26 minutes
Production company(s) National Interest Pictures
Wonderama Productions
Release
Picture format Film 35mm 4:3 Black and white
Audio format Mono
Original release 7 April 1963 (1963-04-07) – 11 June 1964 (1964-06-11)

Space Patrol is a science-fiction television series featuring marionettes that was produced in the United Kingdom in 1962 and broadcast beginning in 1963. It was written and produced by Roberta Leigh in association with the Associated British Corporation.

Summary

The series features the vocal talents of Dick Vosburgh, Ronnie Stevens, Libby Morris, Murray Kash and Ysanne Churchman, and comprises 39 half-hour episodes. This series is also known by its US title Planet Patrol to avoid confusion with the 1950s American live-action series of the same name. The marionettes used in the series incorporated some elements of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation technique - specifically their mouths would move in synch with dialogue.

The series is set in the year 2100, by which time the indigenous and autonomous civilizations on Earth, Mars and Venus have banded together to form the United Galactic Organization (UGO). Space Patrol is the UGO's military wing, and the series follows the actions of this interplanetary force, focusing on the missions of a tiny unit led by the heroic, bearded Captain Larry Dart. The humanoids in his crew consist of the elfin Slim from Venus, and the stocky, ravenously sausage-mad Husky from the Red Planet, Mars. The imperfect Slavic accent variants and six-pointed star chest emblems of these two may have been a sly nod to the Jewish-Russian heritage of the English series creator/writer. These men would regularly use one of two interplanetary space vehicles, the Galasphere 347 and the Galasphere 024.

Providing technical support on Earth is the brilliant and inventive Irishman Professor Aloysius O’Brien O’Rourke Haggarty,[1] called "Pop" by his daughter Cassiopeia, to his perpetual dismay. Haggarty's garrulous pet Martian "parrot" (a Gabblerdictum bird), taught to talk in "The Slaves of Neptune" episode, accompanies the crew on rare occasions. Keeping them all on a tight rein are Colonel Raeburn and his super-efficient Venusian secretary, Marla, both also based on Earth.

The show reflected sex roles characteristic of the culture and era which produced it, but blonde and brainy Marla would often explicitly point out that "There are no dumb blondes on Venus." Indeed, the series was created and written by the prolific polymath artist Roberta Leigh, the first woman producer in Britain to have her own film company.[2]

The series was sold overseas and broadcast in the USA, Canada and Australia, and in spite of the very low budget—which meant that sometimes the shadow of a puppet could be seen behind a "TV Screen" before the communication device was supposedly turned on—the show rated strongly with young audiences in many regions (including New York City)[3] and garnered a huge following. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski said that it was his favourite TV show as a child.

Background

Leigh had previously worked with Gerry Anderson on children's puppet series, and there are some obvious similarities between Space Patrol and Anderson's Fireball XL5, although Space Patrol was made on a lower budget. Arthur Provis, Anderson's former business partner in AP Films was responsible for the cinematography. For many years it was believed that all but a handful of episodes had been destroyed, until a complete cache of 16 mm prints was discovered in the garage at Roberta Leigh's home. Despite their scratched and grainy condition, they were of sufficient historic interest to warrant a commercial release, initially on VHS tapes, and later on DVD. Two episodes have survived from the original 35 mm prints and these were later made available on Blu-ray Disc. (This release is now deleted).[4]

Original style of the series

Although compared (and often confused) with the Gerry Anderson productions (due to the similar use of voice-synchronised marionettes), Space Patrol stands out on its own. This is mainly due to the boldness of a few creative choices. The only music involved is extremely avant-garde, the theme being made by Roberta Leigh herself using electronic equipment she bought from a local store after asking an assistant for anything that made interesting noises. F. C. Judd was responsible for creating all the electronic music for the series; he was an early British electronic experimenter, amateur radio expert, circuit designer, author and contributor to many wireless and electronics magazines from the 1950s to the 1990s. Everything had its peculiar noise with the exception of the Galasphere taking off in that rockets too made the same noise taking off, as did even a chemical rocket used in one episode.

In addition, the marionettes used for Space Patrol were more realistic-looking and less cartoon-like than those being used on Fireball XL5; in terms of relative realism, the puppets of Space Patrol fall between that of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. There were two types of robots, and the ones with the thick upper bodies were mainly used.

Another notable feature is that the music used in the opening sequence may be the first TV theme to be realised entirely through electronic means. That distinction has commonly been ascribed to the BBC's Doctor Who but the first episode of Space Patrol premiered on ABC in the Midlands on 7 April 1963, preceding Doctor Who by more than seven months (that series debuted on 23 November 1963).

Final credits always showed panoramic views over a gigantic city of the future, and never featured any music; only the throb of some industrial machinery, sounding like a gigantic pump or a steam engine, beat in rhythm. The male characters from the planet Venus (Slim for example) presented obvious androgyne features (in contrast to the rustic, virile Martians). Thus the style of the entire series created an extremely eerie atmosphere, that remains rarely matched even by the best adult science-fiction on screen.

The science

Whereas Gerry Anderson had a rocket ship in Fireball XL5 that could travel light years to planets around other stars as though they were just a few million miles away, Space Patrol took a more realistic approach. Because of limited speed, trips to other planets in our solar system could take weeks or months and this was facilitated by the crew of the Galasphere going into a freezer chamber and being put in suspended animation for the trip. A robot would then take over (its movements were said to cost £2,000 a time rather than being just a puppet.) The zirgon ray (faster than light) could be used from Earth to wake them up in an emergency. The term "galaxy" was used inaccurately, but consistently, to refer to a solar system in the series, so "Galactic Control" only supervised the local planets and "other galaxies" referred to nearby star-systems.

