(The following is a segment from a memoir writing project I'm playing with. Hope you like it. Share your own recollections of 1970s Sci-Fi TV shows in the comments.)
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| Logan 5, Jessica 6 and Rem (Wikipedia) |
A spin-off of the 1976 movie
that starred Michael York and Jenny Agutter,
the Logan’s Run TV series suffered
from the common practice of dumbing down scifi to try to appeal to mass
audiences and to make the show more “kid friendly.” The series starred Gregory Harrison and
Heather Menzies in softer, less sexualized versions of the characters played by
York and Agutter, Logan 5 and Jessica 6, with
supporting actors Donald Moffat as the android Rem and Randy Powell as Francis
7, Logan’s
former best friend, fellow Sandman, and now relentless pursuer.
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| Carousel (Ebay image) |
In the post-nuclear holocaust
world of the 23rd Century, Logan is a Sandman; Sandmen are a sort of police force that patrols the City of Domes,
where the last humans known to be alive chose to live a hedonistic existence in
what looks like an upscale shopping mall, and then give up their lives at age
30 (age 21 in the original novel). The populace believes they will be reincarnated via the “Carousel” ceremony, but they are
simply killed to make room for new test-tube babies. Sandmen track and kill any citizens who try to
escape rebirth by running, i.e., “runners.”
(The series recycled many of the movie’s special effects, including the Carousel sequence, but exchanged the spectacular image of exploding bodies used in the film for a freeze-frame and a “crystallizing” effect. Probably to keep little kids from trying to blow up their friends at home, which seemed to be the prevailing thought process at TV studios.)
(The series recycled many of the movie’s special effects, including the Carousel sequence, but exchanged the spectacular image of exploding bodies used in the film for a freeze-frame and a “crystallizing” effect. Probably to keep little kids from trying to blow up their friends at home, which seemed to be the prevailing thought process at TV studios.)
In the film, Logan is placed undercover
by the ruling computer to infiltrate a subversive group that is seeking to
escape the city for some mythical “Sanctuary” where they can live out their
lives in peace. He gets Jessica to help
him, and the two make it through a series of adventures to the ruins of Washington, D.C.
There, they meet an old man and Logan realizes there’s no reason to continue supporting
the old ways of the City of Domes.
He decides to return there, overthrow the computer ruler, and set the people
free from Carousel.
The series wanders from the
film’s plot, however, almost as soon as it begins. Logan
is already questioning the rite of rebirth, and he runs with Jessica. Francis is taken before a secret council of
old men and told he can join their number if he successfully brings Logan back for
re-education. It is never
really made clear why Francis — not to mention all the other Sandmen dispatched
into the outside world — would want to prop up the City of Domes
when it’s obvious that there are many other survivors and civilizations in the
outside world, which appears to be fully recovered from the war, and they no longer
have a reason to die young.
So we once again have the
familiar “Fugitive” structure for our episodes: Innocent of
any crime, our hero is on the run from relentless pursuit, meeting new people
each week that need help, and then being forced to move on just one step ahead
of the long arm of the law. But rather
than a search for proof of innocence, we have innocents searching for a place
they can belong and experiencing true freedom — not the false freedom of
consumerism and hedonism in exchange for giving up their personal power to a
faceless authority — for the first time in their lives.
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| Logan and Jessica in the film (Screened.com) |
I didn’t see the movie in
theaters (I was 12 when it was in theaters), catching it only after it had been “Edited for Television” in advance
of the series premiere. And somehow, I rarely
caught an episode of this series all the way through in its original run, and
never at my own home. The night of the
premiere (Sept. 16, 1977) I was at Grandma and Pawpaw Massey’s house. The grownups were playing canasta in the
dining room, and about the time the pilot got to its secondary story, they took
a break to come
into the family room to talk; they started making jokes about the show, and I
came to realize it was not as good as I was willing to believe. It was like the Penguin running for Mayor,
all over again — though it didn’t stop me from drawing pictures of Logan’s Sandman gun and
trying to make a wooden version in my shop class.
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| Screen capture from 'Captured' (ShareTV.org) |
I was at my friend Troy
Gandy’s home for the third episode (“Capture,” broadcast Sept. 30, 1977), in
which our heroes (and Francis) are hunted by the guy who was the young hot-head
gunslinger wannabe from the original Magnificent
Seven feature, (Horst Buchholz, bringing some presence to the screen). Troy
was eight months older than me, born in December 1963. His brother, Robert, was a couple of years
older than the both of us. Troy and Robert fought constantly,
either mouthing off at each other, or literally fist-fighting, which was a
family dynamic I was not familiar with. The
night of this episode, Robert had picked at Troy until he lost his temper and lunged at
his older brother. They threw each other
around the living room, overturning tables and chairs, scattering snacks on the
floor. I just stayed out of the way.
Looking back, I wonder how
much of that activity was play-acting, like a TV wrestling match. I couldn’t tell. I also wonder how much of it was prompted by
sheer boredom after the brothers discovered this was what I wanted to watch on
TV. When we all saw headlights on the
driveway, a sudden calm hit the room. The
boys separated, a whirlwind of cleaning occurred, and by the time their mother
came in the door, the place was back in the shape it had been in before the
fight. The three of us, sitting on the
couch together, eating potato chips and watching Logan’s Run.
