Monday, September 10, 2012

UFO (1970) Paperback Novelizations

Here are the covers to the two UFO novelizations published by Warner Books in the United States. I actually have both of these, picked up at a yard sale in the mid-80s, if I recall correctly. At the time, I hadn't seen the series since I was a little kid of five or six years old, and really only remembered the cool SHADO interceptors, the purple-haired moonchix and the UFOs themselves. I didn't really recall the characters or how dark and grim the  stories were... reading these books, written by British author John Burke - under the pseudonym, "Robert Miall" - based on the original scripts, really surprised me with their paranoid tone.

It wasn't until a decade or so later that I finally saw the show again during its run on the Sci-Fi Channel in the mid-90s, so for many years, these two books were my only exposure to Gerry Anderson's classic series.
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4 comments:

  1. MarkSeptember 10, 2012 at 6:10 AM

    These are really cool, now on the "want" list. I have the DVD set and I don't recall seeing the Globe ship pictured on the first novel. Also, I know it's in space and it doesn't really matter but SID is pictured "upside down" on the second novel.

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    1. AnonymousSeptember 12, 2012 at 1:55 AM

      The little globe ship was actually an escape pod that an alien attempting to defect uses to escapes his doomed ufo,this was from one of the grimmest episodes A Matter of Priorities where straker has to chose between saving his sons life,hes dying and needs a rare medicine or finding the alien defector before hes killed by his own side.Another cool looking ufo was the underwater one from the subsmash episode sadly it only ever made one appearance

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  2. david_bSeptember 10, 2012 at 2:36 PM

    I know totally what you mean, I read the Doctor Who story novelizations in high school, without having seen a story on TV.

    As for UFO, I only had the article in Starlog #5 for decades until actually watching a UFO episode on Hulu. Loved the tracked vehicles and Moonbase the best, but only had a couple of pictures to look at.

    (HUGE 1999 fan though..)

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  3. El VoxSeptember 11, 2012 at 1:27 PM

    I didn't even know about UFO until the late 80's when some friends were talking about it and Jerry Anderson at a SF club I'd attend on the weekend. We eventually got around to watching the entire run when one of the guys bought the set, and I also caught some of them off the Sci-Fi Channel too. I eventually picked up the first set. I like Space: 1999 too. I just recently have been getting into the Irwin Allen series, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and picked up the first season to that as well. By the way a slight tie-in, I don't know if you've ever seen the SyFy Channel (reality show), Collector Intervention, but tonight episode (it comes on Tuesday nights after the show Face Off), will concern a collector and his obsession over his Battlestar Galactica collection. I enjoy these mostly because I have a similar mindset, though I'd like to think I keep mine in check (I'm sure others would think otherwise), but I just enjoy seeing what others are into collecting. Yes, it saddens me a little when they are more or less pressured into getting rid of some of their collection by a girl friend, spouse, or what have you.

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