A bit of a diversion now. Not a single lead person in sight.
I turn 40 this year (in just a few days, in fact) and have been a science fiction fan for pretty much as long as I could make "pew pew pew" noises. For many years I've been searching for two TV shows that I saw in my yourth and have very vague memories of. After years of searching I've managed to track one of them down.
The first was s scifi film shown on TV. The only memories of it I had was that it was some kind of exploration mission in a spacecraft, the crew were givene a choice to continue of or return home at one point and that the special star drive malfunctioned and the ship accelerated to super fast speeds and threw one of the crew members to the back of the ship to land on a coloured glass wall. That's all I remembered. The image of the crewmember laying on the wall was one the especially stuck with me.
Yesterday I discovered Space 1970, a fabulous little website that covers exactly the kind of sciene fiction shows that I grew up with. The 1970's and 1980's were my formative science fiction years and show like the original Battlestar Galactica, Space:1999 and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were staples of my TV viewing.
Whilst browsing therough the site, with a big grin on my face, I found this. It's the very film I've been looking for for 37 years. A quick google search turned up a flash video of the original as well. The sense of satisfaction in finding this is immense. I haven't viewed it all yet, but the description in the Space 1970 site is spot-on match.
The second long forgotten show was, I think, an import that was redubbed. I have vague memories of it being a sort of proto-steampunk adventure where one, pastoral, peace loving nation is trying to spy on their evil industrialised neighbours who are building weapons of mass destruction. I remember that the weapons had something to do with giant cannons and cryogenics, and the hero that was sent to spy on them had his hand bandaged up all the way through the spying mission, feigning an injury. It was revealed during his daring escape that actually he had a handgun concealed under the bandages. I have a sneaking feeling that this might be a mash-up of a couple of series, one of which might actually have been about spying during WW2, something like (but not) Operation Crossbow.
