Wednesday 19 August 2020

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

6 comments:

  1. Also, a reappearance of the Men Into Space backpack.

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  2. This certainly is one of the crazier ones,I can only imagine the fun that they must`ve had trying to get the horse dressed up in this outfit.I do have to wonder if this suit was originally created for something else tho,as the quality of it does seem really rather good for a tv sitcom.

    Heres something very cool that went up for auction almost 2 months ago,its one of the original 2001 A Space Odyssey spacesuits.Its a little bit on the rough side tho`,but not surprising considering its age.The final price was $370,000.00
    https://www.julienslive.com/m/lot-details/index/catalog/353/lot/141578?uact=5&aid=353&lid=141579&current_page=0

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  3. Heres another one I stumbled across purely by chance,its the 1987 italian-french-german mini series Treasure Island in Space.
    I actually remember seeing this in my neck of the woods back when 24 hour tv was just starting up waaay back in 1993.It was shown during the graveyard shift in the am and surprised me by having both ernest borgnine and anthony quinn starring in it,oh its also directed by Antonio Margheriti as well.
    The suits dont look too bad actually.
    https://dg31sz3gwrwan.cloudfront.net/screen/1758811/1_iphone.jpg
    The sequence with the suits starts at 26:35
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6EVEJEETaU

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  4. There another take on Horse in SpaceSuit
    In the Perry Rhodan series one of Character ride a horse also in space suit
    (a too long story to explain here)
    Here Cover of Perry Rhodan issue 447 from year 1970
    https://www.perrypedia.de/mediawiki/images/b/bb/PR0447.jpg

    Michel Van

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  5. That's four small steps for a horse,
    One giant leap for equine!

    ReplyDelete