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thatcrazycajun(Hey, there's rhymes in there...) One of the few good things about this weekend ending was reading the latest issue of the venerable Starlog magazine, which for 32 years has chronicled the high- and low-lights of science fiction and fantasy in film and television. Its co-founder Kerry O'Quinn was among the very first pros I've met in my fannish career to go out of his way to befriend and encourage the lonely, geeky artistic fanboy that I was then; and I was also an early regular reader, buying it every month off the stands because I was too dumb to realize subscribing would actually be cheaper in the long run. So I've always had a soft spot for this particular periodical, though I've read it far less often in recent years. Magazines actually dealing with this stuff were scarce as Vulcan smiles back then, you understand.
The new issue (featuring a new logo for the first time since its launch and a shot of Daniel Craig in the new Bond film on its cover) contains an article by another old pro-type friend, Bob Greenberger, and notes in its forematter Bob's tragic loss of his son Robbie to leukemia earlier this year. But what really stoked me about this ish was another article reporting that NBC's short-lived 1978 spoof SF series Quark, a brainchild of Get Smart! co-creator Buck Henry, is being released on a remastered DVD this month. Amazon has it for sale here; think of it as sort of a primitive ancestor of Red Dwarf. Here's a sample from the pilot, courtesy of YouTube; one or two cast changes were made by the time regular production began.
It only ran eight episodes; this was the network that axed Star Trek, after all, and besides, then-Peacock honcho Fred Silverman was apparently more interested in pushing his bomb of a skiffy drama Supertrain. But Quark did for TV sci-fi—or perhaps more accurately, did to it—what Henry's previous series had done to the spy genre, i.e., mock its conventions, clichés, tropes and classic scenes mercilessly and hilariously. Film star Richard Benjamin (then fresh off his role in the more serious genre movie WestWorld) had the lead as the series' title character, Capt. Adam Quark, skipper of an interstellar garbage scow and its singularly bizarre crew. The article features most of the cast, writers and producer today sharing memories of the show's production (sadly, Richard Felton [Ficus] was killed in a senseless accident shortly after the show's cancellation) and describing what they were after in sending up Forbidden Planet, Star Trek, Star Wars and other TV and cinematic landmarks of the genre.
If you watched it back then and weren't impressed, give it another shot. If you didn't see it then, you owe it to yourself to check out the silliness, the in-jokes, and the surprisingly good perfs by Benjamin, Tim Thomerson and sitcom veteran Conrad Janis (who got his later role as Mindy's dad in Mork & Mindy on the strength of his work in this show), not to mention guests such as the late Ross Martin (the one true Artemus Gordon—sorry, Kev!) and Joan van Ark. And Cyb and Tricia Barnstable as the show's resident identical-twin hotties aren't exactly a minus, either. (As a hormone-addled teenager, I actually preferred my poster of them in bikinis to the much more popular ones of Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett then on the bedroom walls of so many other boys my age.) It's about time fans had a way to see this overlooked gem other than on shoddy, illegal bootleg discs or tiny, pixelated online clips.
The new issue (featuring a new logo for the first time since its launch and a shot of Daniel Craig in the new Bond film on its cover) contains an article by another old pro-type friend, Bob Greenberger, and notes in its forematter Bob's tragic loss of his son Robbie to leukemia earlier this year. But what really stoked me about this ish was another article reporting that NBC's short-lived 1978 spoof SF series Quark, a brainchild of Get Smart! co-creator Buck Henry, is being released on a remastered DVD this month. Amazon has it for sale here; think of it as sort of a primitive ancestor of Red Dwarf. Here's a sample from the pilot, courtesy of YouTube; one or two cast changes were made by the time regular production began.
It only ran eight episodes; this was the network that axed Star Trek, after all, and besides, then-Peacock honcho Fred Silverman was apparently more interested in pushing his bomb of a skiffy drama Supertrain. But Quark did for TV sci-fi—or perhaps more accurately, did to it—what Henry's previous series had done to the spy genre, i.e., mock its conventions, clichés, tropes and classic scenes mercilessly and hilariously. Film star Richard Benjamin (then fresh off his role in the more serious genre movie WestWorld) had the lead as the series' title character, Capt. Adam Quark, skipper of an interstellar garbage scow and its singularly bizarre crew. The article features most of the cast, writers and producer today sharing memories of the show's production (sadly, Richard Felton [Ficus] was killed in a senseless accident shortly after the show's cancellation) and describing what they were after in sending up Forbidden Planet, Star Trek, Star Wars and other TV and cinematic landmarks of the genre.
If you watched it back then and weren't impressed, give it another shot. If you didn't see it then, you owe it to yourself to check out the silliness, the in-jokes, and the surprisingly good perfs by Benjamin, Tim Thomerson and sitcom veteran Conrad Janis (who got his later role as Mindy's dad in Mork & Mindy on the strength of his work in this show), not to mention guests such as the late Ross Martin (the one true Artemus Gordon—sorry, Kev!) and Joan van Ark. And Cyb and Tricia Barnstable as the show's resident identical-twin hotties aren't exactly a minus, either. (As a hormone-addled teenager, I actually preferred my poster of them in bikinis to the much more popular ones of Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett then on the bedroom walls of so many other boys my age.) It's about time fans had a way to see this overlooked gem other than on shoddy, illegal bootleg discs or tiny, pixelated online clips.
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Date: 2008-12-01 01:29 am (UTC)Did you notice that Amazon was offering "The Starlost" for its bundle deal with "Quark"?
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Date: 2008-12-01 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-01 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-02 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-02 04:28 am (UTC)