From the 1979-1981 television series ‘Buck Rogers In the 25th Century’

Boy, oh boy. Glen Larson. What a guy. A TV man as it were. Dyed in the wool, TV man. The money spent on these shows does not care about the content. The important thing is getting audiences to tune in. So you’re a TV man and you are faced constantly with figuring out how to get Americans to tune into the network for which you work as a gainfully employed producer. No one cares if your show is renewed. No one cares if it goes on for one season or ten. No one on the business side that is to say. Trends, fashions, fads change within the time it takes to blink an eye. The actors and production crews involved are all contracted or on staff or what have you. They couldn’t care less about the program. It’s a job. No one is doing Buck Rogers because they love sci-fi.

But Star Wars. Fucking Star Wars happened. And that’s how it worked in a time before home video was a thing that had extended to even cassette rental services included in the supermarket venue. A movie went viral and in the sidebar known as television, TV movies and series would feature ‘content’ based on the subject of the viral movie. But it’s an Ouroboros effect as TV also served as a breeding ground for future trends, seeding the minds of millions of Americans with ‘programming’. So Star Wars goes dead viral and every shill in the country takes the outer space angle to push everything from toothpaste to life insurance. Glen Larson was no exception. It wasn’t because he loved sci-fi, though it may be that he did, but it wasn’t causal.

The show is corny. Damn corny. Nostalgia can get you through about ten minutes of the show before you’ve had enough. Star Trek, by comparison, there is something there that has legs. But when I was a kid watching Gil Gerard and Erin Gray run around in white spandex, it seemed perfectly legit. So why include the reference? How is the Buck Rogers TV show considered essential? If the Star Wars phenomenon can be considered comparable to the phenomenon of the Beatles, then of the copycat bands that were born out of that circumstance, the Buck Rogers TV show is like one. Which, I wonder?