Moonraker (1979)

Bond.  James Bond.... in a spacesuit.

We'll come back to Moonraker again at some point to look at the space battle.  This space battle..

but in more detail.

Steve

Future Blues by Canned Heat (1970)

Future Blues is the fifth album by the band Canned Heat.  I know nothing at all about them except what I read on wikipedia but you can go and do that for yourself if you're that way inclined. 

What we do have to admire though is the cover artwork.  A recent find for me but a quick glance tells me that we've got spacesuits from a couple of different eras here.  There's the Destination Moon style of suit from  the1950's and the suits from Way... Way Out from 1966.  Both of which pop up all over the place.

 

 

Steve

Saturn 3 (1980) - Gallery

My original post for Saturn 3 gets quite a lot of hits so here's a bit of a gallery of further images to delight and amuse.

  

If you've come over here looking for pictures of Sexy Space Ladies...

Killer Robots...

or Sexy Space Ladies..

then this isn't the blog for you because we never show pictures like that, we only ever talk about spacesuits over here.. like this one.

Sorry for the confusion

Steve

Restricted View (1975/?)

Two alien robots, a quiet country lane and cars that vanish into blinding white balls of light appearing  suddenly in the  middle of the road.  A Classic bit of 70's Doctor Who?  An episode of UFO?  Not Quite

Restricted View is the title of a Public Information Film as featured on the "Charley Says" Vol 2 DVD.  I'm not sure if that's the official title or just the one made up for the DVD - What I also don't know is the year.  I tried to be clever and date the car registration plates but the image is a bit rough after all these years and the nearest I'm going to guess at is 1975 - maybe.

I love these PIF's. As a kid back then they totally coloured my view of the world as much as any TV shows.  And they presented the outside world as a slightly odd, spooky and dangerous place to play which despite popular belief made it an even more exciting a playground, as long as you didn't do anything stupid like fly kites under pylons or swim in muddy junk filled rivers, hide inside fridges, talk to strangers, cross the road, run on the beach, play cowboys and indians on farms etc etc

I could actually remember this one from back in the day even though it's  one which rarely ever gets a mention when people get all nostalgic about them.  Although given the age I first saw it, I remember the menace and not the message.  If asked I probably would have told you it was about the dangers of silver aliens  hiding in the countryside and not blind spots when driving.

So what we have here is another appearance of the Moon Zero Two suits, with two Moon Zero Two helmets.  Were these the ones from Space 1999 or  was it the other way around.  One of the helmets has been customised to make it roboty which might offer a reason why there weren't two helmets available for the Darians to use.  In this case time  probably won't tell.

Steve

Space: 1999 - Mission of the Darians (1975)

Mission of the Darians is an episode from the end of the first series of Space: 1999.

Survivors of a dying world have been adrift in their enormous spaceship for over 900 years; so long that some of them have de-evolved back to savagery and no longer even understand where they are. But not all of them.  Take these chaps.

It's been a long time since I watched this so I don't quite recall how it all pans out but I'm sure there are some really good Space:1999 fan sites out there that will tell you all about it.  Here, we're just interested in the spacesuits.

What we have before us are a couple of Moon Zero Two spacesuits sprayed silver with some nice black  detailing.  The eagle-eyed might even spot that one of the helmets is actually from Gerry Anderson's own UFO series.  The story has it that when they came to hire them they couldn't find two of the MZT ones which isn't all that surprising given that the helmets had careers far more varied than the suits and they were separated quite early on.  Interestingly its the UFO helmet with the extra box shaped bit on the top of which I'm fairly certain there was only ever one.  This may be its latest and last appearance documented so far.

Broadcast in October 1975 but filmed in January of that same year, these dates may or may not help us with a mysterious little appearance of possibly the same two suits from one of those charming and ever so slightly spooky Public Information Films... off which more will be blogged soon.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures

Steve

Mars (1968)

Whats this then...

That's right, our very first space dog as featured in another one of those gems of Russian film making.  From 1968 and the man that made Planeta Bur and Luna, its either an amusing little short about a space man living on mars with his space dog or another speculative documentary from Pavel Klushantsev.  Either way its glorious.

Steve

Luna (1965)

Regular followers of this blog may well be aware of the Russian sci-fi film Planeta Bur as it's had three posts so far.

What I've failed to mention is that it was directed and produced by Pavel Klushantsev who also made this speculative documentary about the moon a few years later.

I don't talky the Russian tongue so I can't tell you what they're saying about the subject matter but there's some very nice shots of asteroid strikes and lava bubbling up through the broken rock crust and there are also these lovely space suits. 

Experiments are conducted by these red spacemen that illustrate the divergent temperatures and the lower gravity.  It goes on to suggest that safe habitats could be made below the ground and ends with a full city and a happy family of moon-folk living and working there.  Its all so much more fun than what actually happened and so much more colourful than the truth.

The rumour has it that this was pulled from the public viewing once the Americans actually landed  on the moon but  whatever its factual accuracy it remains a visual feast for the eyes and another glimpse into the mind of a fantastic film maker.

Now enjoy the full gallery.

Steve

Spike Milligan - Transports of Delight (1974)

It’s all there on the cover really.

This was one of the late great Spike Milligan’s many books of oddness and absurdity.  It was published in 1974 by Penguin and is, according to an online review, a slim volume of amusing photographs over which Spike had made various irreverent and humorous comments.  They then go on to recommend alternative choices of Milligan books more worthy of your money than this one!

More importantly to us than the value of the content though is that this is yet another outing for that Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppelganger) space suit and helmet.  Presuming the cover shoot was done close to publication, this was after UFO, Doomwatch, Don Quick, Smash Mash and The Goodies had finished with it and around about the same time that The Tomorrow People collected it from space in the back of a van.  I kid you not!

Steve

The Adventures of Don Quick (1970)

This little remembered ITV series from the very early 70’s consisted of six 50 minute episodes of which only the first one is known to still exist.  It starred Ian Hendry and Ronald Lacey as Captain Don Quick and Sergeant Sam Czopanser, two travelling astronauts who land on various planets, righting imaginary wrongs and causing more problems than they found.

I’ve only known about this show for a couple of years and figured for the purposes of this blog that it most probably featured a space suit or two.  The trouble is that finding images from it has proved something of a quest, and images that are of any use to this blog even more difficult to track down.

And then a couple of nights ago I came across this...

Which tells us everything we ever wanted to know, really.

As the cover image of that particular week’s TV-Times, you can see how there were high hopes for the show and how they were banking on the star qualities of Hendry to command a goodly wodge of viewers to sit before their televisions in a prime time hour.  But it was not to be.  So the story goes; that after just three weeks of failing to get the right size of audience the show was moved to a later slot and then cancelled... to all but fade from public memory so it would seem.

I don’t know if Don Quixote in space was ever going to be a mainstream idea but I think it’s certainly an interesting premise and I would love to see the remaining episode some time.

Of special interest to this blog though is the space helmet that’s tucked under Hendry’s arm, there.  That is of course one of those lovely Journey to the far side of the Sun aka Doppelganger helmets that Hendry would have worn a couple of years earlier while appearing in that very same film with Roy Thinnes. Given the air dates for Don Quick and the production time to make five odd hours of TV back then, I’m guessing these were loaned out from ‘Anderson-land’ during the break in filming UFO while they moved studios.  It also helps to explain the sudden proliferation in helmet colour for the second set of UFO episodes, given that they went out yellow and came back red from Doomwatch and white from Don Quick.

Can’t help feeling there’s still even more of these ‘guest appearances’ out there, apart from what’s already been blogged and the couple I’ve still yet to share.

Steve