Unidentified Flying Awesome

Okay, right off the bat, look me right in my metaphorical eye and tell me that this is not the most kickass opening credits sequence EVER:

Damn straight. I can think of a few other openings that are pretty good, including some others made by the same guys who did this one, but those are Geek DNA articles for a later date.

First, some background. You kids might not know it, but back in the previous century, TV was pretty limited. Most homes didn't have cable. We actually did, for a short period in southern Indiana in the early seventies, but, ironically, we only had a black and white TV set. Yes, some TVs were in black and white. Ours was, until I was in junior high school.

So, you had analog broadcast, which you got by sticking an antenna on top of your TV set (not a great option), or on top of your house (better), or by living someplace that was actually near civilization. Most of my childhood, we lived near Seattle, and so we had six fairly decent channels from Seattle, and, occasionally, three or four sketchy Canadian channels from Bellingham, Vancouver, and Victoria. The Seattle channels had pretty good signals, because they mostly broadcast from the giant towers on top of Queen Anne Hill, which are still there today.

This was long before home video recorders, too, so if you wanted to watch a program, well, you were at the network's mercy. If KOMO said that The Six Million Dollar Man was on Friday night at nine PM, well, that's when you watched it. No Tivo, no VCR, that was it. We also had to walk ten miles uphill in the snow each way to catch the bus for school, and we were evicted from our shoebox.

Anyway, the point is that some times were better than others, TV-wise. Saturday mornings were the time for cartoons, and so were Sunday mornings for little kids who didn't go to church. (Lincoln and I went to church. Oh boy did we go to church.) Tuesday nights on the local PBS station, KCTS, meant three solid hours of Excellent, and that's yet another article for a later time there. Thursday night at 7:30 PM was The Muppet Show. I can't remember anything I learned in ten years of college, but I could probably sit down with a spreadsheet and work out whole chunks of the television broadcast schedules of my childhood.

One of the most awesome times, however, was late Friday nights. It seems like there was always something good on after the late news, no matter how old I was, and that show above, UFO, was no exception.

UFO came out at the perfect time for me. I was about twelve or thirteen, old enough to appreciate the more complex plots and themes of the show, but still young enough to try and recreate a Lego version of the SkyDiver submarine. (Some luckier friends who went to my school actually had the Dinky toy versions of the craft from the show.)

The plot was an attention-getter, equal parts spy thriller, action show, and conspiracy theories, and had a lot in common with shows that came later, like The X-Files. UFO's (pronounced “you-foes” by the largely British cast) were coming to Earth and abducting innocent humans, who were then harvested for their organs by the aliens. The aliens were obviously a lot similar to us.

A secret agency, SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation) was created by the governments of the Earth to protect us from them. The HQ was built inside a film studio, which was a nice fiction for the backstory (the theory being that if anyone saw any weird equipment, people, events, they could explain it away as scenes from a new movie), and a nifty cost saver for Gerry Anderson, who could run amok on the Pinewood backlot.

Which he did. Anderson was tired of being known as the Puppet Guy (Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90), and he was seriouslytired of being known as the Kids' Show Puppet Guy. He and his wife Sylvia wanted to move into more adult themes in television, and then hopefully into motion pictures. He got Sir Lew Grade to go ahead on UFO by the expedient of not being terribly forthright about which age bracket the show was to be aimed, and also by the fact that he had a couple of heavy hitters in Derek Meddings (VFX) and Barry Gray (music) on board.

The shows were remarkably adult in tone, given the subject matter. Commander Ed Straker, the driven leader of SHADO, was played as a harsh, terse man, who had sacrificed everything for the sake of his mission. Ed Bishop played Straker as a man who was saving all of humanity, sometimes at the cost of his own. In the one season of the show, we see how he lost his wife, his son, and most of his friends.

The conflicts were not just external, but internal, as well. Straker was constantly fighting for a larger budget to build more Moonbases and SkyDivers. His subordinates, men and women of strongly held personal beliefs themselves, were as likely to fight against him as with him, if needed.

And the science, while admittedly more at the “fiction” than “science” end of the spectrum, could be interesting also. One episode featured aliens breathing oxygenated fluid in their spacesuits to help protect their bodies against heavy gravitational forces in flight. The very first part of the credits (which gave me nightmares for a while as a kid) revealed that the aliens wore a special set of contact lenses to protect the eyes from the liquid.

Sure, there were some pretty gaping holes in the plot. Why were these guys flying light-decades just to grab one or two humans and then split? Why didn't they fly in in fleets, hundreds at a time? The most I think I ever saw was three. If they have FTL travel, why are they using machine guns? Even as a kid watching the show, I was asking some of these questions, and, the one time my older brother watched it with me, he asked the others.

But I watched a few of these episodes not long ago, and you know what? It still holds up reasonably well. There are episodes without any aliens in them at all. There are episodes built around the political situations, or Straker's private life, or any number of things.

I saw a proposal, now about ten or fifteen years old, for a revival of the show, and it was brilliant. This show could be redone now and, in the right hands, it could be a Battlestar Galactica-level hit. Sadly, Ed Bishop and Paul Billington, the two main leads, died within five days of each other in 2005, but it's still doable.

If I had millions of dollars to blow on making a TV show, I know I'd be tempted.

If you want to know more, this is the ultimate UFO fansite.  It is also rare for fansites in that it's really well-designed and readable.