Did You Know?
Props, costumes, special effects shots and even entire sets from the series Battlestar Galactica were used in this series.
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Erin Gray was asked to dye her hair blonde for the role of Wilma Deering. However, as the first season progresses, her blonde hair begins to fade to her natural brunette coloring. In the second season, she was allowed to have completely brunette hair.
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US broadcast of the second season was delayed until midway through the 1980-81 TV season due to an actors strike. During the strike, the series was retooled to make it more like Star Trek and Larson's own Battlestar Galactica. The first season was based on Earth and the second was based aboard a deep space exploration vessel. The primary villains in the first season, the Draconians, are never seen in the second season and neither is Buck's friend and mentor Dr. Huer, and Hawk (a "Mr Spock" type character) is added as Buck's sidekick.
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While working on this series, Mel Blanc provided voices for the parody Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24½th Century.
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Mel Blanc was briefly replaced by Bob Elyea as the voice of Twiki at the start of the second season. After protests from fans, he returned to the role for the final episodes.
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The studio decided to cancel the series before the last episode was shot. The producer was evidently incensed that this happened, without his prior knowledge, and began to clear out his office immediately upon hearing the news. To exact a measure of revenge, however, he assigned an intern, Guy Magar, to direct the final episode. Magar had just happened to pop into the director's office to see if he needed anything just after the producer got the call about the cancellation. The studio had no idea that Magar had never before directed a TV show (or anything beyond a student film). Magar went on to direct episodes of Sliders, La Femme Nikita and other shows.
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Written on the side of the spaceship Searcher (from Season Two) is "Per Adua Ad Astra" , which is a misspelling of "Per Ardua Ad Astra" (Through Adversity To The Stars), the motto for The British Royal Air Force ('ardua' is the plural of 'arduus', meaning 'the steep place', so the phrase could also mean "Past the summit to the stars").
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The Earth Starfighter spacecraft seen in the series was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and was actually one of his original designs for the Colonial Viper in Battlestar Galactica. When Galactica producers went with a different style for the Viper, this design resurfaced in Buck Rogers as the Starfighter.
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In "The Golden Boy", the village set is the same one used in the original Frankenstein movies.
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Buck's ship is called "Ranger 3" by the narrator. In real life, NASA's Ranger Program ended in the 1960s, and Ranger 3 was a 1962 lunar probe which missed the moon and was lost in space.
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Henry Silva played Kane in the two-hour pilot episode, "Awakening", which was released theatrically. However, Silva was unavailable to take part in the weekly series and so Michael Ansara was cast in the role of Kane for subsequent episodes. The change had a subtle effect on Kane's relationship with Princess Ardala. In "Awakening" there is a flirtatious quality to some of Ardala's banter with Kane, such as when she asks if Kane desires "Me, or my throne?" and when she pointedly tells Kane that Buck Rogers "wouldn't have been necessary if you were more of a man." This flirtatious banter, however, disappears when Ansara assumed the role, as the relationship between the two becomes more businesslike, notably in the episode "Ardala Returns" where Ardala repeatedly expresses doubt about Kane's Zygot robot duplicates of Buck Rogers and at one point she angrily tells Kane to sit down.
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The enemy spaceship in "Flight of the War Witch" was unfinished when shooting was scheduled to begin, so it was turned upside down to add an alien look to it.
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In the UK, the series was shown by ITV beginning on 30 August 1980, the same date that the BBC began screening season 18 of their long-running sci-fi hit Doctor Who. With both shows in the same Saturday early evening slot, Buck Rogers trounced Doctor Who which saw its ratings fall from a series high of 16.1 million viewers the season before to a low of 3.7 million viewers in November 1980, the lowest ratings in the programme's history at that time. As a similar effect had occurred three years earlier when ITV screened Man from Atlantis, this prompted the BBC to move Doctor Who to a weekday evening slot for its following season, even though Buck Rogers had already been canceled by that time.
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Admiral Efram Asimov (Jay Garner), the commander of the Searcher spaceship, is said to be a descendant of the famous science fiction author Isaac Asimov.
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According to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: Shgoratchx!, the robots Twiki and Crichton are programmed by Isaac Asimov's three laws of Robotics. When they are reactivated after repairs, they quote the laws and a brief history of the laws' origin.
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The visual effects crew often represented futuristic buildings using still photographs of the pavilions at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan.
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