Sunday, 25 March 2012

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
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6 comments:

  1. Trike2 April 2012 at 16:46

    Nothing says "awesome sci-fi" to me quite like a good silver spacesuit.

    Just found your site; loving it.

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    1. Steve4 April 2012 at 12:45

      Thanks very much Trike. Have a good look around there's plenty of sci-fi awsome'ness lurking around here. And plenty more to come

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  2. John Nowak11 September 2015 at 14:10

    I've got a screen capture of what I suspect might be the 2001 Clavius backpack used in the UFO Episode "Close-Up"; I tried to email it to your profile address, but I'm afraid I got an error.

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    1. Steve12 September 2015 at 16:28

      Thanks John. Not quite sure what's up with that email address but I can't get into from this end either, thanks for trying though. I own the dvd's of UFO so failing a picture where should I be looking for the this backpack, presumably somewhere other than on one of the astronauts

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    2. John Nowak12 September 2015 at 16:52

      The episode title is "Close-Up." There is a spacewalk with three astronauts around 25m in. Unfortunately, you don't get a good look at it, but there is a moment where the one who isn't Michael Billington turns around, and it's possible to see the top of the backpack.

      It looks like it's been painted, but it has the overall gray color scheme and, more interestingly, you can see the unusual shape of the Clavius backpack; the way the top slopes down instead of being flat on the top.

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    3. Steve14 September 2015 at 16:05

      Ooh! I've watched it and I think you're right. How odd. How interesting

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