alt Hacker NewsUFO Series Home Page: "UFO" TV Series from 1970
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I just watched through this over the summer. It’s a fascinating specimen of a show. I am highly confident much of the Austin Powers aesthetic is borrowed from this, from the featureless suit coats to the everyone-is-mad-sexy to the swinging soundtrack.
It’s a Gerry Anderson production, so lots of great Thunderbirds-style miniatures too. And wild cars. All the action sequences have the delightful feel of an eight year old playing with toys. In fact a lot of it seems to have a fun child’s-idea aspect. “And it’s part submarine and part fighter jet! And they slide down chutes into the cockpit! And his office is a secret elevator! And all the grownups are doing computer things! And to get a whiskey you push a whiskey button! And the whole thing is under a movie studio!”
But god yes, Stryker’s family story is harsh. Way overbearing the trope that he’s such a powerful dedicated man keeping the world safe that his utterly neglected family has to suffer so badly. Particularly when much of the time, he’s standing around the office smoking and drinking and asking the nearest woman to go fetch him some coffee. You thought you were getting a show about high tech futuristic alien defense. Well, you have to watch a lot of office banter too, that’s the deal.
Still, super stylish. And its cousin “Space: 1999” might be more interesting/bonkers sci-fi, but UFO (pronounced YOOFO) is just relentless with the looks and swagger. Each episode is worth watching for the intro alone.
Let's keep this pertinent to Hacker News: The nicely intoned computer voice of SID on UFO was way more advanced than the clunky monotone of the Star Trek TOS ship's computer.
Apparently, this UFO series was one of the influences that went into the 1994 game UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM).
My kids enjoyed UFO S01E01 (the pilot?) but never got into the series. They really like Space 1999 however.
I've found it useful to use my kids as a barometer of what bits of culture have persevered (as opposed to whatever ancient thing I still like).
Barney Miller: Lasts
Blazing Saddles: Didn't age as well as I thought.
I lapped this up eagerly when it was first syndicated in the US, I was in high school at the time. It wasn't until a few years later that I saw Doppelgänger, probably the first time it was on TV.
I was actually introduced to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson as a much younger kid, when I saw Fireball XL-5 on Saturday morning TV. But I missed Thunderbirds until I was an adult!
"Mindbender" is a brilliant episode.
"A Question Of Priorities" is quite dark.
"Reflections In The Water" is pretty cool, too.
For UK readers: all of UFO is available on the itvX player.
So is Fireball XL5! (And Terrahawks, Space Precinct etc.)
Also The Secret Service but after one episode of Unwinisms you will probably have had enough.
I love the soundtrack (the future used to be groovier), and the understated Earth civilian wardrobe, but I tried to rewatch it and it's so sexist and misogynistic it's almost disturbing. And I find it cool there was never an in-universe explanation for the purple wigs.
My 1970's self liked it. My 2026 one not so much.
I also think Benedict Cumberbatch's mom was an early crush because of this series, but 1970's me didn't quite know what to do with those feelings.
This was one of my favorite shows when I was 10. When I am too old and demented to remember my own name, I will still remember the first four notes of that theme music.
An incredible show and such a creative vision of a future that alas never came to pass.
The conspiratorial angles and the continued mystery around the aliens were engrossing. Add terrifying episodes like "A Question of Priorities" and UFO probably scarred a generation of kids for life.
The Andersons created it as a show for adult audiences which explains the dark storylines and sexy outfits, but somehow it ended up being slotted in children's viewing hours!
I watched it when I was a kid. I also liked it a lot, surprisingly enough.
Some things I liked about it:
- Intro music. One of the best for a TV series IMO. I also liked other great intro music, such as Dallas, but never watched Dallas. Other great intro themes are e. g. The Saints, and of course Tom and Jerry etc... (the german intro though, that one was oddly enough better than the english one, e. g. Udo Jürgens singing it. I always hated it when it was over.).
- The flashy outfits and colours. It looks like a joke today, but I liked it back in the days.
- The futuristic models and style and design overall. It looks aged today, but in the early 1980s it was great (I guess I watched reruns ... I was not aware it was made in 1970, which can explain why it looked so dated now).
- The main actor was kind of interesting looking, almost like an albino in style.
One episodes I remember a bit was some cat ... or some great confusion. I was confused too. That episode ended with the explanation that he was confused by some alien or some cat as messenger. (If you are now confused about it, this is all I remember and some scenes where the room was very disordered. Normally the rooms are clean and ordered in the TV series).
Odd how only a few episodes were made, on IMDB it has very high rating. Reminds me a bit of Twin Peaks. People kind of liked a lot about it but some other things didn't win them over, so things get cancelled.
