A couple years ago, I ran across a neat little site called the Sci-Fi Airshow, which is predicated on the notion that the spaceships and other miscellaneous vehicles we remember from the movies and TV series we grew up on were in fact real. Supposedly, the shows themselves were fictional, but rather than faking everything with special effects, the producers either built or acquired actual spacecraft and filmed them in action. And now, this conceit goes, these old machines are in the hands of private collectors and traveling the world on the airshow circuit so the public can see them up close, take ground tours of them, and maybe even go for rides, just like the 1940s warbirds I so love.
In reality, of course, the Sci-Fi Airshow site is just an excuse for a guy named Bill George to demonstrate his formidable art skills and love of 1960s and ’70s sci-fi through lots of gorgeous, photo-realistic renderings of imaginary spacecraft sitting in real-world settings. (I love the irony of “proving” the existence of nonexistent things by using CGI, which is arguably less “real” than the physical F/X miniatures that embodied these ships to begin with!) But the pretense is maintained throughout the site, and Bill has obviously had a lot of fun cooking up “true-life” back stories for everything. For example, it seems that the Battlestar Galactica shuttlecraft sat neglected for years on the Universal Studios backlot tour, where it eventually became a home for drug-using squatters…
Anyhow, I saw this morning that Bill has really outdone himself with the site’s latest addition, a short film all about the Jupiter 2, the iconic ship from the campy TV classic Lost in Space. The tone of the video is a dead-on imitation of similar materials from real-world airshows, from the generic music and slightly-too-cheerful host to the cheesily dramatic title graphics to the inarticulate gushing comments made by spectators. One technical thing that caught my interest: when the video references the Jupiter 2‘s cinematic ancestors — the flying saucers seen in movies of the 1950s — what we see is not footage from those early films, but digital re-creations that manage to look simultaneously identical to and better than the original effects shots. The obvious explanation is that Bill didn’t want or could not pay to license authentic film footage, but I wonder if perhaps we aren’t meant to think these vessels were “real” as well, and we’re what we’re seeing is “behind-the-scenes” footage? Or maybe I’m just overthinking it, as I’m prone to do…
In any event, I have nothing but the highest admiration for Bill George’s talent and dedication to his fannish obsessions; this is truly cool stuff. Give the site a look, and watch the video below. Oh, and keep your eyes open during the vid for glimpses of other fan-favorite machines from vintage sci-fi, including that creepy robot spider-thing from Jonny Quest, the ANSA Icarus spacecraft from Planet of the Apes (seen here in its upright launch configuration!), and Star Trek‘s Galileo…
