Kadoyng (1972)

Leo Maguire writes and stars in this Children’s Film Foundation film about an alien who befriends a group of kids and helps them to stop a motorway from being built through their village by using his strange alien powers. Sound like good clean family fun to me!

As you can see; this alien shops at the same outfitters as those in Gerry Anderson’s UFO series although his behaviour would suggest that he’s a much nicer chap and far less likely to steal your internal organs.

Steve

UFO (1970) Part 2: The Alien Spacesuits

These are the chaps that lurk within the UfOs.  For aliens, they're sort of human looking except for the dead-fish eyes and the fact that they breathe green liquid instead of air.

An image that lurks from childhood is of a captured human being converted to alien, his helmet filling up with the green stuff.  I sort of remember him drowning inside his helmet as he fights against breathing the alien goo in.  The image sticks in the mind’s eye along with all of those Public Information Films that haunted our childhood back then.

Anyway, these are the bad guys that give SHADO all the trouble.   As a general rule you never see more than one of them at a time and I’ve heard that there were only two suits made.  So you can understand that there was a bit of a problem when in one story there was a scene where two of them needed to be seen carrying a third between them.  Clever camera editing managed to crop either the front or back alien out of the shot so as presumably not to reveal the other actor dressed in his jeans and a T-shirt.

There are a couple of alterations made to the suits over the shows run, the biggest being the replacement of the silver chain mail for a less ornate material finish.

To the best of my research, this space suit only makes one future appearance after the show finished and that was in a Children’s Film Foundation feature.  Blog post pending.

Steve

Something for the Weekend 1

Publicity picture of Jane Fonda from Barbarella (1968)
Nice!

Steve

UFO (1970) Part 1: The SHADO Spacesuits

It’s 1980; the future, and Earth is under attack from aliens.  They come from a dying world to covertly harvest humanity of their organs.  Thankfully there’s a secret organisation called SHADO, who stop these incursions with a variety of cutting edge tanks, a submarine, planes, satellites, spaceships and a base on the moon.

There were 26 episodes of this Gerry Anderson series made between April 1969 and September 1970.  Not only is it Anderson’s first all live action series but it’s also substantially more adult in theme.  It’s a good looking show with value added by recycling various props, cars and costumes from Anderson’s Doppelganger film that is also a little darker than people expect it to be given its creators reputation as the maker of puppet based children’s shows.

Digression aside, the space suits used in this show were the ones made for Doppelganger although they had been seen in the BBC’s Doomwatch episode; Re-Entry Forbidden exactly 6 months prior to their first appearance in UFO on the ATV network, 16^th of September 1970.  And this was despite UFO going into production some 11 months prior to Doomwatch and spraying the helmets yellow!

This was a mystery solved when I discovered that there had been a five month delay in the middle of the show’s production run after the MGM-British studios closed down and the show had to find a new home.  It was during this protracted break that the BBC hired the costumes for their show and repainted the helmets back to their original colour.

And it’s here that a misconception of mine is corrected, which is that the helmets in UFO were always yellow when they weren’t.  As the pictures in this post reveal the helmets were yellow, red, occasionally silver and, once at least, one of them was white.

As a general rule, they’re yellow for the first 9 episodes, then the show stops shooting, the BBC repaints them and when they’re returned to Anderson for the other 17 episodes they are left as they are.

Something else I’ve read and previously accepted as true was that there were only ever three of these helmets made.  Now I’m not sure where this originally came from, possibly an interview with somebody working on the show or the fact that you never seem to see more than three in any one scene.  But I’m beginning to have doubts that this was the case.  Although they all seem alike, it you look closely, one of the helmets has an additional raised piece on the back and no ridges at the front, like the other two have.  Which suits the theory fine until you look at the silver painted ones in which all three helmets are identical, all have ridges.

If I ever find the truth of this I’ll obviously post it here but otherwise expect at least one more post about the show because we’ve still got the alien space suits to have a look at.  Which, as far as I’m aware, is a much simpler task.

Steve

Doomwatch: Re-Entry Forbidden (1970)

Re-Entry Forbidden is an episode from about half way through the first series of the BBC seminal sci-fi show; Doomwatch.  Each week the Doomwatch team investigated various technology-could-run-amok scenarios and cautioned us all to the perils of this brave new world in which we all found ourselves living.

