Maybe this will be life in 500 years

The year is 1987 and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap Ranger 3 and its pilot Captain William “Buck” Rogers are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit that freezes his life support systems and returns Buck Rogers to Earth 500 years later.

Are you with me so far? Ok, so in short the year is 2491, we have perfected interstellar space travel, discovered countless other inhabited worlds, Earth is recovering from a nuclear war, and an astronaut from the 1980s is the only guy that can regularly save the planet from almost certain death.

I have only just re-discovered Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, having only seen it when it aired on television when I was a kid. So, for anyone who wasn’t alive in those days, in my house at that point we didn’t have a VCR, and there were no streaming services, so if you didn’t get to see an episode you just missed out on seeing it.

I loved Buck Rogers when it first aired, it was in that sweet spot between A New Hope (but again, back then we just called that movie Star Wars) and Empire Strikes Back. It attempted to give an insight into what life would be like 500 years from now, combining some corny jokes and the tried-and-true recipe of ongoing unresolved sexual tension between the main characters. Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard) awakes to a different time but soon learns that he has special skills that have apparently not endured in the 500 years since he left the NASA Space Centre.

Watching it some forty years later is a bit amusing, a bit cringe-worthy, and offers quite some insight into the attitudes at the time. There were things I had forgotten about the show and things I wish I hadn’t rediscovered.

What the tech?

Again, 500 years have passed, and this is the pinnacle of technology that we have. There is Doctor Theopolis who is apparently a super-intelligent robot, but he needs to be carried around by a wise-cracking robot named Twiki (voiced by the immortal Mel Blanc, that’s right the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam and so many more).

They can fly distances of light years in mere seconds using star gates, but the computers look like somebody has hooked up a cathode ray oscilloscope and had a spare keyboard from Radio Shack. There was even a scene where people ask Buck if his Earth Defence Directorate shuttle has video capability because apparently, this technology isn't in use everywhere by then.

A bit of equality?

Now, this TV show was based on a story written in the late 1920s. It first aired in 1979, and yet it appears that in the minds of the show’s producers, equality only went so far in that time. Sure, Colonel Wilma Deering (played by the timeless beauty Erin Gray) is one of the top military leaders of the Earth Defence Directorate, but she’s still restricted to dressing like she is there as the eye candy.

In fact, almost all the female characters undergo their lives and the grueling space travel in attire that is more sexy and less practical. The regular sexual innuendo perpetrated by Buck and often encouraged by the other characters, including a “Hubba-hubba” from Twiki every now and then certainly wouldn’t fit today’s standards, and one would hope not those in 500 years.

Some things haven’t aged very well

There are at least two occasions when Buck slips sedatives to women. Fortunately, not to have his way with them, but still, it’s something that leaves the viewer saying to themselves “Ummm… not cool Buck!”

Other references from the time include talking about how successful OJ Simpson is and as already highlighted, plenty of sexual innuendo references. Rather than educating Buck on why his behavior isn’t acceptable anymore, everyone around him just laughs it off and says, “Oh Buck!”

The guest stars

Re-watching and I kept having to do a double-take or go to IMDB to check, but there are a lot of significant guest stars in the episodes. It appears they took the ‘Love Boat’ recipe of putting popular guest actors in almost every episode. Some of the more notable appearances include Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween, True Lies), Gary Coleman (Different Strokes), Peter Graves (Mission Impossible), and Jerry Orbach (Law & Order).

One can only imagine that in the wake of Star Wars, everyone in Hollywood wanted to get into sci-fi in some way or another. If nothing else, it allows you to play a game of “where do I know them from?” I know I found out about some of the stars including some more tragic stories. For instance Dorothy Stratten who plays Miss Cosmos in the episode Cruise Ship to the Stars. She was murdered by her estranged husband about 230 days after the episode aired.

If you can accept that this reflects the times and would not be acceptable today, then you might get a few laughs out of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I know I enjoyed watching the hilarious fight scenes, the over-acting and yes, I will admit that I always had a crush on Wilma!

Talk is that a re-imagining of Buck Rogers is on the cards, with the rumored involvement of George Clooney. One can only hope that they embrace some of the beauty of the original series.

The two seasons of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century are available to watch on Apple TV.