It also has to so with the muscle drug. It rips apart people over 15. And it's apparently an essential part of being a cub.
Logan's Run First Watch
- Thread starter Antonovus
- Start date
It also has to so with the muscle drug. It rips apart people over 15. And it's apparently an essential part of being a cub.
Now I realized that: a bunch of young and fit extras, scarcely dressed, in the middle of the pre-aids seventies.Was there any meaning in the colors of the clothes? I don't remember this particular detail ...
I'm sure that a lot of interesting things happened in between takes...
I'm sure they were just getting into characterNow I realized that: a bunch of young and fit extras, scarcely dressed, in the middle of the pre-aids seventies.
I'm sure that a lot of interesting things happened in between takes...
Dancing? Frisbee? Hacky-sack? Hula-hoops?Now I realized that: a bunch of young and fit extras, scarcely dressed, in the middle of the pre-aids seventies.
I'm sure that a lot of interesting things happened in between takes...
True, and how anyone could conclude that the "system" had anything to do with it means they are not watching the film.
Exactly. The Computer (or Thinker) does not authorize or enforce the actions or lives of the Cubs beyond sealing off Cathedral--essentially "throwing away the key" on them. That class of children are an aberration to the entire structure of the city, and citizens' beliefs, hence how they (the Cubs) have created their own dystopia within a dystopia by banishing anyone who ages out of Yellow status.
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There's a little bit more too that. Based on this thread, I just checked the movie out from the library and watched it with the Director's Commentary on. The colors actually grow darker as you progress through the spectrum. For example, light red means you're 24 and dark red means you're 30 and in your last year; although that have been a little hard to discern on screen.
I did notice the different shades, but I got the impression it was by gender. Looking at the crowd photo above, I see varying shades on both men and women, but the women's outfits generally look lighter-hued, or at least have a greater range of hues.
Perhaps they had just a little of freedom in choosing the hue of their color...? (like, it seems, they could choose the style of their outfits - they aren't all identical).
Part of it could be that the women's outfits were made of sheerer material. Apparently the same color dye on different fabrics can photograph differently, like the difference between Captain Kirk's velour uniform shirts that appeared gold and his wraparound tunics that looked green, even though they were both the same avocado-green hue.
Well, it took 11 days, but the DVD set of the Logan's Run TV series finally reached my local library, and I've just watched the pilot. Its version of the movie's plot is hugely simplified, taking only 10 minutes for Logan and Jessica to get outside. In this version, Logan's genuinely questioning the social order (using much the same dialogue as the Logan/Francis debate early in the movie, but played as more sincere doubt on Logan's part), Jessica's already had her eye on him as a potential recruit, and he ends up turning on Francis and running with Jessica very quickly (before he even learns her name). But at the same time, it clarifies a couple of things left vague in the movie. It explains just what "renewal" is believed to be -- going to "sleep" (explaining the "Sandman" thing) and being reborn again as a baby. I guess that would explain the numbers -- presumably Logan 5 is meant to be the reincarnation of Logan 4, who was preceded by Logan 3, etc. It also more clearly explains that the city was founded as the last refuge after a nuclear war 200 years earlier (and it move the timeframe 45 years forward from the movie, into 2319).
It also retcons in a secret ruling council of elders (led by Morgan Woodward) that offers Francis a chance to join them and grow old if he brings back Logan and Jessica. So while he starts out as the unquestioning true believer in the system, he, rather than Logan, is the one who gets the revelation that renewal is a myth... yet he still goes after L&J because of the prize he's been offered, which makes him more malicious. The movie's Francis may have been upholding an unjust system, but at least he believed he was doing the right thing.
Anyway, once L&J get out, it becomes a pretty formulaic, episodic show right away, much like I imagine Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II/Planet Earth would've been like, with the characters encountering an assortment of isolated post-apocalyptic enclaves with distinct cultures and problems. First they help a bunch of pacifists hiding in a fallout shelter to fight back against the armed horsemen who drove them there (and it turns out the Sandman guns have a stun setting that looks completely different from their usual blasts, a blue animated beam), which is wrapped up in 50 minutes so it could've been rerun as an hourlong episode; and then the last 25 minutes has them get trapped in a city of androids determined to keep them prisoner forever in order to "serve" them, only to escape with the most advanced android, Donald Moffat's Rem, who's the third regular. It makes me wonder if the pilot was originally scripted to run an hour and then had another half-hour added when they decided to add Rem. But that isn't indicated in anything I've read about the show. Wikipedia just says the stuff about the cabal of elders was added in reshoots.
