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BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25th CENTURY
Rating: 
USA. 1979.
Director – Daniel Haller, Screenplay – Glen A. Larson & Leslie Stevens, Based on the 1939 film Buck Rogers written by Norman Hall & Ray Trampe, the Comic Strip Created by Richard W. Calkins and the Short Stories Armageddon 2419 A.D.
and The Airlords of Han by Phillip Francis Nowlan, Producer – Richard Caffey, Photography – Frank Beascoechea, Music – Stu Phillips, Visual Effects – David M. Garber & Wayne Smith, Special Effects – Bud Ewing & Jack Faggard, Art Direction – Paul Peters. Production Company – Universal.
Cast:
Gil Gerard (Captain William ‘Buck’ Rogers), Pamela Hensley (Princess Ardala), Erin Grey (Colonel Wilma Deering), Tim O’Connor (Dr Huer), Henry Silva (Kane), Felix Silla (Twiki), Mel Blanc (Voice of Dr Theo)
Plot: Astronaut William ‘Buck’ Rogers is launched on a space shuttle mission but the shuttle is swept up by a passing comet and he frozen in suspended animation. 500 years later he is found and revived by a passing flagship of the Draconian Empire that is on its way to Earth to sign a treaty. Aboard, the seductive Princess Ardala takes a liking to Buck. He is released and sent on ahead to Earth where he finds the only remnants of civilization to be survivors living in a domed city amid the post-holocaust ruins. But when Buck tries to convince them that the Draconian treaty is a trap, he is treated with suspicion and disbelief.
Buck Rogers evolved out of two novellas, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928) and The Airlords of Han (1929), published in Amazing Stories by Phillip Francis Nowlan. These stories are fairly dull, caught halfway between space opera and a terrible racist fear of the Chinese (who are the villains of the piece rather than any alien races). They nevertheless served as the basis for the long-running Buck Rogers in the 25th Century syndicated daily newspaper comic-strip that debuted later in 1929 and ran until 1967. It is the comic-strip rather than Nowlan’s that is the basis of the image of Buck Rogers today – it is the gung-ho, flying helmet clad hero zipping around the solar system in finned rocketships that everyone has in mind when they talk about “that Buck Rogers stuff”. With the success of the trilogy of Flash Gordon serials starring Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe, a serial of Buck Rogers (1939) was produced starring Crabbe and is one of the better science-fiction serials. There was also an all-but forgotten Buck Rogers tv series (1950-1).
This Buck Rogers film was the flagship of a tv series revival (1979-1981) that emerged in the aftermath of the immense success of Star Wars (1977). There is considerable irony to this as in fact Star Wars evolved out of George Lucas’s initially wanting to make another Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers film. He however found the rights too expensive to buy so ended up writing his own space opera. But then in the wake of the success of Star Wars, Lucas ended up having to face revivals of both Buck Rogers (here) and Flash Gordon (1980) – the campy Dino de Laurentiis remake – as his own imitators. It is a shame that the Buck Rogers strip has been revived in an attempt to exploit Star Wars rather than with a nostalgic feel for the genre. Little remains of the original Buck – although one should hardly berate it for that as the original stories, the comic-book and the serial all bear little in common with one another. Although the film does return somewhat to the Yellow Peril racism that ran through the original stories, with the Draconians seemingly designed as Mongols.
The Buck Rogers film was made by producer Glen A. Larson. Larson had previously had success with the tv series Battlestar Galactica (1978-9). Galactica was one of the most shameless ripoffs of Star Wars ever conducted and, no doubt due to its success, Universal promptly sought Larson to produce their long-planned Buck Rogers remake. This film was initially intended as the pilot for the tv series however Larson had had considerable success in releasing his Battlestar Galactica
(1979) pilot theatrically and so extra money was put in to upgrade the film for cinema release. After its release, the film was reissued as the two-part pilot episode Aftermath, which is the same as the film version except for a new theme song, the redubbing of some of the more suggestively adult lines and the addition of several scenes in Buck’s apartment. (It has become a quite common misnomer among modern commentators, including the IMDB and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1992), to assume that the film was always the pilot episode and was never screened theatrically prior to the premiere of the tv series).
Buck Rogers is marginally a better film than Battlestar Galactica. The shadow of Star Wars hangs heavily over it at every point – cute robots that talk in bleeps, lookalike starships, a climactic WWII-type dogfight between small ships in space. But while Galactica’s big screen outing enchanced what was seen on tv considerably, Buck Rogers’s only seems to bring out its limitations. The effects and ship shootouts are competently conducted, although the tv origins do show through. The production values do seem rather threadbare when it comes to the interiors of the Draconian ship. There are some visible glitches – boom-mikes in the corner of the screen or where one can see Pamela Hensley’s bodysuit in her supposedly nude bathing sequence.
But it is the film’s attempt to be hip that ultimately derails it. Gil Gerard gives an awfully smug performance. The cute robots are dubbed with smartass lines like “I’m freezing my ball-bearings off” or looking on a bikini-clad Pamela Hensley “What a body”. Twiki’s “beedeebeedeebeedee”’s become extremely irritating in a very short time. And there’s a terribly dated scene where Buck introduces disco dancing to the uptight 25th Century, joined by Twiki who boogies his mechanical butt too. It isn’t funny, just smug and, in its treatment of its material, cynical. It’s a film that wants you to laugh at how it is not taking things too seriously because it dubs the cute robots with crude one-liners or has Gil Gerard wisecracking at every point.
The people of the future are seen as having become so advanced, living in their antisceptic gilded domed, that Buck becomes an injection of 20th Century knowhow – Buck is constantly referred to as a “real man”, the implication being that he is offering an injection of masculine virility that the 25th Century has been lacking. Buster Crabbe’s Buck Rogers was essentially the hero of a Western who conquers the frontier with his forthright certainty, his fists and a six-gun; Gil Gerard’s Buck Rogers, on the other hand, is Buck as a 1970’s Real Man – it is not that hard to close one’s eyes and imagine the producers wanting to have cast Burt Reynolds in the part, or perhaps even more appropriately Roger Moore.
Certainly the film is a model of restraint in comparison to some of the awful kitsch excesses the following tv series escalated to – as evidenced by episode titles such as Planet of the Slave Girls, Vegas in Space, Cosmic Whiz Kid, Escape from Wedded Bliss, Cruise Ship to the Stars, Space Rockers and Planet of the Amazon Woman. Episodes featured the likes of Buck being sold as a male slave, a spacegoing version of The Love Boat (1977-86) and intergalactic Olympics. The series lasted two seasons (37 episodes in total between 1979 and 1981), becoming marginally more serious in its second year, only to be dumped halfway through the season.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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