When I was a wee lad, I obsessively consumed any sci-fi movies and TV shows I could find and watch. The 70s and 80s was a great time for genre television, with lots of different shows: Wonder Woman, Six Million Dollar Man, Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999… and there were reruns of Batman, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and many more to fill my fanboy schedule. When I read in Starlog that NBC was going to do a series based on the classic comic strip Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, I was thrilled.
Hoping to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, they released the pilot episode as a feature film. My mom took me to see it at a local theatre, and I loved it.
Keep in mind, I was nine years old at the time.
Rewatching it these many years later, I can recognize that… well, it’s not the awesome film I remembered. There are deep flaws in the film… many of them. Buck Rogers is a TV show blown up for the big screen, and there is no mistaking the low budget that the effort had. The cast is fairly game, with Gil Gerard and Erin Gray doing a fine effort to bring the material to life (and I spent many a night drooling over Erin Gray when the series aired). But the problem is the material itself… it’s a TV-movie, with TV effects…. a comic book writ large, and it is cheesy as all get out.
And consider the performance of Mel Blanc, voicing Twiki the robot… Oy. Twiki is a carbon copy of the Star Wars droids, only without any whimsy and charm. It’s cringe-inducing.
The plot is a SF rework of the Rip Van Winkle tale: a 20th century man reawakening 500 years later, dealing with a brand new culture and world. Producer Glen Larson decided to adapt the comic as a “James Bond in space” tale, making Buck a man without a past who is the perfect intergalactic spy…. heck, the movie’s title sequence even has beautiful writhing women on screen, like the typical Bond title sequence (Speaking of cringing, I did when Erin Gray whipped her hair around and pouted for the camera… embarrassing). It’s an interesting take on the character, but the limited budget the film had prevents anything of any real scope from taking place.
Is it a fun rewatch? Somewhat, but it’s only entertaining out of sheer nostalgia. 1979 was a transitional year in science fiction on screen, as filmmakers started to take the genre more seriously than many in Hollywood had done before. When you compare Buck Rogers to another SF film that was also released that year, ALIEN… well, there’s no comparison.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, like its protagonist, is a movie from an earlier time… a time where thin plots and thin cardboard sets were “good enough” for audiences starved for such fare. Thankfully, things got better. As it is, the Buck Rogers film (and series) is a good lesson in where things could have gone if more serious-minded artists and budgets had not won the day.