1995: STARLOG MAGAZINE PREVIEWS SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND

From 1995: SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND, FOX's one-season-wonder, is previewed by STARLOG MAGAZINE.

After a lousy opening night, the show settled down to be pretty good stuff.  It never quite managed to capture the TOUR OF DUTY in space vibe that i think it really needed (the writing wasn't quite good enough) but it put together some strong episodes played out by a good cast.  The world-building and back-story was also pretty interesting with lots of opportunities to explore various facets of the war with the aliens further had the show been renewed.  It did - however - pass out with a cracking two-part conclusion with unresolved cliffhangers aplenty.  It's on DVD (and the UK edition comes with some exclusive new material including a documentary).

1997: SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND Issue 1 (Titan Magazines)

From March 1997: The first issue of Titan Magazine's SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND comic/ magazine, based on the short-lived FOX fighting-in-space TV show that spluttered to a halt after one season.

Titan must have known this monthly had a finite life before they even published this first issue (complete with a nice pin badge with the squadron logo) as the bulk of the contents came from the US comic published by Topps... and that only mustered five issues before closing.

The three-part limited series revived the old Marvel tradition of stretching an adaptation of the feature-length pilot over three issues.  The two-part follow-up, The Gauntlet, was an original adventure.  The end of the TV show, along with (presumably) low sales, meant Topps didn't publish anything else.  

The UK edition managed four issues (the three-part pilot and the first installment of the follow-up) with an announcement that the impending fifth edition would be the last.  Titan obviously had no intention of spending their own money on commissioning new material.  But the fifth issue never appeared.

Titan also issued a trade paperback collection (now long out-of-print but a regular fixture of remaindered book shops for years) which collected all five of the US issues.  

The demise of the Titan edition can probably be attributed to the show's UK scheduling.  Sky, predictably, had first bite and - as I recall - ran the show on (the soon-to-be-defunct) SKY TWO channel (which they seemed to be positioning as their home for SF and fantasy shows).  Titan launched the monthly to coincide with the terrestrial broadcast on BBC TWO... except the schedulers tucked the show away in a late Friday night slot where audiences (especially the type who would then go out and buy a comic about the show) must have been miniscule. 

The show has now been released on DVD. 

1996: SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND Young Reader novels (Harper Collins)

Starlogged comes bang-up-to-date (relatively speaking) today with this set of four SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND Young Readers books, from 1996.

Published in the States, and not widely available in the UK, each gave a cursory adaptation of the relevant TV episode of the same name.  Competent enough, they're not the sort of thing you'd really want to read (and certainly not in public) but I think they're a pretty neat thing to have and the unique cover art is certainly distinctive.

They demonstrate the early belief that the show, created by Glen Morgan and James Wong (both formerly star players in THE X-FILES writing team), was going to be a hit for FOX.  However, the ratings were never that great and FOX pulled the plug after a single season.

The decision to cancel came just as another part of the Fox empire was preparing to usher in the first of the STAR WARS prequels (and we know how that worked out) which, in theory, could have led to another SF boom which S:A&B would have been in a good place to exploit if it had stayed on-air.

Around the same time, Harper Collins (another part of the Murdoch media conglomerate) also published several suitable-for-young-readers X-FILES adaptations.  Go figure.

There was also a standard paperback adaptation of the opening pilot movie (more on that in a moment) which I'm pretty sure I have in a box somewhere although I've never read it and I've not seen it in several years.  One day I'll stumble across it and post it here.

I've always had mixed feelings about the show.  The cast, and their characters, were likeable enough and they did a good enough job with the material (as an aside, I once knew someone who looked disconcertingly, in a good way, like Morgan Weisser aka missing girlfriend obsessed Nathan West) but the material itself was a little erratic.  

The feature-length pilot, shot in Australia (the series relocated to California), is a bit of a mess: packed full of cliched moments and stupid dialogue.  It does, however, feature an early US TV appearance of Jim Dale (aka NEIGHBOURS' Jim Robinson) in the opening scene.  I vaguely recall one of the UK SF magazines printing a fairly scathing early review, based on an incomplete edit of the opener, which incurred the wrath of the show runners.

The weekly series itself is much better although I always thought it should have had the writing quality of TOUR OF DUTY, albeit shipped into space, and it seldom managed to reach those heights.  The inspiration of STARSHIP TROOPERS (not yet adapted for the screen) was, in retrospect, pretty obvious, albeit scaled down for a TV budget.  Production standards were generally good although the CGI FX work looked pretty crude compared with what BABYLON FIVE was churning out, on a lower budget, at the time.  Making the fighters' cockpits detachable was presumably necessitated by the reality that the show couldn't afford more than one full-sized mock-up but it looked like the ace war heroes were clambering into a fleet of Sinclair C5's!

A season's worth of story lines (including Martin Jarvis in a tank!) dovetailed neatly into the impressive two-part end-of-season story, which closed-out with several cliffhangers which unfortunately went unresolved.

In the UK, the show initially premiered on satellite channel SKY TWO (I think) but may have transferred to SKY ONE when the companion channel was shuttered.  The BBC followed-up with a terrestrial screening, banished to a late-night Friday slot.  I remember thinking some episodes looked like they had been crudely edited which -if true - suggests that the cuts were made to run the show in a much earlier slot (possibly one of the 6-7.30pm weekday 'cult' slots) before the schedulers dumped it into an off-peak slot.  

Titan Magazines were certainly confident enough to launch a monthly comic based on the show (they were already publishing an X-FILES title) which reprinted the US strips briefly published by Topps Comics in the states.  The first issue came with a neat cover-mounted pin badge.  The fifth UK issue was announced as the last (presumably because it would have exhausted the last of the US reprints) but never actually appeared.  I have those four issues, as well as the US originals and Titan Books' trade paperback collection and I'll post them at some point.