Dangerous Visions 1 (1974)

Dangerous Visions 1 was a groundbreaking collection of short stories when published and is still very well respected now.

And what an absolute gem of a cover by Fred Gambino.  Definite shades of Kubrick's 2001, like quite a few book covers throughout the early 70's.

And here's the artwork in its purest form.

I'm going to put Fred Gambino in the labels because he's done quite a few spacesuits over the years and we are most assuredly going to be back round this way again.


Steve

UFO - The Man Who Came Back (1971)

We've looked at UFO before but as I'm working my way through the DVD box set and have just hit a very interesting episode we'll take another look at a few of the peculiarities featured there within.

So episode 21, The Man Who Came Back was filmed the previous year in June of 1970.  It has a lot of model work reused from Gerry Anderson's; Journey to the Far Side of the Sun which as you may well be aware by now was the original source of the UFO spacesuits...and cars, props, actors etc etc.

Now unless I wasn't paying attention, this episode also features the first reusing of the space-suit undergarments from that same film as featured here.

The suggestion of tubing running through the material is based on real world cooling systems which I am planning on looking at in the future as it crops up in more fiction than you might imagine and links up quite a few films, TV shows and music videos by use of the self same suits, from what I can gather

There's a new helmet colour in the orange with white stripes as well as another appearance of the reasonably rare white helmet.

As an extra point there may also be a bit of an alteration made to the normal space suits which by the look of it enables all of the electronic breathing gubbins to be connected to the actor in the form of a waistcoat affair rather than hanging off of straps and shifting about like it used to.

And finally there are some nice little - totally unconvincing- puppet spacemen used for the space walk scene.

For all of the right reasons, and a few of the wrong ones as well, The Man Who Came Back must be one of the most entertaining episodes of the show so far.


Steve

The Lawrence Welk Show - Sandi and Sally - We'll Make it to the Moon (1969)

I know very little about these two ladies except what I just read on the net.  They were a  singing duo for a while and regular guests on The Lawrence Welk Show on American TV right up until the breakup in 1972.

Update: Well future me from 2017 has just been here and deleted a load of nonsense written in ignorance.  There is little more to say except sorry the images are not better but enjoy the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB-lW8m2sak

Steve

The Six Million Dollar Man - Deadly Countdown (1977)

Deadly Countdown was a two part story from the 5th Season of the massively popular TV show The Six Million Dollar Man.

This story is most noted by its fans for the fact that it featured Martin Caiden, author of the the original 1972 novel; Cyborg which is the book on which the show and the character of Steve Austin was based.

For men of a certain age, myself included, it's real point of interest is that it also guest stars British actress Jenny Agutter.

And to followers of this blog I should probably note the space suits.  Which keener eyed folk than me report as being genuine Apollo A7l suits on loan from NASA.

But lets have a look at that beauty again one final time

Lovely isn't she


Steve

Capricorn One (1977)

The NASA Mars mission isn't ready and there's no more funding to fix it so the suits in charge decide to fake the whole thing.  There's a studio recreation of the Mars landing site and they're planning on filming the astronauts on this instead.  The problems start when those same astronauts are informed of this change of mission plan at the 11th hour and decide they don't want to play along with the deceit.

This is either a very silly film or quite a daring and brave piece of work depending on how you feel about the moon landings and if they really happened.

I'm going to watch it again a little later today but based on existing memories I've always kind of enjoyed it.  Its got a sci-fi premise but only in so far as setting up a big run for your life chase plot and that it does very well.

The suits, as you can see, are off the peg NASA basic but anything else wouldn't be true to the tone of the story so thats fine.

Steve