FLASH GORDON (1980) Lobby Cards

There's really no such thing as lobby cards anymore. Nowadays theaters have ugly Photoshopped movie posters in backlit frames and gargantuan cardboard displays to preview forthcoming releases. But in the days when you bought your tickets from a boxoffice out in front, many theaters displayed these now-anachronistic cards in their lobbies along with exquisitely-painted one-sheets. I like posting scans of these cards here not only because they often feature lesser-seen photos from familiar films, but also because they're yet another lost aspect of the 70s Star Kid experience.

Today I've got a handful of lobby cards from Mike Hodges' 1980 Flash Gordon feature film, which, as loyal Space: 1970 readers know, is a great favorite of mine. I hope you enjoy them!

Irwin Allen's CITY BENEATH THE SEA (1971)

It's kind of interesting that the producer who dominated sci-fi television programming in the Sixties couldn't seem to get a genre show on the air in the following decade. Prolific producer Irwin Allen, whose creations Lost In Space, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Time Tunnel, and Land Of The Giants were staples of late-60s network TV, found his particular brand of genre fare out of step in the 1970s. Like Gene Roddenberry, he pitched a few sci-fi pilots that aired as TV movies, but none of them went to series. Among these failed attempts were 1976's Time Travelers, 1978's The Amazing Captain Nemo, and 1971's City Beneath The Sea.

Stuart Whitman is Admiral Michael Matthews, who is ordered by the President of the United States to retake command of Pacifica, a large, underwater scientific research facility. Upon his arrival at the city beneath the sea, he is besieged by crises, including sabotage, espionage, various disgruntled colleagues, and a rogue comet that is going to collide with Earth right above his sub-oceanic seabase! In addition, Pacifica is in the process of receiving the U.S.' entire gold reserve from Fort Knox (shipped by rocket!) and a group of thieves (including Matthews' own brother - played by Robert Wagner) have an elaborate scheme in place for stealing all of it! 

City Beneath The Sea is vintage Allen, with the same Cold War-tinged plotting, colorful production design, and Old School miniature effects that had been the hallmarks of his 60s productions; in fact, he re-used some of the models and sets from his earlier shows (most notably, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea's "flying sub"). A lot of familiar faces from those shows appear, too - James Darren, Robert Colbert  and Whit Bissell from Time Tunnel and Richard Basehart from Voyage, among others.

I don't recall seeing City Beneath The Sea on television in '71 (I was only six), nor did I catch it on TV in the years between then and now. Fortunately for me, it is available as part of the Warner Archive Collection, both as a manufactured-on-demand DVD and on their online streaming service, which is where I finally caught up with it. I enjoyed it considerably (as you probably guessed), but then, I'm a big fan of the Voyage to The Bottom Of The Sea series and Allen's other 60s shows. I'll definitely be adding the DVD to my 70s sci-fi library one of these days.

As for Irwin Allen, he may not have sold City Beneath The Sea as a weekly series, but he continued to do pretty well as a producer of theatrical films (and TV movies) during the decade, becoming the king of 70s disaster epics, with such hits as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, and others.

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (1974-78) TV Guide Ads

 Just for the heck of it, here's a selection of vintage TV Guide advertisements for ABC's The Six Million Dollar Man that I've collected over the last couple years. It's sort of a "greatest hits" package: the Bionic Woman, the Bionic Bigfoot... and the infamous "Death Probe!" Enjoy!

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) International Poster Gallery

Today I've got a selection of colorful one-sheets from around the world used to advertise the first Planet Of the Apes theatrical sequel in 1970.

For a long time, Beneath The Planet Of the Apes was my favorite of the Apes sequels (these days, it keeps going back-and-forth between Beneath and Conquest) for its exciting action-oriented - and utterly nihilistic - bonkers plot. Plus, you know, telepathic mutants, lots of Linda Harrison's "Nova" - and one of the most downbeat endings in sci-fi cinema history.

I do miss Roddy McDowell, though....

Captain's bLog: 0612:13

Not a lot new to report here; still buried in my comics writing commitments (including the Perils On Planet X webcomic), and still trying to carve out some time to finish up some longer posts. So, in short... new stuff on the way; stay tuned.

