1979: STARLOG PHOTO GUIDEBOOK: ROBOTS

From 1979: STARLOG PHOTO GUIDEBOOK: ROBOTS.

Top marks to Messrs O'Quinn and Jacobs for very swiftly realising their little unlicensed STAR TREK magazine (with enough other genre stuff to keep the Paramount lawyers at bay) could be upscaled to a whole publishing empire at the height of the Star Age. Not only did they spin off FUTURE LIFE, FANGORIA, CINEMAGIC and COMICS SCENE in quick succession but they also launched the PHOTO GUIDEBOOKS, essentially a series of colour scrapbooks dedicated to all things SF. 

These seem a little crude by today's standards but hark from the pre-internet age where even colour printing was a relative luxury. They were A4 softcover books of varying page counts and price points. 

They covered all the obvious bases including heroes, villains, robots, toys, tech, vehicles etc. The various volumes dedicated to special effects are amongst the most coveted by collectors today.

Two of the most useful reprinted, with a good range of stills, the TV episode guides which were a fixture of the early issues of the magazine. Behind-the-scenes information was all but absent but that didn't matter when these were the only source available. 

1990: PLANET OF THE APES in COMICS SCENE MAGAZINE (Starlog)

From June 1990: STARLOG spin-off COMICS SCENE (the revived second incarnation, officially volume 2, issue 13) celebrate the launch of Adventure Comics' PLANET OF THE APES line.

This was the first time that the saga had been gifted a comic book version since the dying days of the 1970s Apes boom and Marvel's decision to drop the license on both sides of the Atlantic.

I'm not overly familiar with the Adventure Comics titles but I do know there was a lot of them... and the creative teams liked to play fast-and-loose with the format established in the screen incarnations.  Licensing restrictions meant that, with the exception of reprints of Marvel's after-the-fact adaptations of the first two movies, the film and TV characters were off limits.  

Adventure also reprinted some of Marvel's original strips (the only time to date that any of that inventory has seen the light of day again... amazing considering POTA's intermittent longevity in print and on screen) in the TERROR ON THE PLANET OF THE APES four-parter.  See here for more on that run.  

The POTA books (all of which, with the exception of the bonkers APE NATION, see here, appeared in black & white) seemed ubiquitous at the time but seldom seem to surface in any numbers in the UK today. 

1992: STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION MAKEUP FX JOURNAL (Starlog)

From 1992: More behind-the-screens secrets from the Paramount lot courtesy of the booming STARLOG empire: STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION MAKEUP FX JOURNAL (THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE).

A squarebound/ stiff cover spin-off from the regular licensed mag, this was a cavalcade of novelty-headed guest stars (and a few series regulars) and combined designs and candid behind-the-scenes snaps with the more ubiquitous studio publicity shots.  

Quite how useful this was to the general public is debatable... but, in the age of cosplay, surely more valuable than ever...

1980: GLEN A. LARSON in STARLOG

From 1980: TV Uber-producer GLEN A. LARSON interviewed in STARLOG issue 36.

The magazine has a July cover-date but the weird-world of deadlines and on-sale dates mean this interview must have been conducted pretty early in the year... when GALACTICA 1980 (bastard child of the Battlestar) still looked viable as a weekly series (it stalled after only a few weeks) and Larson had high hopes that the format would allow him (and I'm looking specifically at him as he wrote all bar one of the scripts) to tell any sort of tale he wanted.  

Unfortunately, the axe fell before he could get the plots he talked about into production (and, interestingly, there's no mention of Return of Starbuck, suggesting that it REALLY was a last-minute deadline-buster slotted into the production schedule as a "double-up" because it placed few demands on the regular cast) so we were left with a show that seemed infinitely inflexible and highly dependent of Larson's sub-par attempts at writing what amounted to a succession of undemanding Disney-esque outings. 

1980: GALACTICA 1980 - ROBYN DOUGLASS INTERVIEW (Starlog Magazine)

It's the show that everyone loves to hate.  As one critic sneered "the show that gave the 1980s a bad name." Battlestar Galactica's bastard child: GALACTICA 1980.  Only eight months (give-or-take) since ABC unexpectedly ended Adama's quest for Earth after a single season... they revived the show.  With a few - ahem - refinements.

It would be lovely to say that ABC listened to Battlestar's loyal fans but the (harsh) reality was that the network's 1979-80 season was tanking fast and they needed some proven (and promotable) hits to bolster the ratings.  Glen Larson's pitch of a final TV movie to end the search for Earth fitted the bill and ABC signed-up.

Unfortunately Larson's script for Galactica Discovers Earth just isn't very good and plays like a sub-par Disney tele-flick.  Earth's found before the show even starts and its downhill from there.  Something might have been salvaged from the mess if he'd have been able to coax back more of his original cast but Hatch and Benedict took one look at the script and declared themselves "busy". 

Some hasty rewriting by Larson moved events forward a generation, allowing him to introduce a new cast (although Lorne Greene, apparently at his own insistence, returned.  Albeit with a ridiculous beard).  The new guys, presumably cast in a hurry (and I can't help wondering if they got the gig simply because they were roughly the same build as their predecessors... allowing cash-conscious Larson to use hand-me-down costumes mothballed from the original series), felt like second-rate substitutes.  An impression not helped by Larson's threadbare script which gives them few - if any - discernible characteristics. 

The other thing that's painfully obvious about G80 is that it was designed to be as cheap as possible.  Plonking the Colonial survivors in contemporary California betrays the complex (albeit occasionally confused) mythology the original story was trying to create.  Now we know that the Galactica and her fleet had no influence on Earth's ancient history.  The excursion to occupied Europe (a time travel plot device quietly abandoned in the short-lived weekly series) feels like blatant padding and an excuse for Universal to raid the costume and props warehouse.

The set-piece effects sequence, the not-what-it-seems Cylon attack on Los Angeles, looks pretty good (except for the all-too-obvious mounting points on the Raider models and a building that's destroyed - and then miraculous undamaged - a few shots later, two pieces of SFX sloppiness fixed for the movie version, CONQUEST OF THE EARTH) but would have been familiar to many viewers: it's lifted from the 1975 Universal disaster flick EARTHQUAKE (yup, the one with Lorne Greene).

As bad as the three-part pilot is... the subsequent weekly series (commissioned in haste by ABC after the pilot bagged better audiences than anticipated) is considerably worse.  With one episodic exception.

This is a STARLOG (Issue 34, May 1980) interview with Robyn Douglass who played Jamie Hamilton, the TV journalist who (rather improbably) befriends the Colonial advanced guard and agrees to help them in their covert operations on Earth (and becomes a glorified babysitter for their space brats in subsequent episodes).  Clearly conducted before the pilot aired, it gives some idea of the time pressures the show was under, as well as the potential for a weekly series version.

- Next on Galactica 1980: Doctor Zee -