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Star Trek: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969)
Painful Episode
When I was little, Star Trek would come on once a week in syndication. There were no VCRs, ITunes, DVDs, etc.
One Saturday afternoon, this was the episode. It was horrible. No good guy, no bad guy, no ship V. ship space battles, etc.
The next week, the station messed up, and instead of another episode, showed this one again.
The horror of this rotten episode twice in a row, and having to wait another week.
I would rather watch Spock's Brain than this episode. But, it is not like all TOS episodes are great. Some are pretty bad, but the concept was so great you just had to watch them all.
Land of the Lost (1974)
Ahhh... The Glory Days of the Golden Age of Cartoons
Once upon a time, Saturday mornings meant something.
Starting in the mid to late 60s, programming started to pick up in focus and quality for kids all concentrated on Saturday morning.
By about 1970 they had it down and in my opinion had a great ten year run. So many shows did so well with merchandising by 1980 or so the cartoons were no longer created for kids, but the merchandise/toys cart was put ahead of the actual cartoon horse.
Ten more years of mucking with cartoons "for the good of the children" went even further down the hole. Then, there was just so much other entertainment all the time the "holiness" of the Saturday morning cartoons is long gone.
Ah, but if you were a pre-school/grade school kid from about 1970 to 1980, it was magic. No recording, no streaming, no internet, no video games. You had a few special hours just for you on the TV every Saturday morning. You saw it then, or got lucky with a repeat, or never saw it again.
I have a few memories of Scooby Doo, SuperFriends, Valley of the Dinosaurs, SpeedBuggy, etc. from that era. There were even Star Trek and Planet of the Apes cartoons to mirror live action shows. And one special niche on Saturday morning was what I call "live action cartoons." ISIS, Shazamm!, and, Land of the Lost.
I was five years old and just started first grade when I woke up Saturday morning. I climbed on the counter, got down a bowl of Cheerios, went to the table, got into the parent's coffee sugar bowl, dumped half a dozen heaping spoons of sugar on there, poured on the milk, and headed for the TV.
Thirteen inches of black and white with NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS on VHF and two more channels on UHF. And I was rewarded with a show with dinosaurs and the kids got their own knives! Too cool. Not even counting the monkey cave man friend, power crystals, and lizard/insect scary people that hissed and had the coolest sling-shot crossbow things ever.
I loved this show. Heck, there was a blond named Holly in my class that thanks to this show I still have a crush on to this day in addition to the actual Holly from the show.
Now, for the record, unless you have child hood memories of this show, you are not going to like it. Groovy crystals, a typical 70s twenty something year old actor playing a teenager and rocking the wide open shirt, corny dialog, kumbaya themes delivered by a so much more enlightened and hipper than anyone generation a decade before they red lined the greed and consumption meter, etc.
But where else in the world in the middle of the 70s was a kid going to get to watch an Allosaurus throw down face to face with a T. Rex?
IF you experienced this show as part of your childhood, and IF you have a few grade school aged kids left, buy the set and enjoy.
Some of the episodes have some pretty cool concepts by good writers, it's very nostalgic, and it is just plain fun.
Universal Soldier (1971)
Almost but not quite a diamond in the rough...
I have very fond memories of and a fondness for 70s movies.
Either mainstream ones seen on TV as the Sunday night movie, like Dirty Harry or James Bond ones,
or the less mainstream, counter-culture specials aired on Saturday afternoons- like Vanishing Point or Two Lane Blacktop.
After a great job as James Bond, in a completely under rated Bond film which can only be faulted for people mad he was not Sean Connery, he took this role.
A pre-Rambo non-over-the-top special operations vet (much like Billy Jack the Vietnam Ranger/Green Beret), he plays Ryker.
I infer that he was an Australian SAS Vietnam vet with a few more years of merc work and arms dealing under his belt. I say infer because the whole movie is less coherent than the New Orleans portion of Easy Rider.
Now in his thirties, he has an unease with his past. He shacks up with a clichéd (well, now anyways, maybe not in '71) hippie chick that gets her groovy vibe on in decorating his flat, meditates in the way of him, gets him to take out his TV CRT and plant a flower in it, and do "shotgun" hits of grass with her using his .45.
The deal he abandoned when he decided to drop out has left some unhappy associates. The try to do him in. They turn the tables. He ends up with an anti-hero ending at the hands of the corrupt, establishment, industro-military representatives of "the man."
This summary is far more coherent than the actual movie. Despite being a fan of the late 60s and the 70s film of this type, it just did not do it for me.
There was a car chase, but without American cars of the era I was just not into it. There was a fight, but he did not get his kung fu on in a way I was hoping- or at least bring on the nerve wracking serious of some of the old school but less skilled fight scenes we have seen.
The quality of the visuals and sound was a confounding factor. The lack of coherence as well. The non-familiar (to an American) setting was not made up for by beautiful women, exotic scenery, etc. like some other films of this era.
This could have become a cult classic or hidden gem with just a touch more "viewability" that would not have required any more budget.
UFO (1970)
Great memories...
I got the set for Christmas and really enjoyed going through it.
I have memories of this from my pre-school to early grade school years.
It may be the first instance I saw of the "Do you hear that?" "Hear what?" "Nothing, that's what's wrong." cliché.
It is probably also my first memories of ESP and a Ouija Board. Yeah, I probably had a few bad dreams thanks to this!
My memories only included space ships with one missle shooting at a UFO and that unique UFO noise, tanks firing mortars into a lake where a UFO was, the car phone, hot chicks, an alien Siamese cat, a pyramid of light or something on a guy's head while an alien takes them over, the oddest mish mash of a time loop and driving funny little cars, groovy hair, and a human getting an alien helmet stuck on them as it filled up with black fluid- which freaked me out!
That was it. My only memories of it but I liked it and always wanted to see it again.
It was everything I hoped for and then some. Groovy music, future cars, stripper-iffic outfits, etc. I do not remember if it aired on some UHF channel we got, or on the WGBH as the fourth of our four VHF channels we got. It was a Saturday after cartoons sort of thing.
Man, it brought back memories of how damn fun I thought it was going to be to grow up and be an adult! When I was a kid it was FUN to be an adult! Smoking indoors, drinking at work, no seat belts, etc. Well, it did not turn out that way, LOL.
It also had themes I totally get that obviously I did not pick up on as a kid, but resonate now. High stress jobs, time away from family, some jobs that can't be shared at home, etc.
This was a quality show. Far too cerebral to be a mainstream hit, but so wonderfully dated it's a blast.
If you saw this as a child, or were a little kid during the golden age of Saturday morning cartoons/Saturday afternoon shows/movies, say from 68 to 80 or so, give this a try. Stryker really pulls off the acting, hard to believe he was the meek professor in Diamonds are Forever (great child hood memories on the Sunday night movie of that red Mach1 car chase as well!).