I thought about this and
other times at the Gandy home a few years ago, when I learned that Troy had taken his own
life.
And I realized that Troy and Robert, in their
sibling conflict, had mirrored the dynamic of Logan
and Francis in that very episode: One
former friend — a brother in almost every way — hunting and fighting the other
until a common enemy appeared to force them to work together, at least until
their next opportunity to struggle for dominance. In the theater of my memory, I would have to
cast Troy as Logan, as he was only trying to maintain his
freedom and his sense of self that night.
I guess that makes me either
Rem or Jessica in that scenario; I’ll go with the dispassionate and pacifistic
Rem, if it’s all the same to you. I
don’t look that good in short skirts.
On Halloween of that year, I
was again at the Gandy house for the only boy-girl party I was ever invited to
during my middle- and high school years. A game of spin-the-bottle was happening on the
back porch, and the girl I liked (one of Troy’s
cousins) didn’t want to participate. Moreover,
when the bottle pointed at me early in the game, the girl who should have
kissed me begged off, lying to the crowd that we were cousins and it wouldn’t
be right; I didn’t dispute her.
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| Screen grab from 'Half Life' (SnowCrest.net) |
Instead
I went inside to get some snacks, and discovered the TV was on in the living
room. No one was watching it. Logan’s
Run was playing (“Half Life” written by Shimon Wincelberg, broadcast Oct.
31, 1977). I just stood there, watching
Jessica 6 being duplicated, which is a familiar enough idea in sci-fi TV. Except her personality was being split between the two bodies, so
that one Jessica was good and the other evil. Anyone who had seen Star Trek (specifically “The Enemy Within” episode) knew that we need both expressions of
our personality to make us whole, and that people can’t go on as half-people. (This episode also features a very young Kim Cattrall.)
I heard laughter outside and
somewhat reluctantly left Jessica to seek out the party again. This might have been when I began to
recognize that real people didn’t hold as much allure to me as the ones on TV,
or maybe I just told myself that because no one wanted to play spin the bottle
with me. Strangely, my situation again
mirrored the very episode that was broadcast that night, except that I was the
outcast whose personality didn’t conform to the accepted group, and no amount
of video effects would make me right for them.
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| Screen grab of 'The Crypt' (OVGuide.com) |
A week later, I saw the next
episode from start to finish at my friend Chuck’s house. Chuck and I
had known each other since before we were born. That is, our fathers and mothers had been in
school together and were close friends; our mothers were pregnant within a
couple months of each other, and we had playdates from a very early age. The only real fist fight I ever had in middle
school was against Chuck, and we both ended up getting paddled by the
principal. (I remember sitting in the office and Chuck telling me, "You were punching and crying at the same time. That scared the crap out of me.") Probably one of the first
times I ever slept over at a friend’s house, it was at Chuck’s. He never
had quite the same fascination with scifi that I did, though, so it wasn’t
surprising that I sat and watched “The Crypt” episode (Nov. 7, 1977) more or
less on my own.
Taken from a story by Harlan
Ellison, who would later be one of my favorite authors, “The Crypt” concerned a
group of people in suspended animation, endangered by earthquakes and stalked
by one of their own. I watched it while sitting
on the wood floor in the living room. Chuck
was off somewhere else. His mother,
Elizabeth, was sitting on a chair drawing; later, she showed me the sketch she
had done of me as I concentrated on the show. It embarrassed me to know she had been
watching me, but also made me feel special.
She was an English and Literature teacher, and as I grew up and started
trying to write fiction, she would be one of my first readers and encouragers.
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| DVD box set (TheWickedLocal.com) |
Recently, I purchased the box
set of Logan’s Run from the Warner
Archive Collection (WBshop.com) and enjoyed seeing the 14 episode series from
the beginning. Watching the fourth outing,
“The Innocent,” I turned to my wife and muttered, “This show did not deserve to
live.” However, there were many bright
moments: “The Crypt” holds up, as does
“Man Out of Time,” written by scifi author David Gerrold (most famous in the
genre for writing the Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”), who was
unhappy with changes to the script and used a pseudonym, “Noah Ward” (as in “no
award”) in the credits. The latter
concerned a time traveler who is trying to forestall a nuclear war, but learns
that his success at jaunting into the future precipitated the first strike;
Logan and his friends have to decide if the traveler should be allowed to
return to his own time, even if his success means that their world — and by
extension, each of them — might be wiped from history.
I appreciated, even in
’77, the bravery and earnestness of Logan, the optimism and
innocence (girl-next-door and yet Farrah Fawcett-like hotness) of Jessica. And the lead actors (particularly Donald
Moffat) are always fun to watch; you can see they recognized the limitations
they were faced with each week and were determined to rise above.
The show was often preempted
by the network (only 11 episodes were ever shown on the West Coast during the
initial broadcast, according to Internet sources), and it ended its run on Feb.
6, 1978, with “Stargate,” a story written by comic book legend Dennis O’Neil,
that failed to bring a conclusion to Logan’s
search for Sanctuary.
Thirty-odd years later, I
have a daughter named Jessica Heather (and it wasn’t until I began writing this
segment that I realized she shares names with the character and the actress);
our family lives in a gated community called Sanctuary Beach,
where I have taken issue with the runners (at least the ones who trespass into
the neighborhood and let their dogs run off-leash).
I have become a Sandman, but
I still don’t have a working pistol.
