In Memoriam: Fallen Stars of 2017

This past weekend, it was announced that actor Martin Landau, best known to readers of this site and children of the Seventies as the humanistic Commander John Koenig of Space: 1999, had passed away at the age of 89. A renowned performer, Landau's screen career began on television in the early 1950s, and included memorable roles on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. After turning down the role of Spock on Star Trek, the actor became a household name with a three-year stint on the hit spy series Mission: Impossible, on which he co-starred with his then-wife, Barbara Bain. (Ironically, Leonard Nimoy replaced him on M:I when Landau left the show.)

In 1975, he and Bain co-starred on the British science fiction series Space: 1999. His role as the intellectual commander of Moonbase Alpha, an artificial habitat on the surface of the wandering Moon, was iconic. After a career slump in the Eighties, the actor received acclaim and Oscar nods in the 90s, with his  win for his portrayal of legendary horror star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's Ed Wood being especially notable.

Godspeed, Commander.

As this blog was on hiatus for the last few months, I didn't post notices of the passings of two other Space: 1970 icons (although I did note them on this site's Facebook page.) I want to correct that now.

• On May 24th, Jared Martin, star of the 1977 sci-fi series, The Fantastic Journey, died at age 75. A prolific television actor, Martin not only portrayed the enigmatic, time traveling futurian Varian on Journey, but made guest appearances on The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Logan's Run and The Six Million Dollar Man. In the late Eighties, he starred as Dr. Harrison Blackwood on the War Of the Worlds television series for two seasons.

I always liked Martin - he possessed an otherworldly quality that served him particularly well in genre roles. He will be missed.

• Back in February, we lost Battlestar Galactica's original Captain Apollo, Richard Hatch. He passed away on February 7th, at the age of 71. As the heroic, responsible fighter pilot, Hatch's Apollo was a genuinely positive role model for 70s Star Kids, and his loss is heavily felt. His connection with the role and the show never faded; in the 90s he produced a "pilot film" for a proposed revival and co-authored several novels continuing the adventures of the Galactica and its multi-generational crew.

When the series was finally rebooted in the early 2000's by the SyFy channel, Hatch joined the cast as Tom Zarek, and provided the voice of Apollo for the 2003 Galactica video game.

I like to think that he has been taken aboard the Ship of Lights for an eternal journey among the stars...

Let's hope that I don't have to write any more obituaries this year.

November's Space Babe: Katie Saylor

November's Space Babe is the lovely and mysterious Katie Saylor as the half-alien Liana of the 1977 television series The Fantastic Journey. The character first appeared in the second episode of the short-lived series, "Atlantium," and joined our inter-dimensional castaways Varian (Jared Martin), Scott (Ike Eisenmann) and Fred (Carl Franklin) as they traveled through the various time zones of a mysterious island in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.

According to the series, her father was Atlantean and her mother was an extraterrestrial from a heavy-gravity world. Liana possessed superhuman physical strength (due to her being born on a higher gravity planet than Earth) and various psionic abilities. She traveled with a pet cat that she could telepathically communicate with, named Sil-El, which often acted as a scout for the adventurers.

There's very little information online about Ms. Saylor. She became gravely ill during the production of The Fantastic Journey and was written out of the final two (and a half) episodes. She appears to have retired from acting at that time. Conflicting information online states that she either passed away in 1991, or is still alive and living a quiet life in California with her husband. Prior to Journey, she appeared in exploitation films like Invasion of The Bee Girls and The Swinging Barmaids.

Wherever she is now - this world or the next - I hope she knows how many of us remember her fondly for her strong, dignified portrayal of the heroic Liana.

THE FANTASTIC JOURNEY (1977) Network Promo

Wow! A rare, vintage TV spot for the short-lived NBC sci-fi series, The Fantastic Journey, which starred Jared Martin, Carl Franklin, Roddy McDowell (The Planet Of The Apes), Ike Eisenmann (Escape To/Return From Witch Mountain) and the lovely Katie Saylor. This particular promo trumpets the addition of McDowell to the show's constantly-shifting regular cast, though it also shows footage from the previous episodes....