Anyway, so far it's nothing to write home about. It doesn't even feel that connected to Logan's Run, just using the basic premise to set up a rather generic heroes-on-the-run sci-fi show. It's clumsy that the pilot has them escape one dystopian enclave where the people have peace and plenty but no freedom, only to get caught up in two other enclaves that basically have the same problem. It feels redundant. Also, the lead actors other than Moffat are fairly bland. I do remember from my previous viewings that Moffat was the standout in the cast.
It also retcons in a secret ruling council of elders (led by Morgan Woodward) that offers Francis a chance to join them and grow old if he brings back Logan and Jessica. So while he starts out as the unquestioning true believer in the system, he, rather than Logan, is the one who gets the revelation that renewal is a myth... yet he still goes after L&J because of the prize he's been offered, which makes him more malicious. The movie's Francis may have been upholding an unjust system, but at least he believed he was doing the right thing.
Anyway, once L&J get out, it becomes a pretty formulaic, episodic show right away, much like I imagine Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II/Planet Earth would've been like, with the characters encountering an assortment of isolated post-apocalyptic enclaves with distinct cultures and problems. First they help a bunch of pacifists hiding in a fallout shelter to fight back against the armed horsemen who drove them there (and it turns out the Sandman guns have a stun setting that looks completely different from their usual blasts, a blue animated beam), which is wrapped up in 50 minutes so it could've been rerun as an hourlong episode; and then the last 25 minutes has them get trapped in a city of androids determined to keep them prisoner forever in order to "serve" them, only to escape with the most advanced android, Donald Moffat's Rem, who's the third regular. It makes me wonder if the pilot was originally scripted to run an hour and then had another half-hour added when they decided to add Rem. But that isn't indicated in anything I've read about the show. Wikipedia just says the stuff about the cabal of elders was added in reshoots.
Anyway, so far it's nothing to write home about. It doesn't even feel that connected to Logan's Run, just using the basic premise to set up a rather generic heroes-on-the-run sci-fi show. It's clumsy that the pilot has them escape one dystopian enclave where the people have peace and plenty but no freedom, only to get caught up in two other enclaves that basically have the same problem. It feels redundant. Also, the lead actors other than Moffat are fairly bland. I do remember from my previous viewings that Moffat was the standout in the cast.
Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. I was at my first-ever Trek convention in the summer of 1977, and I saw the original version of the Logan’s Run pilot. It was shorter, and there was no Rem. And, possibly, no car? Can’t remember — it was 42 years ago! They did tell us that they would be adding to the pilot before it was broadcast, so when I watched it on TV a few months later, part of it was new. They were bragging about upcoming episodes by Fontana and Gerrold, so I was kind of excited for the series.
I watched the show, at least as much as was initially broadcast — I think it was cancelled with 3 or 4 episodes still to air. It wasn’t great, but it was something. Anyway, at that time, we were assured Star Trek II was just around the corner, so it was OK as a temporary stopgap.
Maybe 10 years ago I got the DVDs from Netflix (remember the red envelopes?) and rewatched the entire series. It’s still OK, and I found Heather Menzies to be a likable lead. But if you skip it, you’re not missing anything.
Oh, that's interesting. It's sort of like what happened with Lost in Space, except they were able to tack the new character's introduction on at the end instead of interweaving the reshoot material with the original pilot footage (and stretching it into five episodes).
I was going to say that the hovercraft scenes seemed pretty integrated into the story, but then I realized they weren't. There was this one big sequence introducing the hovercraft, showing them escaping from Francis, and then driving to the site of their fallout-shelter adventure, but then they left it behind until the end of that plotline. So I guess it could've been added later, and it makes sense as the sort of thing execs would've pushed for, maybe so they could've had a toy to sell, or so they could have a standing set to shoot in so that it wouldn't all have to be locations and new sets. (The execs tried to convince Kenneth Johnson to give The Incredible Hulk's David Banner a sidekick with an RV so they could shoot scenes there to save money, but he refused.)
