Mister Ed - The Horsestronaut (1961)

I think this is a first for this site so lets just get in there and explore our very first Horsestronaut in the form of Mister Ed, season 2, episode 2.

 

 

Now for those of you that don't know, Mister Ed was an American television comedy show that ran from January 1961 to February 1966 and featured a talking horse as the titular star.  It lasted for 143 episodes.  I may have seen s couple of them back in my youth during the summer holiday schedule but for the most part I don't think it ran very often on this side of the pond, so I would never have discovered this one without the help of one of our long standing blog followers.

So, according to Wikipedia the episode synopsis is;

"In order to appease Mr. Mencken, a potential new client, Wilbur takes an office downtown. Ed now feels unwanted and attempts to become the first horse astronaut into space. Ed goes to the space center and passes the intelligence test. The day of the flight, Wilbur rushes to the space center, but the rocket is just taking off. Mr. Ed shows up and tells Wilbur they picked another horse at the last minute because Ed was too heavy."

Which is all very informative but what you really want to see is this rather splendid Destination Moon style spacesuit on that there horse

 

 

Its a cracking job isn't it and its fun to note that they've left a little grill in the horse shaped fishbowl (?) helmet so that the 'actor' can still breath with out steaming it up and obscuring his talent.

 

If we never see another horse shaped spacesuit again, I still think we've already seen the best.

 

Big thanks to Bill for this find. You are a good friend to the blog and its greatly appreciated.

 

 

Steve