The concerns of this particular story are quite simply that the pilot of a space craft could cock-up the re-entry coordinates and cause nuclear fuel to rain down upon the world below.  It’s not a bad episode but there are much better ones.

However, from the point of view of the Say; Hello Spaceman blog this is a really important entry primarily because it seemed to contradict a lot of what I thought I knew about a couple of other appearances of these suits.

Firstly as you will see from the picture of the crew of the Sunfire rocket ship, they are indeed wearing the same suits and helmets as seen in the film Doppelganger (Aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) which was released in 1969.

There for these must also be the very same helmets that would go on to be seen in Gerry Anderson’s UFO tv series.  That show would use a lot of the Doppelganger props, cars and costumes to add some big budget gloss to its small screen adventures.   UFO was in production from April 69 to September 70.  As far as I was aware the suits went from one Gerry Anderson production to the next.  They were sprayed yellow in between and there were only three of them.

And then I discovered the Doomwatch appearance and because the helmets seem not yet to have been sprayed yellow as they were for their run on UFO, I concluded that this episode must have been filmed between the two projects.   Indeed, Doomwatch aired 16^th of March 1970 where as the first airing of UFO wasn’t until September of the same year.  All well and good except for the fact that this episode was filmed February 1970; which is slap-bang in the middle of the UFO production run.  And they are back to their Doppelganger colours!

I couldn’t post on this subject until I had solved the mystery...  and now I have....  and you can find out what the answer is on my UFO Post.

But we haven’t quite finished with Doomwatch just yet.  Following the two days of filming of these three on-loan-astronauts at their rather impressive rocket controls, the production crew vacated the set and after a tiny bit of tarting up, the Doctor Who production team came in, added an airlock, and stuck three entirely different spacemen onto it for their show.  And I’ll be looking at Doctor who and the Ambassadors of Death just as soon as.

Steve

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Planet of The Vampires, or Terrore Nello Spazio, to give it it’s Italian title, was a co-production between the United States and Italy, with some Spanish backing thrown into the mix to help it along.

Its plot concerns the crew of two space ships who are both drawn towards the unexplored planet of Aura from where a distress signal has been emanating.  Once within the fog enshrouded atmosphere, various crewmen become temporarily possessed by the world’s ethereal inhabitants, committing murder upon their fellow man.  Both ships manage to make it to the planet’s surface although the situation only worsens as the Aurans begin to reanimate the newly dead, using their bodies as corporeal hosts and a means to escape their dying world.

Planet of the Vampires is one of those; love it or loathe it films although it’s become far more cult than perhaps it might have done simply because it’s B-movie plot reads a lot like a first draft for Dan O’Bannon’s Alien script.  Obviously, with the way Ridley Scott’s directorial eye colours a film it’s not so blatant in its telling.  I could well believe that Planet of the Vampires was an inspiration behind at least a few of the scenes in Alien but for what it’s worth I personally think that John Carpenter’s The Thing owes just as much to it, at least in tone.
 

Steve

Department S: The Man From X (1969)

Department S was one of those very cool ITC shows from the late 60’s, early 70’s.  It’s a sort of a Spy-fi, cop, adventure series for which the plot hook is this:

     “When a case proves too challenging for the collective minds of Interpol, they turn to the talents of Department S”

Fair enough.  So every episode starts with a seemingly impossibly strange set up for which the boys and girls from the special department have to find a more logical and rational explanation.

In the episode entitled; The Man from X, a courting couple are confronted by a man in a spacesuit who staggers towards them down a London street at night and then dies.

What transpires with the investigation is that.......

No.  That would ruin it.  Go buy the DVD boxset.  The whole series is a lot of fun and everybody should enjoy the iconic performance that is Peter Wyngarde as Jason King.

I would like some better detailed pictures of the spacesuits because my guess is that they most probably turn up somewhere else in some other show.  Even the Mini motor car used by the startled couple who are first confronted by the out-of-place outer-spaceman was more frequently seen being driven about within the episodes of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased so there’s no way the production stretched to original suits and helmets.

Steve