Honestly, the way the original pilot storyline ends -- with the shelter community freed to live peaceful, independent lives again -- kind of renders the whole series premise moot. If Logan and Jessica have found a free community of humans like that, why do they need to keep looking for Sanctuary? I guess maybe they're specifically looking for earlier Runners from their own community, but it's kind of like those early Battlestar Galactica episodes the following season where the ragtag, fugitive fleet keeps finding these human-populated worlds and leaving them behind rather than settling on them. It undermines the whole premise of there being only a single legendary refuge to search for if they come across equally viable places to live almost every week. (Wow, I never realized how similar the two shows' premises were.)
The second episode is "The Collectors" by James Schmerer (ST:TAS's "The Survivor"), and it's very much in the '70s mold where every episode after the pilot is written to work anywhere in the sequence. It treats Logan, Jessica, and Rem as if they've been traveling together for a fair while and the status quo is well-established. And it has them find an illusory version of Sanctuary, which is something that might've worked better if they'd put it off a while so it wouldn't have been so obviously fake -- although they pretty much clued the audience into the fakery right away. Turns out it's a trick by a couple of aliens collecting twosomes of various alien species to find their weaknesses so they can conquer their planets -- which seems an unnecessary length to go to in Earth's case, given that the planet's mostly devastated and has few people left alive on it to begin with. The alien masks look kind of familiar in some cases, like they were recycled from something else -- and I'd be amazed if this show had the budget to create at least four different pairs of alien masks from scratch -- but I can't place them. Oh, and speaking of Lost in Space, it has a supporting role for Angela Cartwright, reunited with her The Sound of Music sibling Heather Menzies.
There's a clumsy bit of plotting -- Logan and Jessica figure out their surroundings are an illusion because everyone and everything they think about immediately appears, and then Jessica wishes Rem were there and Rem immediately appears. Yet it doesn't occur to them to doubt that he's real, and it turns out he actually is real, which undercuts the whole thing.
Oh, one thing -- the show abandons the color-coded wardrobes of the movie. Jessica's regular outfit is pink, but in "The Collectors" she wears a blue gown and says it's exactly like one she wore back home (since it's a recreation drawn from her memory).
They were probably still trying to depreciate costs from Shazam!.
Compared to the quantity today, they barely did.
1: True, which is the main reason for point #3. But the cost could be mitigated by recycling assets (costumes, props, stock footage) from a feature film, e.g. Planet of the Apes or Logan's Run. And a post-apocalyptic series wandering around the Los Angeles mountains encountering various villages of pre-industrial survivors wasn't that expensive. (And one more reason the execs probably wanted the hovercraft in Logan was so they could recycle stock footage of it driving along.)
2. Yes, but no more so than shows in any other genre. The reason execs wanted SF shows restricted to basic formulas was because those were the same formulas that prevailed on mainstream shows.
3. As far as I can recall, you're right; the only '70s SF shows that made it to a third season were present-day action/superhero shows like the bionic shows, Wonder Woman, and The Incredible Hulk.
To answer why they tried anyway, keep in mind that the '70s were when Star Trek exploded in popularity in syndicated reruns. And the Planet of the Apes film series was a pretty big hit too. So there was an incentive to try, in hopes of finding a concept that would hit big enough with audiences that the profit would offset the expense. The problem was that, at the same time, execs were too conservative and assumed anything too smart or challenging would drive away Joe Average, so they insisted on dumbing down the scripts and sticking to comfortable formulas. They didn't get that what made ST and PotA successful was that they were smart and daring and had something to say. They assumed sci-fi was a children's genre whose appeal was its monsters and aliens and ray guns. So they kept trying to create the next Star Trek but didn't realize they were sabotaging their own efforts.