• It's possible that I'm simply not looking in the right places or that my Google-fu isn't as strong as I think, but I've been trying unsuccessfully to find a complete list of the Space: 1999 paperbacks published in the U.S. by Pocket Books (Year 1) and Warner Books (Year 2) online. Now that I have a (nearly) complete set of Battlestar Galactica (I'm still missing one volume - haven't found an affordable copy of # 9 yet) and Man From Atlantis novels, I'm now concentrating on filling in the gaps of my Space: 1999 library.

I'm not particularly interested in the Powys Media re-issues, or any modern/new novels; at the moment, I'm focusing on the 70s U.S. volumes. If anyone can direct me to a complete list, I'd appreciate it.

•  So... Best Buy didn't cancel my order properly (despite the fact that I cancelled it a full ten days before I received notification that it had shipped), and I frankly don't trust them to correctly refund my money if I try to return it, so I've got an extra copy of the Battlestar Galactica Blu-ray on my desk. Now I have to figure out what to do with it. Hmmmmm....

•  The Space: 1970 blog has seen huge amounts of traffic lately, due mostly to my post on that unused Star Wars poster art, which garnered links from a number of high-profile sci-fi fansites and on Reddit. The Star Wars Burger Chef commercial has proven popular, too. I only hope that some of these new visitors take a few minutes to explore the rest of the blog and maybe become regular followers. In related news, the Space: 1970 Facebook page now has nearly 1400 "Likes." Cool! The more Star Kids, the better!

•  Blatant Cross-Promotion: I want to remind you all again that my weekly sci-fantasy webcomic, Perils On Planet X, drawn by the talented Gene Gonazles, can be read for free at perilsonplanetx.com.  This serialized interplanetary swashbuckler has a new page posted every Friday, and chronicles the adventures of modern-day Earth astronaut Donovan Hawke, stranded on the lost planet of Xylos, hundreds of millions of years in the past. The story is packed with monsters, beautiful women and lots of Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers-styled thrills. I hope you'll check it out, bookmark it, and follow the comic each week.

Anyone who enjoys my writing and the reviews on this blog should check out my DVD Late Show site, where I have been reviewing B-movies, cult films and genre television shows on DVD and Blu-ray disc since 2005. Among the over 700 reviews on the site are plenty of Space: 1970-era favorites, like Battle Beyond The Stars, Damnation Alley, Starcrash, The Starlost, the Space: 1999 Blu-rays, and many more.

Burger Chef STAR WARS (1977) Posters Commercial

One of the most popular posts on this blog has been the one about the Star Wars Burger Chef/Burger King posters painted by Del Nichols and offered by both restaurant chains back in the early months of 1978. Well, here's a vintage Burger Chef commercial for those highly collectible fast food premiums, starring pitchdroids C-3PO, R2-D2, and some of their galactic "pals."

SPACE TREK Magazine (1978) Cover Gallery

Yet another unimaginatively-titled genre mag from the publishing house behind such publications as Space Wars, Star Encounters, Star Battles and Star Warp, Myron Fass' Stories Layouts and Press Incorporated: the short-lived and confusingly-numbered Space Trek magazine from 1978. The eccentric Fass, who passed away in 2006, was a notorious publisher of low-end magazines and comics, the print equivalent of an exploitation film mogul, publishing anything and everything he thought might make a few bucks, especially if it appealed to the basest of tastes or could ride the coattails of some pre-established moneymaker.

As with it's corporate brethren, Space Trek was a cheapo Starlog knock-off, indistinguishable from Fass' other scifi mags, complete with recycled stories, B&W photos and fan art, haphazardly assembled and rushed to press by the bottom-feeding publisher to separate young, starstruck Star Kids from their allowances while the genre was still hot. How many of these did you buy?

Behind-The-Scenes Pix #42: BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS

A young James Cameron works on a matte painting of the Akira village from Roger Corman's 1980 epic space opera, Battle Beyond The Stars. The multi-talented, future Academy Award-winning director Cameron handled a number of special effects and design duties on the film, including designing and building the main starship, Nell.