THE FANTASTIC JOURNEY (1977) TV Guide Ad

Here's the bizarrely psychotronic TV Guide advertisement that NBC ran for the premiere of its short-lived science fiction series, The Fantastic Journey, starring Escape To Witch Mountain space kid, Ike Eisenman, Jared Martin and Carl Franklin (who would become an acclaimed film director in the 90s, with movies like One False Move and Devil In A Blue Dress).

The pilot film had about twice as many main characters as the ongoing series that followed it, characters that were written out rather clumsily at the end of the premiere in a tacked-on scene. In subsequent episodes, the lovely Katie Saylor and Space: 1970 favorite Roddy McDowell would join the cast as they wandered through various strange universes and different time zones.

Oh, that wacky Bermuda Triangle!

THE FANTASTIC JOURNEY (1977)

Lost in the Devil's Triangle, trapped in a dimension with beings from the future and other worlds, a party of adventurers journey through zones of time back to their own time. Varian, a man from the 23rd century, possessing awesome powers; from 1977; Fred, a young doctor just out of medical school; Scott Jordan, the thirteen-year-old son of a famous scientist; Liana, daughter of an Atlantean father and an extraterrestrial mother; and Jonathan Willaway, a rebel scientist from the 1960s. Together they face the frightening unknown on... The Fantastic Journey.

When I was thirteen, NBC aired ten episodes of this oh-so-70s science fiction fantasy series. Starring Ike Eisenmann between Disney's Witch Mountain flicks, and the always-welcome Roddy McDowell, The Fantastic Journey was tailor-made for kids like me. Hell, just the words "Bermuda Triangle," were enough to get my pulse racing back in '77, and when this show came on, I was glued to the set.

My memories of it were vague through most of my life, as I never saw an episode after the last show aired on June 16, 1977. If it was ever rerun, I never saw it. In fact, no one I ever mentioned it to even remembered it at all, and if not for a few articles in Starlog magazine, I might have convinced myself that I'd dreamed the whole thing. But, in the mid-90s, I was working for Tekno*Comix in Florida as an editor and writer. Tekno was run by the same lawyers who'd created the Sci-Fi Channel, and was actually financed, in part, by having sold the cable channel concept to MCA/Universal a year or two before. Well, one afternoon, I happened to see a VHS tape in a big pile of junk that was being carried down to the dumpster. As I always had to check out any video I came across, I snagged it and discovered that it was a complete episode of The Fantastic Journey!

Not a great episode, and not the pilot, which I was particularly eager to see again, but still.

Anyway, last night I found the tape again, and transferred it to a DVD-R disc. As it burned, I watched it again, and was fascinated by some of the names in the credits. Producers William Cairncross and Leonard Katzman, along with story editor (and Star Trek vet) D. C. Fontana went directly from this show to manage Logan's Run the following season, and creator/executive producer Bruce Lansbury moved on to Wonder Woman, and then, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

The cast of The Fantastic Journey was interesting, too. Aside from sci-fi faces Eisenmann and McDowell (whose character was sort of a more restrained - and thus, tolerable - version of Jonathan Harris' "Dr. Smith" from Lost In Space), there was the legitimately otherworldly Jared Martin (who later starred in the late-80s War of the Worlds syndicated series) as futureman Varian, who carried a small sonic device (looked like a glowing tuning fork) that was nearly as versatile as a certain Timelord's screwdriver, and the lovely and mysterious (seriously, I can't find anything about her on the web) Katie Saylor as the half-Atlantean/half-alien Liana. Carl Franklin is also quite good as the young doctor, Fred.

As to the show itself, it was pretty typical 70s TV fare. The episode I have a copy of, "Children of the Gods," is the obligatory "Lord of the Flies" knock-off plot that appeared on Star Trek, The Starlost, etc. and not particularly good. In fact it looks a lot like - and I guess that it's no surprise - the Logan's Run series, with lots of roaming around Griffith Park, running up and down corridors, and very limited effects (a single matte painting of a ruined city over a concrete culvert and one animated raygun blast). But it is professionally crafted and entertaining.

I would love to get my hands on the rest of the series one day. Maybe Columbia will initiate its own "manufacture-on-demand" program like Warners Archive one of these days and make the series available...