This is getting into some very tall grass on the Plains of Geekiness, but I can’t help it… I love this cheez-ball stuff:
The Bad Astronomer reminds us that today, September 13, would have been the eighth anniversary of the Moon blasting out of Earth orbit if the premise of Space: 1999 had come true.
(If you don’t remember it — and not a lot of people do — Space: 1999 was a TV series back in the early ’70s. It begins with a nuclear explosion — a superimposed title informs us that the date is September 13, 1999 — that sends the Moon hurtling into deep space, carrying with it the 300 or so inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who then proceed to have various far-out adventures every week. Whoever was writing the show had a weaker grasp of basic science than my inbred, semi-feral pet cat, as common-sense things like the immense distance between star systems were routinely ignored — not to mention the fact that Alpha apparently had an inexhaustible supply of its Eagle shuttlecraft, considering that one or two got wrecked every week — but what the show lacked in sense, it made up for in style. The aforementioned Eagle, for instance, is still one of the coolest-looking spaceship designs ever put on film, in my humble opinion.)
It’s strange, sometimes, being a science fiction fan in the 21st century; as all these iconic dates for made-up events that never occurred recede into the distance, it’s hard not to feel an odd twinge of disappointment, of loss for what might have been. For instance, NASA did not launch the last of America’s deep-space probes in 1987 with Captain William “Buck” Rogers at the controls… there were no Eugenics Wars in the mid-1990s that ended with a group of genetic “supermen” stealing an advanced DY-100 spacecraft and slipping away from Earth (that’s a good thing, actually)… and the spaceship Discovery did not explore Jupiter and the secret of the black monoliths in 2001. The result is that our fictional worlds are now harder to believe in, if only for an hour or two’s viewing time, and the real world just isn’t as cool as we grew up thinking it would be. Consider, for example, the fact that we never see anything like this anywhere but our imaginations:
Sigh.