I didn't expect to like "Capture," D.C. Fontana's first episode (under her Michael Richards pseudonym), since it's the 3 millionth TV-episode rehash of The Most Dangerous Game, with the stars being captured and made prey by a fanatical hunter (Horst Bucholz) and his equally predatory wife (Mary Woronov at her most leonine). But it actually works surprisingly well. Its premise meshes nicely with a show about hunters and quarry, and the plot -- in which Francis captures Logan and they're then captured in turn and forced to work together to survive -- does an excellent job backfilling the Logan-Francis friendship that was glossed over in the pilot's hasty setup. It also cursorily ties the plot into the larger Runner narrative by revealing that the hunters have killed a number of previous Runners and kept their ankh amulets as trophies -- the first information we've gotten about the actual fate of any of the Runners. It still relies too much on Rem to save the day by being endlessly clever, capable, and charming, but Logan and Jessica get to be at least somewhat resourceful as well, and the hunters get an effective self-inflicted comeuppance that should've been the resolution but ended up being just the penultimate step before a more basic resolution.
I may have been wrong about the episodes being made to run in any order, since this one has a couple of continuity nods -- it's explicitly the first time Logan and Francis have met since the mountain city, and Rem references the desert they passed through in the previous episode. The episode also introduces a second vehicle, a car for the Sandmen that's vaguely similar to the maze cars from the movies, with a curved glass roof and gullwing doors. The "outside car" was mentioned in reshoot dialogue in the pilot, but this is our first look at it. It's a clear case of executive meddling overriding story logic -- if the city was so completely closed off from the outside, why does it have vehicles designed to operate outside?
"The Innocents" by Ray Brenner and Fontana compounds the problem by having multiple teams of Sandmen in multiple cars (Francis is in Groundcar 7) combing the countryside for Logan. So all these Sandmen, who are trained to uphold a system predicated on the assumption that the world outside the City is uninhabitable, are being sent outside to discover that the entire system they kill to uphold is based on a lie -- and none of them are troubled by that? Heck, Logan became a Runner just for having some questions about the system -- now, in order to catch that one Sandman, the city leaders are sending a whole horde of Sandmen into a situation that's practically guaranteed to turn more of them into Runners, or would if the show bothered to address the issue.
Anyway, our trio escapes the Sandmen by retreating into a bunker inhabited by a pair of goofy-looking comic-relief robots and a 19-year-old girl named Lisa, who's been alone all her life and naturally falls immediately for Logan, and then turns out to have psychokinetic powers, which is why she's stuck alone in a bunker. So it's basically a gender-swapped rehash of Fontana's "Charlie X" from Star Trek, with Lisa having essentially the same power set as Charlie and the same motivations, though the ending is less tragic. It plays out pretty predictably, although this time, unlike "Charlie X," we actually get to see the limbo people end up in when Lisa "puts them away" (which is just blackness, but it does establish that they're still conscious and aware).
Not a very impressive episode, except for how strikingly bad the optical effects are. It was normal in film days for optical effects shots to be grainier and lower in film quality than regular shots, because the need to re-photograph strips of film in the process of combining them with each other led to generational loss of image clarity/quality. But in this case, the optical shots are massively degraded compared to the standard shots, even when the superimposed FX are simple animation so that there should only have been a single generation's worth of re-exposure. It's weird, because the same wasn't the case in previous episodes.
I may have been wrong about the episodes being made to run in any order, since this one has a couple of continuity nods -- it's explicitly the first time Logan and Francis have met since the mountain city, and Rem references the desert they passed through in the previous episode. The episode also introduces a second vehicle, a car for the Sandmen that's vaguely similar to the maze cars from the movies, with a curved glass roof and gullwing doors. The "outside car" was mentioned in reshoot dialogue in the pilot, but this is our first look at it. It's a clear case of executive meddling overriding story logic -- if the city was so completely closed off from the outside, why does it have vehicles designed to operate outside?
"The Innocents" by Ray Brenner and Fontana compounds the problem by having multiple teams of Sandmen in multiple cars (Francis is in Groundcar 7) combing the countryside for Logan. So all these Sandmen, who are trained to uphold a system predicated on the assumption that the world outside the City is uninhabitable, are being sent outside to discover that the entire system they kill to uphold is based on a lie -- and none of them are troubled by that? Heck, Logan became a Runner just for having some questions about the system -- now, in order to catch that one Sandman, the city leaders are sending a whole horde of Sandmen into a situation that's practically guaranteed to turn more of them into Runners, or would if the show bothered to address the issue.
