Today’s title sequence is something of a departure in that I don’t actually remember this one. I remember the show — this is the one I mentioned the other day that I used to think I might have imagined — and there are some familiar elements in the video clip, but the sequence as a whole is a total blank spot. See if it rings a bell for you:

Maybe that just looks like forgettable shlock to you — and you probably wouldn’t be wrong — but this series is so mysterious to me that I can’t let it go. Thinking about it is like trying to recall what color your nursery was — you can almost picture it, but you just can’t say with any absolute certainty. I clearly remember watching it and loving it fiercely. I remember the green fog surrounding the boat and the blue “beam-in” effect when the travelers crossed from one zone of the mysterious island to another. I remember Jared Martin and his weapon/tool, that glowing tuning-fork thingie you see in one shot of the title clip (somewhere in the Bennion Archives, I have a plywood version of that thing, cut and painted by my dad to placate his geeky young son). I remember identifying with the character played by Ike Eisenmann, who was actually a pretty familiar face in the ’70s (Trekkies will recognize him as Scotty’s doomed trainee-nephew in The Wrath of Khan), and of course Roddy McDowell was in freakin’ everything during that period. (I always liked him, even as a small child; there was something about his elegant voice, I think, and that sardonic roll of the eyes when he was making a point…). But the details of the show seem to become ever more elusive the longer I think about them. I can’t recall a single episode or even a specific scene. Even a detailed critique doesn’t quite bring it back, it just whets my appetite for more. It’s maddening. I may have to look around for a bootleg DVD of this series to satisfy my nagging curiosity once and for all.

One thing I can say with certainty, just from watching the titles, is that this show was a nice big slice of the pre-Star Wars pop-cultural zeitgeist of the early ’70s: the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, pyramid power, psychic powers, “evolved” humans, time travel, flying saucers. I remember very well how, before everything became space opera, it was all about von Däniken. (On a somewhat related sidenote, I’ve always rolled my eyes at the critics who call the original Battlestar Galactica a rip-off of Star Wars, because the show so obviously germinated from all the Chariots of the Gods stuff that was immensely popular right up until the moment that Star Destroyer loomed across movie screens. It’s all right there in Patrick Macnee’s opening voice-over: “Some believe that life here… began out there…”)

I wonder if you couldn’t also say that The Fantastic Journey was an influence on Lost. It’s much the same set-up: castaways on a mysterious, uncharted island dotted by relics of advanced science (the various “hatches” and the ultra-sonic death-fence, maybe even the “smoke monster,” depending on what that thing turns out to be), where there seems to be something very weird going on with time and no one manages to leave the island unless the travel along a very specific heading. Hmmm…

(As long as I’m rambling a bit, I have a theory about whatever’s going on on Lost: I think that the big electromagnetic device that the castaways had to keep resetting every 108 minutes somehow cracked open spacetime when it finally detonated and sent ripples both backwards and forwards. One of those ripples apparently brought down the castaways’ plane and created some paradoxes — supposedly, Oceanic 815 was found on the sea floor and all aboard were confirmed dead, and yet we know that sections of it landed on the island and people survived — as well as somehow insulating the island from the rest of the world. But that’s all just me noodling around and may or may not have anything to do with what the show’s writers are thinking about. Hell, I’m still waiting for the Sleestak to show up…)