Ah, the memories. The joyous days spent imagining the future...
As a 70's child, I grew up with the UFO Interceptor[1] toy, a treasured possession, and fondly remember blasting it around the house, scraping it on the floor, shooting off the rocket missile, chasing the cat, pew pew... but gradually getting tired of it, losing the missile in some corner of our backyard.
I wasn't allowed to watch the TV show, but occasionally caught glimpses of it, mostly only ever interested in the scenes involving the models and spaceships, never quite getting the gist of the story...
A couple years or two later, I received the SPACE:1999 Eagle[2] toy for a birthday, must have been my 6th or 7th year - my Mum obviously realizing I'd outgrown the UFO Interceptor, having long lost the rocket bit that made it the most fun. For some reason by then I was allowed to watch the odd SPACE:1999 episode, but stopped after the trauma of the "Dragon's Domain" episode. (If you know, you know.)
I was enamored with the Eagle for a few months, but after a short period of use it then sat mostly unused as a trinket on my shelf, alongside my Capsela[3] constructions - themselves later supplemented by Denshi Blocks[4].
I have this sense that these devices were how the consumer cycle was imprinted on me as a kid, as well as a deep longing for a computer of my own.
The Interceptor->Eagle path was obvious consumerism, but something else happened .. losing the Interceptors rocket frustrated me immensely, so I fashioned a new one out of a pencil. My engineering mind was thus born.
As I recall, the latch mechanism that made the UFO Interceptor so satisfying as a projectile launcher required that I notch a groove into the pencil, a process that took me an afternoon of whittling, my first practical use of my Swiss Army knife, resulting in various waves of fun and disappointment as the latch/spring eroded the pencil down with each launch .. there was a curve of fun at which the top of the crest the pencil being launched was so satisfying, but after repeated blasts, also kind of boring as the wood wore down. I jammed the pencil in one last time and sat the Interceptor on the shelf, my own space-age Mr. Squiggle[5].
I was also, as a kid, immensely frustrated that the launched projectiles never went straight, rendering it quite useless for shooting things. Especially the cat. Still, my engineering senses had been cracked, the seed began to grow ..
I moved on to Capsela, which was an utter delight to build things to take to the bath tub, and then I was gifted a Denshi Blocks kit by a wise old HAM-fanatic uncle of mine.
Capsela and Denshi were mind-expanding to an 8 year old kid who by then was utterly enamored with any electronic technology I could get my hands on, and I even attempted wiring up the Denshi Blocks and the Capsela to try to make a kind of robot, which never got too far, although my imagination took it into cosmic realms. An imagination flavored by the UFO and SPACE:1999 model sequences, indeed.
This all faded away of course, until I touched my first computer - a Commodore Pet some business associate of my Dad had added to his office without knowing what to do with it whatsoever, just knowing he had to have one .. I think the only use it ever got was as a babysitter for me while he and Dad did whatever it was they did, as I tapped away and learned all the key combo's to make pretty pictures that were, in my mind, maps of the universe. And then, BASIC, and oh what a journey that became!
There was a sexual awakening happening in me too amidst all of this, although I didn't realize it at the time but came to know too well - the crush/trauma I'd had on the lost female crew member from "Dragon's Domain" resurfaced in my teens, and she's still the kind of girl I like. Fatal, pretty, technologically savvy yet doomed to be a victim of the dragon. A smart, imperiled girl I probably could've saved with my Capsela Denshi Robot.
(Replaced not long after with Leela from Doctor Who as a fantasy figure, I recall now fondly .. the Doctors sonic screwdriver sending me into a life-long dedication to the hobby of synthesizers, too!)
What a time to remember how the future used to be...
I've still got the Denshi Blocks kit, managed to keep them for my own kids, who haven't quite engaged as much as I'd liked, but it'll be there for the grandkids when they arrive.
I wonder what they'll do with it, if anything.
[1] - https://www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/index/UFO_Interceptor_(D...
[2] - https://dinkytvspace.com/359-eagle-transporter/
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsela
[4] - https://www.elektronauts.com/t/gakken-denshi-blocks/136198
I rewatched this series a few years ago and was surprised that it held up as well as it did. Yes, lots of sexism, but not untypical for that time. Like Star Trek, it had women in authority roles, but also in sexy outfits, so a bit of a mixed bag. They also got handsome Michael Billington out of his shirt a few times, which I found quite interesting for reasons that didn't become clear to me until some years later :)
Space:1999 started as a sequel to this series, set ten years later, on a greatly expanded Moonbase. They eventually abandoned that connection.
The opening credits theme music and editing are just brilliant.