Retro Traveller

[EDG]

I find it interesting that the guy was also on ST:TOS. I felt that the third season of TOS had similar problems in many of the stories. Character's personalities were changed to fit the plot (Chekov being conservative and Spock being a hippy is one example). While it also had some nice gritty stuff, it was very uneven IMHO.

Now that there is a common element, it makes some kind of sense...

IIRC the third season of TOS was the one that Frieberger worked on.

S1 of Space 1999 is pretty much how I like my scifi. Once you get over the things that are actually necessary to make the whole concept work (like the moon being blown out of orbit, the planet of the week, the fact that everyone hasn't died by halfway through the series through attrition of extras due to threat of the week etc), a lot of the stories themselves are actually pretty thoughtful and smart - though there were a few turkeys in there too. And also there was the underlying arc that the moon was blown out of orbit for a reason, and that somehow something was guiding them (as seen in "Collision Course" and "The Testament of Arkadia").

Sometimes I think it'd be nice to get back to that sort of "high concept SF" that seemed to be more common in the 70s.

 

[captainjack23]

I find it interesting that the guy was also on ST:TOS. I felt that the third season of TOS had similar problems in many of the stories. Character's personalities were changed to fit the plot (Chekov being conservative and Spock being a hippy is one example). While it also had some nice gritty stuff, it was very uneven IMHO.

Now that there is a common element, it makes some kind of sense...

IIRC the third season of TOS was the one that Frieberger worked on.

:evil: :x :evil: :x :evil: :x ...

 

[EDG]

Confirmed by the page about Frieberger on Wiki... though it says there that Star Trek was kinda dying anyway when he took it over.

Still:

In the pre-production analysis for the second season of Space: 1999, Freiberger pointed out that the first season was too intellectual for his target audiences, and he consequently redesigned the series.

:roll:

 

[BP]

Hmmm... it's interesting to see the tech that people think wasn't around in the '70s and '80's. To wit -

Mobile Cell phones - early 1970's (the tech came from just after WWII and 'cell' phones were used in squad cars - but cell hand-overs and handheld units didn't happen till the '70's)

PCs - began showing up for consumers mid '70's (Altair was what I'd call the first PC, though Apples were about that time too?)

Storage - floppies existed before PCs (8 " at least); laserdiscs were available (movies; in the '80's they were commercially available for recording data for about $12,000 for the drive); hard drives of course; CDs were available (though burners were kept from most large markets); mid '80's MO drives were available. Since the 70's IBM and others made holographic storage drives (expensive and hard to come by). Since I personally have seen all those technologies back then I know they existed - and of course there was also punch cards (yuk)!

During this time we also saw (from the U.S.) the Star Wars Defense Initiative which saw multi-frequency anti-satellite defense lasers developed. And then there were the cruise missiles, phalanx close in defense systems, head/optically controlled turret cannons, laser guided munitions and lots of other nasty tech goodies...

Some other things not in production included micro-mirror mems devices (used in DLPs today = TI spent years building the production facilities in one of the worst places - amid highways in the heart of Dallas - and trying to make them work with analog TV broadcasts); holographic TVs (though various real-time projection systems existed commercially); man portable 'x-ray' style radar; ion space drives; and, so much more.

Much of what was in Traveller was not sci-fi, but rather real science not yet commercially available or just recently released to market...