|
"Buck Rogers in the 25th Century"
Theatrical Film (1979) and TV Series
(1979-81)
Articles
"Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century" television review
from TV Guide, December 15, 1979
By Robert MacKenzie
The heroes they're
issuing lately have some design flaws, I'm afraid. Here is Buck Rogers, who set a good
example for youth in several decades of comic strips and serials, retooled for NBC's Buck
Rogers in the 25th Century; and how gallant is he? Well, at the start of one episode,
he asked his pretty commander Wilma (Erie Gray), "Are you busy later tonight?"
She replied with a touch of eagerness, "No," and the big joker cracked,
"That's too bad. I am."
Now, is that any way to
treat a lady? Would Buster Crabbe have said that? All right, it was just an incident. But
these little things tell.
Gil Gerard, cast as Buck,
is a beefy sort, squarish of jaw, stuffed into a tight white suit and looking rather like
a Polish sausage. He's certainly sturdy enough, and has a nice smile, but is more stolid
than dashing. I suppose it's the going style.
In this version, Buck is
a 20th-century astronaut who finds himself in 2491 A.D., where an interstellar
war is going on. With good old 20th-century enthusiasm, he gets his own rocket
and starts killing Draconians. The art of animation, now highly developed, allows for
destruction and death-dealing on a cosmic scale. Mighty spaceships are zapped to powder
and every informed person has a ray-pistol to render enemies unconscious and possibly
sterile.
Unlike Star Trek, which
liked to turn a philosophical moral, Buck is straight space-cowboy, relying on
chases and shootouts, with interplanetary reaches used as the O.K. Corral. In one story
Buck was held prisoner on an enemy planet, Earth's pilot corps had been decimated, and
there was nobody to fly the rescue mission but a handful of old space-jockeys who had been
retired as unfit. The over-the-hill gang flew the mission, disintegrated the enemy
warships and recaptured their self-respect. In another one, Buck rescued a woman from an
extraterrestrial jail and trudged her across a desert, pursued by an ill-tempered android
that kicked boulders and knocked down trees. There was a rather good monster here, a
tentacly sand creature that glommed onto victims and dragged them under.
Frankly, it discourages
me to find war and killing so popular five centuries from now. In Buck's world, hardly
anything else goes on. Nobody goes shopping or visiting, and there are no dogs and cats.
There are pretty colors
in Buck-cerise jumpsuits and the like-and an occasional quick glimpse of a sleek
automated city. The women's costumes, for a change, do not look like carhop uniforms,
though some would work for Vegas cocktail waitresses.
I'm afraid this kind of
space opera makes painfully evident the failure of human imagination-or maybe I mean
Hollywood imagination. Nothing here is really strange, otherworldly, mind-turning or
fantastic. Kids who have read science fiction and taken leaps into the beyond with Robert
Heinlein and Ray Bradbury will find this big ox and his adventures pretty tepid.
If the future isn't for
dreaming, what good is it?
|
Now Playing:
Awakening (TV Version)
 Dial-up stream
Broadband
stream
|
