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UFO
1970 · TV series · 50 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Gerry Anderson, Sylvia Anderson
Science FictionFantasyDramaActionAdventure
A secret, high-technology international agency called SHADO defends Earth from alien invaders.
4 positive6 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
UFO is also one I could recommend - I watched it when it first came out but didn't really understand any of it (I was about 6):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series)
I’ve been rewatching it recently and thought the first season was awful. The plots specifically, the aesthetics and theme music are awesome and worth watching for that alone. Haven’t gotten to the second season yet but was really hoping it improved…
Biggest disappointment was reading up on it and finding that the Anderson’s had originally intended to do a second season of UFO then changed it up to make Space 1999 instead.
UFO was amazingly good
The US broadcast syndication market is really only set up to sell shows that have more than 100 episodes. I think UFO, Space:1999, and the 1955 Robin Hood were among the few shows seen on regular non-PBS stations. The Disney Show would sometimes run UK-filmed material. (Scarecrow, Thomasina) Partly it's because Americans can't understand the words when they hear many UK dialect accents, so they tune out those shows and that tanks the ratings. Even if you give a station a free tv show they lose money if no one watches it. We do better at remaking shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Skins, and Being Human.
Also the aliens in the Sylvia & Gerry Anderson TV series "UFO".
The sets, models, and wardrobe were originally intended for season 2 of UFO, but not enough US stations wanted to syndicate it. We got Plan B.
Anyone old enough to still remember the opening of UFO episodes (1970)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(TV_series)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpdI-F4-7jM
SHADO
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ......
ALIEN DEFENCE ORGANIZATION ...
SECRET LOCATION .... BENEATH FILM STUDIO
"2010: The Year We Make Contact" is a much more accessible movie that holds up pretty well. It also feels like a payoff after investing so much time being confused/bored by 2001.
I was 11 when "Logan's Run" came out. Yes it's kinda loaded with 70's sex tropes for the first act, but it's also equal parts goofy and a really good film.
The original "The Day The Earth Stood Still" holds up.
"A Boy and His Dog" is a bit crude here and there, but might resonate with a 12yo.
"Quatermass and the Pit" (aka "Five Million Years to Earth") is both intense and fairly tame.
A lot of old TV series hold up - Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, UFO, Space 1999, Star Trek TOS, etc all have some excellent episodes.
I absolutely love "Dark City" and "12 Monkeys" but I'm not sure they'd have held my interest at 12.
Doctor Who, both old and new are excellent. Though I'm partial to the Tom Baker era.
The Stargate franchise is pretty good.
"Moon" (2009) is a bit cerebral but a good SF story.
The sad thing is that I actually vaguely remember them in the office and that earlier, as a kid, few things were cooler than the TV UFO series:
SHADO
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ......
ALIEN DEFENCE ORGANIZATION ...
SECRET LOCATION .... BENEATH FILM STUDIO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya_9fUNstvc
that's an interesting thought, ST:TNG without woo.
Without Whoopi and the Counselor and their magic episodes it'd cut the library down like 20 or 30 percent I bet.
Personally I think the ST woo started way before TNG -- but I do think that it was presented and turned into viable story the best in TNG. That said, pseudoscience/magic/woo was around and plentiful around the world during the production of the original ST too, maybe that content was also prompted by the popularity.
Speaking of space-magic, if anyone reading is into space+scifi/fantasy and you enjoy Star Trek, check out UFO and Space:1999, or really any Gerry Anderson. Lots of similar topics, and its fun to determine which series did which subplot first.
It's a closer analogy to the "beat frequencies" you get with constructive and destructive interference of waves of similar frequency. The envelope of the total amplitude of the pendulums oscillates with lower frequency than the amplitude of any individual pendulum.
I used Audacity to mix sine waves of the frequencies of the pendulums (51/60Hz, 52/60Hz, ..., 65/60Hz), multiplied by 440 to get them to audio frequency, and it sounds a lot like the UFO sound effect from the 1970s TV series "UFO".
>t is difficult to look more late 70s/early 80s than this car :)
Anyone old enough to remember the UFO TV series?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(TV_series)
Just in case:
http://epguides.com/comics/shado/straker.shtml
http://epguides.com/comics/shado/foster.shtml
That's true; but Space: 1999 did it every episode. Most transportation in UFO via. that futuristic car, which they had a full-scale working example of.
I'm sure they showed the moon shuttle a few times, and of course they did lots of effects for the fighter jets and submarines blowing UFOs up, but it wasn't ubiquitous like in Space: 1999.
But the world would not be the same. Let me give you a somewhat silly example. In the TV series UFO, a moon to earth shuttle crashed. Sabotage was suspected. A pilot said he'd fly the same route to see if anything was there to sabotage a flight. Well, that's just impossible. The earth is in a different position in relation the the sun, the moon is in a different spot in relation to both the earth and sun, and the entire solar system has moved in relation to the galaxy and the universe. To paraphrase a saying, it's never the same river twice. The entire environment the clone would be in would be drastically different than the one the original was in, so it'd really be impossible to get a truly identical experience. And a dog's senses are different than a human's. What you would never notice as a significant change the dog probably would -- and that too would have an effect.