Who Is Your Captain?

Who Is Your Captain?

Coming from Eastern Europe, I have a different experience with Sci-Fi and tv sci-fi series. I am a geek, and being one I love sci-fi. I grew up on the books of A.C. Clarke and Asimov. Watching sci-fi however was always different experience. First of all the communist doctrine in my country did not accept sci-fi as literature (it was considered as pulp fiction), so we had very few TV adaptations in my country. Some countries like Poland and Russia was more receptive to science fiction, maybe they had more geeks in the communist party. Right now I am just thinking about books from Stanislaw Lem, and the Russian adaptation of the Solaris.

In the late seventies, when my brain was mature enough to understand the stories, and allowed to see with parental guidance some PG13 rated sci-fi epics, which were almost ten years old at the time. I remember watching the Hungarian adaptation of the Adventures of Captain Pirx – which by the way was based on the story from Stanislaw Lem. I am trying to understand why the western (English speaking) audience has so little available from him. The first Solaris movie (from Andrej Tarkovsky) was famous and legendary. The American version of the film with George Clooney was a mediocre success. The adaptation was not based on an original translation of the book, and the novel is still not available (2009) for the readers.

Back to the adventures, the set of captain Pirx and the special effects showed limitations of a the cheap production: the space ship was made of an average simple coffee maker, the parabolic antenna was a kitchen basket: well, it seemed indeed the film was made entirely in a kitchen of someone’s house. The story was fascinating and amusing though: I was completely amazed by the fascinating future, leaser weapons and robotics. In fact: I did not see the kitchen basket and the coffee machine – (that was my mother’s domain anyway) – I just enjoyed the story.


Then I saw the first repetition of the Fantastic Adventures of Spaceship Orion. This was a Western German tv series, which was almost 15 years old in the eighties, and I saw McLane, and Tamara and the fight against Space Administration bureaucracy and narrow mindedness about the existence of space aliens (which I was convinced that they exists). The special effects were the same home made and funny, but it was better executed. The set moved from the kitchen to the laundry room, therefore there was an iron in the command room of the spaceship.


I think my next experience was the Space 1999 series

Moon base Alpha command team: Left to right:
Victor Bergman (sitting) Alan Carter, Dr. Helena Russell, John Koenig, Paul Morrow (sitting) Sandra Benes and David Kano
We got introduced to captain Koenig. Now I am reading about Moonbase Alpha. The production was RAI-BBC cooperation, with sexy Italian characters (like Metamorph-Maya with painted sideburns, and pictures about the psychic aliens who looked like a pile of hash. (Now the story makes much more sense ) Here is the crew of the Monbase Alpha: look at the outfits, like watching the Boney M on concert.

I started to think at the time, how is life for these people in between their adventures. We saw everyday life events from the future era of the Orion. From the moonbase we had nothing. I thought, they just did not have time to explain it to us, how did this work on the detached, alien, sunless deep space. You see more man than women on the picture: At that time I started to think, how can they live without falling in love with each other? I was looking forward to see each time for the Metamorph, and I thought that she must marry Koenig sometimes. The set and the whole story were very confined. It was a sort of claustrophobic. One question I was remember keep on asking from myself: would I be able to live in a space future like this, without going to open air, see birds…
Something was missing from the story, and I think the detachment from the everyday life, and focus only on the space adventure took away from the story. I am still curious what do they eat? Where do they get water from?
I was very happy to see the expectations about the technological advance: if you remember A.C. Clarke and the 2001 Space Odyssey, where the artificial intelligence was envisioned to be available by 2001, Moonbase Alpha was in 1999. I thought, we don’t have to wait so long, and the adventure will start. I will see this in the newspaper: Alpha under construction… 1999, 2001 all history by now. We are living at the time of the second odyssey, next year will be 2010. The foreseen future is quite a bit of less in reality. Sad to see that we did not advance that much.

Eagle one come and went. We started to watch Star Trek on the Austrian TV channels. It was aired right before eight after the Tom and Jerry show.
This was my first encounter with Star Trek, which was called “Raumshiff Enterprise” at the time, and mister Spock was “Herr Spock” to me. Well the expression “beam me up Scotty” come to me from a linux e-mail daemon, which was inserting funny quotes to each sent e-mail. What is beaming up? Ah JA! This is the thing when you disappear, and manifest yourself on the spaceship. This was really funny, and appealing to my geeky mind. I was at the university already, and you can tell, that I was late by all means to understand what it meant to be a “Trekie” in North America. I am a late maturing trekie. My excuse: we had a limited access to these films. It was just not worth for the government-controlled film distribution to introduce the series to us. We did not know the main reason, until I saw and understood the hidden message of each episode: “Romulan” could be a parallel with “Russian”, Vulcan could be a good German with the ethics of Immanuel Kant. I believe it was banned for a reason. When the Star Trek: new generation movie come out there was no context for us. The movie was just a Sci-Fi movie, like the “Planet of Apes” or the “Star Wars”, nothing more. I liked the movie though, very much.
Now, looking back at the series, watching the different seasons with the ever coming new captains, you can pick new favorites: Captain Kirk with the Lone Star swinger attitude, the philosophical, Buddhist monk-like Patrick Stewart, or the emancipated commander of the next Enterprise – what a journey. You can only understand it when you put this into the North American cultural background.
I am missing from my list of Sci-Fi series the Thunderbirds, just because I had not even a chance to see them, and all played with puppets, and Dr Who, I saw this on Sky channel in the middle nineties, never impressed me really, but it could be caused by the language barrier.
If you think about the whole sci-fi TV, you can see some trends:
1. The early TV series were more space and discovery related. The origins are probably all the space program achievements. You had have your TV heroes living up to real figures. The real life was almost more interesting than the TV. We did land on the Moon, didn’t we? The TV needed something close enough to generate interest. They went to the space and the future.
2. The earlier series are telling more about more real life events. We can relate to every day things like sex, eating, food and sleeping. The heroes are like us, but they are living in the future.
3. When the swinging sixties and disco seventies was over, you see less of sex, more aliens. The philosophical context gets embedded in the storyline: the Prime Directive is more important in the nineties than in the early series
4. They realize that the main audience of the show is geeky engineers, who are mostly man: lowering the cleavage of the female officers in the new generation star trek (seeking for more sex-appeal). Same thing with the female borg.
5. End of nineties comes with a female captain. Is this the sign that the engineering faculties are filled with less man, and the university population is biased to women?
Ok, time to finish this blog entry by revealing my top 5 space ship captains
1. Captain Kirk
2. Patrick Stewart - Enterprise NGCC
3. Captain Pirx
4. McLaine form the Orion
5. Koenig from Moonbase Alpha