Anyway, our trio escapes the Sandmen by retreating into a bunker inhabited by a pair of goofy-looking comic-relief robots and a 19-year-old girl named Lisa, who's been alone all her life and naturally falls immediately for Logan, and then turns out to have psychokinetic powers, which is why she's stuck alone in a bunker. So it's basically a gender-swapped rehash of Fontana's "Charlie X" from Star Trek, with Lisa having essentially the same power set as Charlie and the same motivations, though the ending is less tragic. It plays out pretty predictably, although this time, unlike "Charlie X," we actually get to see the limbo people end up in when Lisa "puts them away" (which is just blackness, but it does establish that they're still conscious and aware).
Not a very impressive episode, except for how strikingly bad the optical effects are. It was normal in film days for optical effects shots to be grainier and lower in film quality than regular shots, because the need to re-photograph strips of film in the process of combining them with each other led to generational loss of image clarity/quality. But in this case, the optical shots are massively degraded compared to the standard shots, even when the superimposed FX are simple animation so that there should only have been a single generation's worth of re-exposure. It's weird, because the same wasn't the case in previous episodes.
Well, perhaps more than the absolute figures we should look at the percentage... I mean, I suppose that the total number of the (American) tv shows made in the 1977 isn't comparable to today...
The only thing I remember about the TV series was, even then, it seemed painfully dull, and the two leads were (as had been said) extremely bland. I've never even considered seeking it out to rewatch over the years. It just holds no place in my heart, like Buck Rogers or the Hulk.
Well, as you said, genre shows back then rarely made it beyond a season or two, and prior to ST:TNG, virtually nothing in the US made it past five seasons (besides Adventures of Superman and Bewitched). These days, there are many long-running genre shows. So even if you compare the percentage of shows, that doesn't really reflect how much greater the percentage of content is, because most of those shows were flashes in the pan that constantly replaced each other in the same rather small niche.
Let's see... Looking at the 1970-1 schedule on Wikipedia, the only prime-time genre shows I see (unless you count Mission: Impossible, which was sometimes borderline-SF) are Bewitched and The Immortal, plus Nanny and the Professor (a Mary Poppins-inspired sitcom that was more ambiguous about its nanny's paranormal abilities). In '71-2, you've still got both sitcoms, plus the psychic-detective series The Sixth Sense. In '72-3, those three shows are gone, and there's basically just Search (a spy-fi adventure show) and a horror anthology retitled from Ghost Story to Circle of Fear. In '73-4, there was pretty much only The Six Million Dollar Man. That was joined in '74-5 by Planet of the Apes and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. In '75-6, you had $6M, The Invisible Man, and Wonder Woman, plus Space: 1999 in syndication; and in '76-7, $6M, WW and 1999 were joined by The Bionic Woman, The Fantastic Journey, and Gemini Man (a different invisible-man show).
Now, in '77-8, in the wake of the Logan's Run movie and Star Wars, there was a huge glut: along with $6M, TBW, and WW, you had Logan's Run, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Man from Atlantis, Project UFO, the sitcom Quark, and Lucan (a borderline-genre show about a boy raised by wolves). But by '78-9, the only ones of those that were left were WW, Hulk, Spidey, and Project UFO, and we had a glut of other one-season wonders -- Galactica, Salvage 1, Cliffhangers, Supertrain, the flash-in-the-pan Time Express -- plus one breakout hit, Mork & Mindy. And by '79-80, the glut was fading -- only Hulk, Mork, and Salvage 1 survived, plus Galactica 1980, and newcomers Buck Rogers, Beyond Westworld, and a Frankenstein-themed sitcom, Struck by Lightning, that got canned after 3 episodes. And only Hulk, Mork, and Buck survived the season.
So, okay, there were more shows in all than I remembered, particularly later in the decade. But most of them came and went quickly, which is probably why it felt to me at the time like there was a dearth of genre programming, since the shows I wanted to see more of kept ending.
/tread derail
Interesting in that I think a version of "Rick Jones" (from the Hulk comic back in that day) might have been an interesting element for the series. I was always disappointed they didn't ever even try to bring in a "General Thunderbolt Ross" type character either for a few episodes or recurring storylines here and there.
/end thread derail.
^^^
Interesting in that I think a version of "Rick Jones" (from the Hulk comic back in that day) might have been an interesting element for the series. I was always disappointed they didn't ever even try to bring in a "General Thunderbolt Ross" type character either for a few episodes or recurring storylines here and there.
/end thread derail.
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