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Hitting 50: Yours Truly
If you were a kid in the 70s’s, you might have seen a TV show called Space: 1999. If you weren’t, it’s likely you never heard of it. It was dark and gloomy and generally slow-moving, with two stars who managed to be technically famous without being particularly charismatic, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. Still, the model work was pretty good, and during those years where Star Trek was off the air with no guarantee it would ever be back, and Star Wars was still a wild notion in George Lucas’ head, it provided a fix for young sci-fi junkies like my younger self. Of course as soon as Luke and Han showed up, it pretty much vanished from pop-culture memory.
Anyway, I still remember watching the first episode, where John Koenig (Landau) travels to the Moon to take over as Commander of Moonbase Alpha, and thinking, “Wow, it’d be cool to work on the Moon. But will I even be alive in 1999?” After doing the math in my head, I decided, “Yeah, but I’ll be really old.” Like, 35.
Now I look back and somehow, incredibly, 1999 itself has become the ancient past. (Still no Moonbase, though. What’s up with that?) That’s the weirdest part of getting older; realizing how long ago things happened that still feel like yesterday, or at most last year. Twenty-three years since the Berlin Wall came down? Thirty-two years since I graduated high school? How is this even possible?
Most days now when I get home from work I turn on MeTV in the kitchen while I’m prepping dinner for the kids and listen (keeping my eyes on my work, lest I cut a finger off) to shows like “Emergency” and “CHiPs” and “MASH,” shows I grew up on…the newest of which has been off the air for more years than my younger self could imagine even living. At every commercial break I hear ads for medic-alert bracelets, phone plans for seniors, hearing aids and funeral planning services, and I say to myself: “They think only old people are watching this channel.” And then I realize, “Maybe they’re right.”
Then, there’s the “classic radio” stations, playing things like Billy Idol, The Police and The Go-Gos, which means the 80s now qualifies as “classic” (read: “antique”). What? Doesn’t “classic rock” mean Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival? And of course it won’t stop there: The next phase comes soon enough, when 80s music fans transition from “old but still buying stuff” to “too old to bother marketng to” and “classic” is redefined as 90s stuff like Nirvana and Pearl Jam (we’re already getting there).
That’s depressing stuff if you let yourself dwell on it. Luckily, I have three young kids at home to keep me young, or at least too busy to dwell on how young I’m not. Between scouts and dance and hopscotch matches, and with so many conversations revolving around My Little Pony and Minecraft, I don’t have time to feel old. When I first became a dad at 38, I thought, “Wow, I’m going to be really old when my kids get out of high school.” But like the TV and radio stations, I find I have a sliding rule for defining “old.” Thirty-five seems a lot younger to me now than it did in 1975, and hey, 50 is the new 40, right? Just ask any 50-year old.
Anyway, I’m pretty cool with hitting the half-century mark yesterday. And if I do say so myself, I’m holding up pretty well. But I still would’ve preferred a job on the Moon.
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I love this post! You’ve nailed many of the things I’m experiencing.
Yes, I remember Space 1999. I remember liking it a lot, but for whatever reason, it didn’t capture me in quite the same way Star Trek did. It’s a good example of the clever children’s SF the Brits were doing, like Space 1999, Tomorrow People, and of course Dr Who.
Mentioning Star Wars, I’d still rather watch the TV series of Space 1999 than any of the Star Wars films after Empire Strikes Back.
That’s the thing with the British SF… the clever stories are what caught my attention. Maybe this is nostalgia talking (bound to be), but those shows were aimed at kids while not being kiddie stuff. There was a British comic I liked as a boy, 2000 AD, and it was along the same lines. The writers assumed we 10-year-olds were already really intelligent (we were) and so they wrote that way. (Whereas most of the Star Wars movies assume the opposite: most of the audience is thick, so let’s dumb it all down.)
You can imagine how sobering it is for me to be 15 years beyond “2000 AD”, David. When I was reading the comic, 2000 seemed impossibly far off. Back then, it was such a romantic / exciting / frightening title.
For the record, I remember Chips! Most kids here liked American TV shows when I was growing up. Strangely, I was always a fan of Jon, while EVERYBODY else liked Ponch the best (?).
(I’d better slip in here that no show was a rival for Six Million Dollar Man. He was the champ.)
Again, great post. And happy birthday.
Anthony:
Thanks for the warm wishes.
I don’t think “Space:1999” tried to “capture” anyone. If anything, it seemed determined to keep viewers at arm’s length with dour, downbeat, and purposely obtuse plots. It think it was much more inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey” than by “Star Trek.” But where the chummy, swashbuckling “Trek” approach won that show generations of fans willing to turn a blind eye to (or even embrace) cheesiness and goofy science, the aloof, pretentious approach of 1999 meant the fan base stayed small (but still there, and on the web!) and every scientific boo-boo (which were legion) was called out and mercilessly mocked.
That said, I LOVED the “Eagle” models and was fascinated by (if not fully enamored with) those “staple gun” lasers they were always shooting.
“1999” also gave me my first glimpse into the dark side of Trek fandom, as so many Trekkies worked so hard to tear apart and belittle the Anderson show. The attitude in the mid-70s was, “If we can’t have Trek, we will not support any SF on television.” In a way, Star Wars did a service by entering the scene as such a juggernaut, lest the Trek crowd end up the bullies of the whole genre. (Of course, then it became the Star Wars fans dominating everything. Ah well…)
My favorite Brit SF was Gerry Anderson’s previous show, “UFO” (which kind of, sort of, evolved into “1999”). That show was also dark and creepy, but in a gaudy, bawdy sort of way (like Hammer films!) and even though cast with essentially unknown British actors, was more riveting — to me, anyway — than “1999” with it’s “big name American stars.”
I never got to read 2000 AD, though as a kind-of, sort-of fan of “Judge Dredd” (really more a fan of Brian Bolland’s art) I’m certainly aware of it.
And yeah, it’s too bad we’ve run out of all the really cool dates to look forward to. 1984, 1999, 2000 and 2001 were all kind of a bust.