On other planets, they would use dial-selector translators (dial P for Pluto) to talk to alien beings - at the time, even some serious scientists considered the possibility of life on Venus, Mars and maybe elsewhere. Life support in hazardous atmospheres was provided by a "Moolung" - a sealed cylindrical transparent helmet, and the crew would often ride around on "Hover Jets", or more rarely, an "Ion Gun" which looked like a giant sparkler firework. Neptune was said to have atomic heating but none of the planets were really cold, such as when Dart walked about on Pluto (in "The Buried Spaceship") without any extra protection in what would be temperatures of about -230 °C.

The Galasphere had a top speed of about 800,000 mph, using "meson power". In "The Talking Bell" episode, they use "Boost Speed", which is dangerous, but allows them to travel at almost one million miles per hour for a long period. Meson power is dangerous to use in atmosphere. The engine also used gamma rays and 'Yobba rays'. The Galasphere has a force field which would protect it from enemy missiles, and it also turned out to protect them from the mind control of the evil Neptunians who were thousands of years ahead of Earth people, with great mental powers, and who hated work.

The Galasphere was constructed of Plutonite from Pluto, and a number of times, like in "The Human Fish", it also travelled underwater. Pluto was the furthest they normally travelled but after an accident they went way beyond that to a self-heated new planet which was full of giants who treated the Galasphere as a toy. Another time, an alien from Alpha Centauri visited them and installed a device which allowed the Galasphere to travel faster than light (at which point it vanished). They had their adventure twenty five trillion miles away and then returned to Earth, and just made it, with Galasphere 347 collapsing under the strain of such travel, just as they left it. In "The Planet of Light", Dart and Slim were taken to a planet circling Sirius (8.7 light years away) in just a few hours. This fast journey was necessary as the "light beings" who took them would be poisoned by air, so the two had to rely on their own supplies.

In "The Rings of Saturn" and a minority of other episodes, the crew rode the Galasphere 024, rather than the Galasphere 347. The references to Galasphere 024 are, for the most part, continuity errors introduced by the continual re-use of stock footage from the pilot episode, "The Swamps of Jupiter". Although the Galasphere is referred to as 024 during the takeoff programme sequence, it is often later referred to as 347 in the same episode.

Episode listing

There are 39 episodes across three series.

Series One

Series One/A

Series Two

Original UK Broadcasts

Space Patrol debuted on Sunday, 7 April 1963 on the ABC channel of ITV (supplying weekend programming to the Midlands and North). The series was shown in several episodic blocks over the following five years, with the final episodes airing over ABC's last weeks on air during the summer of 1968. Following these broadcasts, the series was never repeated in the UK. In the London area, Space Patrol was shown on weekdays by Associated Rediffusion.

Production

The series was filmed in two separate production blocks consisting of 26 and 13 episodes, which are considered as the first and second series.[5] The final 13 episodes employ refurbished puppets and sets, and are copyrighted 1962 Wonderama Productions on the end credits (the first 26 episodes omitted any on-screen copyright information). Various puppets from the series were re-used in later Roberta Leigh productions including Wonderboy and Tiger and Send for Dithers. These colour films reveal the fact that the Gabblerdictum was bright pink. Other than two endpapers from the TV Comic Annual for 1966, no colour photographic materials from the series have survived. These images indicate that the puppets were dressed in monochromatic uniforms, although most comic strip and book illustrations depict them as red and silver. Slim's darker complexion in series two suggests that the Venusians and Martians were repainted in their 'correct' skin tone for this batch of episodes, although no colour stills from the second series are known to exist.

DVD release

A 'best of' DVD release appeared in 2001, comprising six episodes: "The Swamps of Jupiter", "The Wandering Asteroid", "The Robot Revolution", "The Rings of Saturn," "Husky Becomes Invisible" and "Mystery on the Moon", including transfers of the two 35mm episodes and other special features. The definitive DVD release is a six-disk Region 0 boxed set (2003) containing all 39 episodes and numerous extras:

Disc 1

Disc 2

Disc 3

Disc 4

Disc 5

Disc 6

Special Features

Discs 1-3

Discs 4-6

In Other Media

A small number of Space Patrol episodes were made available in the Standard-8 and Super-8 home movie formats from Mountain Films during the 1960s and 70s. Episodes known to have been released in this format are: "The Swamps of Jupiter", "The Miracle Tree of Saturn", "The Robot Revolution" and "Mystery on the Moon." The films were released in 400' sound editions, and packaging for all titles used the same artwork as the first release, "Mystery on the Moon." The title Space Patrol did not appear anywhere on the packaging. The films were all around 16 minutes long, with most of the material coming from the second act of the episodes. The complete series was released by Network on VHS tape following the recovery of the episodes in the late 1990s.

Comic strip adaptations

A number of comic strip adaptations of Space Patrol were produced:

References

  1. ↑ Space Patrol: The Website: Slim's Encyclopedia: H
  2. ↑
  3. ↑ allmovie.com - Space Patrol
  4. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20110717184333/http://www.networkdvd.net/product_info.php?cPath=86&products_id=1170. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 9 January 2011. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. ↑ Cater, Martin (1997). "Space Patrol: The Complete Series". TV Zone Yearbook (Special No. 27): 80.
  6. ↑ Paul Starr, URL accessed 13 July 2015
  7. ↑ "Andy Partridge Interview re. Space Patrol". YouTube. Retrieved 13 July 2015.
  8. ↑ "Send For Dithers". toonhound.com. Retrieved 13 July 2015.
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