June's Space Babe is pretty, pouty Ayshea, as SHADO Operative... "Ayshea," on Gerry Anderson's first live-action sci-fi series, UFO. A fixture of SHADO's underground HQ beneath England's Harlington-Straker film studio, the raven-haired lovely with the prominent monogrammed pendant seemed to be one of the organization's most efficient and appreciated operatives. At least, Straker seemed fond of her.

Actress and singer Ayshea Brough was born Ayshea Hague in 1948, and had her first film role at age 9. She was a popular recording artist and TV presenter in England the 70s, hosting such music and variety shows as Discotheque and Lift Off before moving to Los Angeles for most of the 80s and early 90s. According to online sources, she was a well known Beverly Hills socialite and ran a property development and interior design business. She returned to the UK in 1993.

MAN FROM ATLANTIS (1977) Tie-In Paperbacks

As I've mentioned before, as an avid reader from age five, one of the few Space:1970-era collectibles I really made an effort to buy as a kid (and still do) were the film and TV tie-in paperbacks. Fortunately, pretty much all of the major 70s TV sci-fi properties got tie-in novels: Star Trek, Space: 1999, Battlestar Galactica - even Buck Rogers got two, and the Planet Of the Apes show got four.

In 1977, Dell Books commissioned veteran tie-in author Richard Woodley (The Bad News Bears, Slap Shot, Con Air) to pen four paperback novelizations of the NBC Man From Atlantis telefilms: Man From Atlantis, Death Scouts, Killer Spores and Ark Of Doom (The Disappearances). The first two of these books hit the racks just around the time the weekly series premiered in Autumn, and I remember saving up my Junior High allowance of 50¢ a week to buy them when they came out. Woodley was a solid wordsmith, so they're pretty decent adaptations - and good reads, too.

The second two volumes, Killer Spores & Ark Of Doom, didn't make their way to bookstores until 1978, and the show was already off the air. This probably explains why they were published without the MfA logo or numbering. The nicely painted cover artwork by Vincent DiFate (replacing the photo covers of Volumes 1 & 2) does portray the likeness of actor Patrick Duffy, but otherwise appear to be designed to attract the eye of general sci-fi readers rather than just fans of the recently-cancelled show.

I didn't pick up these last two books in '78 (I wonder if their distribution was less pervasive than the earlier books?), but have added them to my library recently, thanks - in part - to Star Kid "Caeric ArcLight," who kindly sent me a nice copy of #3.

THE STARLOST (1973) Rare TV Guide Ads

It's tough to find any vintage advertising or promotional material for 1973's The Starlost, the Canadian-produced, syndicated science fiction series created by Harlan "Cordwainer Bird" Ellison. Every once in a while, though, I stumble across something.... like this, for instance: This odd, Biblical-inspired, hand-drawn ad (presumably by someone at WMAQ) appeared in the Northern Indiana edition of TV Guide for the week of September 22-28, 1973.

And then, there's this one, featuring pen 'n ink portraits of lead Keir Dullea and his co-stars, Robin Ward and Gay Rowan. I'm not entirely certain of its provenance, but it clearly ran in a Canadian television listing magazine (did they have TV Guide in Canada in '73?).

Unused STAR WARS (1977) Poster Concept

When it comes to Star Wars (and Star Trek) items, I've resolved myself to the fact that I'm not likely to dig up anything that's new to the die hard fans. But every once in a while, I do come across stuff that's new to me - like this early Star Wars advertising campaign concept art.

The graphic design is strong, and from a marketing perspective, it's an interesting approach. There was a lot of pop culture nostalgia in the air in the mid-Seventies, so I can see why someone at Fox might propose that angle as a way to sell George Lucas' space opera to the masses. Of course, what's so ironic about this is that it was the spectacular success of Luke Skywalker that paved the way for both Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to return to the big screen over the next few years.

Posting here at Space: 1970 will probably be pretty light this week, as I will be concentrating on finishing up some comics writing work and some overdue DVD/Blu-ray reviews for my DVD Late Show website. Of course, if anything newsworthy should come up in the next few days, I'll be sure to let you all know.