UFO Set 1 (1970)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Series Creator: Gerry Anderson
Starring Ed Bishop, George Sewell, Peter Gordeno, Gabrielle Drake, Michael Billington, and Grant Taylor

Features:

• Contains 13 episodes of the TV series
  
• Commentary by Gerry Anderson on the premiere episode
  
• Alternate video outtakes
  
• Gerry Anderson biography/filmography
  
• Production stills photo gallery
  

Rating: NR, suitable for ages 13+

Anamorphic: N/A

My Advice: Rent it.

Before The X-Files, before Dark Skies, and before V, there was UFO. The first live-action series from Gerry Anderson, best known for his children's shows in "Supermarionation" like Thunderbirds, UFO detailed the struggles of super-secret government organization SHADO against an equally mysterious alien race bent on conquering the Earth. With an arsenal of incredibly high-tech weapons, the men and women of SHADO dealt with this alien menace without the population of the planet ever suspecting that they existed. The show was a bit of a surprise to its original 1970 audience, who weren't prepared for the dark themes and "downer" endings of many of the episodes.

Anderson continued his effects wizardry pioneered in his children's shows in this series, as well. Lots of stop-motion and scale models were used to create SHADO's amazing array of interplanetary interceptors, submarine launch platforms, moonbase, and ground forces. While put to shame by more recent developments in special effects, Anderson was well ahead of his time on the sci-fi front.

Despite the effects wizardry and the thematic trailblazing, the series has problems. Most fundamental is a lack of any sort of basic understanding of science or technological possibility on the part of the series writers and creators. For starters, the series is set in the future, to account for the technological advances, but it's set in 1980--hardly ample time for the development of a moonbase, interplanetary attack craft that are capable of (apparently) near-relativistic speeds, and a near-Earth-orbital attack plane launched from the front end of a submarine.

I appreciate that science fiction has frequently erred in their projections about future scientific advances--understandably so, given the unusual leaps and subsequent lulls in technology in many fields. But not many of those other examples made the mistake of "dating" their future a mere decade away. But Anderson and his crew thought 1980 was plenty far off. Heck, we'd just put a man on the moon, hadn't we. Surely in ten more years we'd have a whole military base up there, with fighters that could go blow up UFOs beyond the asteroid belt and nip back in time for tea, right? Wrong. So tragically, laughably wrong.

Another problem is the same annoyingly lame sexism so common among TV series of the time (and other times, no sense singling out one decade). Everybody's seen the Star Trek miniskirts, which were understandably part of the fashion vocabulary of the 1960s, though still very silly. Well, UFO goes 'em one better, with wrap miniskirts that leave even less to the imagination, and by merely removing the skirt and zipping on some mesh leggings to the monokini, make functional work clothes for the women staffing our moonbase. And they all have purple hair. Every last one. Must have something to do with the oxygen-recyclers on the moonbase. Or maybe the water. While the men do get stuck in silly nehru jackets, at least they're not walking around the moonbase with their asses hanging out.

The storyline of the show lacks the kind of careful planning that has made for the best sci-fi television. No truly adequate explanation is given of these aliens, why Commander Straker wants them exterminated so badly, or why precisely they decided to kill us all. Bits and pieces accumulate over the course of these episodes, but not enough to present a solid picture. And how is it that Straker's fake office (at a production studio front, no less) can descend beneath the surface into SHADO's secret underground HQ...when he has an office with a WINDOW! Behind his head, you can watch as the street rises out of view, and packed earth and stone show through the window. But apparently nobody on the sidewalk notices when this corner office just sinks into the ground, leaving a large gaping hole for several stories down. Go figure.

Extras are decent, particularly for a show of this age, and the video and audio are both as good as can be expected from three-decade-old stock. The show's worth watching for a greater appreciation of the history of science fiction on television, and some of the individual episodes are quite good. As a whole, though, the series is very hit-or-miss, with significantly more misses than hits. Add in the silly costumes, improbable science, and plot holes large enough to fly a sub-launched starfighter through, and it just doesn't measure up as a keeper.