Saturday 13 February 2016

Vega 4 (1968)

Vega 4 is an Australian TV serial from way back in 1968.  I know very little about this show other than what I learned here; http://www.classicaustraliantv.com/phx5.htm.  Below are images from the opening credits.


Steve.

4 comments:

  1. You forgot this pic
    http://www.classicaustraliantv.com/PHX5/V4ce.jpg
    sadly I think this show plus the 2 that preceded it may well be lost as only snippets exist on youtube....hold on a minute I`ve just checked and you can see the actual first episode complete with spacesuits intro at
    http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mysrm
    Wow!,I`ve just watched it and its sort of like if you had made star trek with the budget,sets,effects and writers of mid sixties Dr Who

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    Replies
    1. Amazingly enough the first episode of the preceding series from 1966 The Interpretaris is also available and also has a spacesuit sequence in it
      http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2myqzh [00:38-01:40]
      And lastly theres not one but two episodes available from the last of the three shows 1969s Phoenix Five,sadly theres only a very quick glimpse of a guy in a spacesuit tumbling about in space,its about 13 seconds into the intro sequence,but the production quality has certainly improved tho` its still more Dr Who than the Star trek it aspires to be,supposedly these shows were screened overseas including Britain but sadly not not as far as I know in my native New Zealand which is a shame as I would have loved these as a kid,we never got Star Maidens either....god life was tough back in the stone age!
      http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2n12pn
      http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2n12ke

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    2. Hi Tim, If we did get these shows over in England I've never seen it referenced in anything I've read over the years. Open to someone telling me different?
      As to Star Maidens well there were at least a couple of TV regions in England that never showed it at all. One of them being the ATV region that broadcast in my area - consequently I only watched the show a couple of years back for the first time. Its all about patience.
      Oh and I'll check those links out later - thanks

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  2. Regarding the excellent and fascinating article linked in the post:

    It's very strange to hear the original Star Trek held up as an example of high budgets.

    Still, I'm struck by an obvious omission from the article. As I'm sure anyone who's studied this site is aware, US TV science fiction did not start with Star Trek. Prior to that were a number of shows like Space Cadet and Space Patrol (Men Into Space we won't mention here because that was an outlier indeed), and before that there were movie serials. This Australian trilogy seems to draw fairly heavily from that shared gene pool, focusing on a two or three-man ship fighting an evil scientist.

    Of course, a website about Classic Australian TV should be forgiven that sort of lapse.

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