The Adventures of Don Quick (1970) Gallery

As some kind soul has recently uploaded episode one of The Adventures of Don Quick onto You Tube we can now all have a little look at what has been lost and almost forgotten for quite some time.  We can also have ourselves a little gallery of images.

The episode is called The Benefits of Earth and should be viewable via the link below.  It's the only known episode to still exist and having just watched it I have to say that although its a little overlong it's otherwise very enjoyable.  I would love for the rest of the episodes to turn up some day but at least we still have this one.  Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=BlRrrR09GtM

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