The Women of Sci-Fi (The 80s)

Last month, SciFiTVZone provided a list of women who paved the way in science fiction within the world of television. This next installment continues in that path, focusing on the actresses from 1980’s TV:

• Catherine Hicks was Amanda Tucker in the short-lived 1982-1983 series Tucker’s Witch where she and her husband ran a private investigation office and she used her special powers to advantage, despite it getting them into trouble.

• Erin Gray was Col. Wilma Deering in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century during the late 1970’s and early 1980s, while seen in a skin-tight white jumpsuit and helmet this character was one of the early examples of a strong female character in a sci-fi setting.

• Faye Grant was Dr. Juliet Parrish in the 1980’s V: The Series, where she fought side-by-side with Marc Singer against invading lizards disguised as humans.

• Marina Sirtis as Counselor Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the latter part of the 1980’s and early 1990’s was a highly valued advisor to Captain Picard and a skilled diplomat. While she was not a clinical psychologist or a medical doctor she was, a shrink-type person aboard the Enterprise.

• Linda Hamilton was Catherine Chandler on Beauty & the Beast. After a brutal attack, and a rescue by a shadowy figure, she worked for the District Attorney’s office and fought to make a difference beside Vincent, the half-man/half-creature who saved her life.

• Courteney Cox appeared in the short-lived series Misfits of Science as Gloria Dinallo a 17-year-old girl with telekinetic abilities. The series only aired for 16 episodes in 1985 and 1986.

• Patricia McPherson played Bonnie Barstow, the mechanic of KITT in the 80’s classic series Knight Rider. She didn’t have any special powers except she was the key to keeping KITT and Michael Knight on the road.

• Connie Selleca appeared as Pam Davidson, the lawyer girlfriend of Ralph Hinkley, an unassuming teacher who was endowed with superpowers by visiting aliens and became The Greatest American Hero when he wore a red supersuit they left him with.

• Amanda Pays was Theora Jones, the controller behind Edison Carter aka Max Headroom in the short-lived series of the same name, which was set in a future where it was illegal to turn off your TV sets.

The next installment of this article series will focus on the women of sci-fi from the 1990’s.

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Being Erica: An Interview with Erin Karpluk

Have you ever wished you could revisit your past and change a certain event to see if the outcome would be different? Or wish that you could straighten out a previous mistake in the hope it would influence your future? That’s the premise behind the Soapnet TV series Being Erica, currently in its second season and airing each Wednesday night at 10PM. The series, created by Jana Sinyor who executive produces with Aaron Martin, stars Erin Karpluk as Erica Strange, who, via the therapist “Dr. Tom” (Michael Riley) is able to revisit key moments in her life to make changes where necessary, but, more importantly, to utilize the past to illuminate the present.

Tonight’s episode — “Yes We Can” — is a perfect jumping on point for viewers as it nicely re-establishes the rules for the show, and then breaks them as Dr. Tom gives Erica a “do over” day in which nothing she does will have lasting consequences.

In the following interview, Erin Karpluk discusses the evolution of the series and the impact that Erica has had on her own life.

SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: Considering you’ve gone back in time to high school and college days, do you ever feel as thought you’re playing different characters?

ERIN KARPLUK: I do. I really find that when I’m with my brother or my family on the show, back in time, I just take on this younger energy. But I, as Erin, even going home at Christmas, I’m a 31-year-old woman, but as soon as I’m home, I’m, like, “Mom, can you do my laundry?” I’m pulled back there, and on the show I think Erica certainly has fun with being back in high school and taking everything in. But I almost have it easier than some of the other actors, certainly the actress that plays young Erica when she’s 12. They [the producers] don’t think I can play 12, so they hired this fantastic actress. But she was a 12-year-old girl who had to play 32, and I thought that she did a fantastic job.

SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: Can you describe the difference in tone between season one and season two? Season one seemed a little light-hearted with heavy moments, but season two seems different.

ERIN: It’s the same show, though we do get into the time travel aspect a little more. But I look at the time travel as the catalyst for her learning and growth and development. One thing I have to give credit for regarding the second season is that I remember when I read the pilot, I said, “How many regrets can this woman have? How many times am I in Dr. Tom’s office; where he is the teacher and I am the student? Is it going to be repetitive or stagnant?” But that hasn’t happened. Season two was so much fun to shoot. Erica is more worldly and responsible and accountable in the ways of the time travel and uses her experience from the first season and applies them into the second season. It’s not only in helping and developing herself, but also to help other people. That’s something that’s very fun to play, to see her kind of step outside of herself. Depending on what the particular regret is, that will shape the episode. It’s still the same show, but if it’s dealing with the death of her brother, it’s obviously going to be a bit more heavy than if it’s her singing Britney Spears to try to stand up to a professor.

SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: Are there ways this has affected you as a real person?

ERIN: I’ve learned so much from Erica. Just that regrets are the kind of thing that can fester inside of you and you can hang on to for years. It just seems so pointless. There’s one episode where Erica wants to go back and relive a regret, but she realizes that, in fact, it wasn’t a regret at all. It was a hard thing that she had to go through, but given the chance again, she would do it the same. I thought that was interesting in my own life, and it helped me kind of let go of certain things that I may still be hanging on to. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned from playing Erica, and just as an actor on the show and the experience, is just to let go of things. It’s a lot easier.

Look for much more on Being Erica in the weeks to come at SciFi Media Zone.

Exclusive First Look: “Batman – Under the Red Hood”

Dark, brooding adventure is nothing new in the world of Batman, but from all indications, his latest animated journey – this fall’s Batman: Under the Red Hood – could be the darkest of all.

“It’s simply the darkest Batman movie we’ve made yet, and that’s including Mask of the Phantasm and Return of the Joker,” offers producer Bruce Timm, who has been involved in Batman’s 2D world since the 1990s’ Batman: The Animated Series. “This is a really gritty, pretty darkly emotional story, and if it all comes together as I’m expecting it will, it’s going to be something really special.”

Following a line of films that includes Superman: Doomsday, Green Lantern: First Flight, Batman: Gotham Knight, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and, most recently, Justice League: Crisis On Two Earths, Under The Red Hood is adapted by Judd Winick from a story arc presented in the Dark Knight’s comic book adventures, part of which Winick himself had written. For his part, the writer thought the tale was a natural for animation.

“What I loved best about it is that it had a really amazing beginning and a really strong ending, which pretty much most movies ride on,” Winick notes. “The movie starts with Batman’s failure, which resonates throughout.”

That “failure,” the full details of which he won’t go in to, occurred some years ago, and its impact is felt in the present with the arrival of the Red Hood, a costumed vigilante and criminal whose actions reflect what Batman himself would be should he ever decide to step over the line from hero to villain.

“This is absolutely a Batman story,” he emphasizes. “It’s about Batman facing his greatest fear, and it’s a fear he was unaware of: failure. All Batman is trying to do is win a war. All he’s trying to do is right wrongs, beginning with the death of his parents and followed by another seminal event in his life, the loss of his partner, Jason Todd [who replaced Dick Grayson as his sidekick, Robin]. It was a major mistake in his life, bringing another kid into this war. So for Batman, it seems like one horrible mistake after another.”

Those mistakes, and a few others made in his career, come home to roost in the form of the Red Hood. “Batman is the Dark Knight, he has strange means and he’s tortured, but the bare essence of the man is that he’s trying to do right; to stop the bad in the world,” Winick explains. “In this story, his failure has increased ten-fold. He’s almost at a loss, because something unspoken about Batman is his emotional side. This ‘mistake’ is trying to undo everything that Batman does, trying to beat him at his own game, trying to be better than he is. So Batman has to battle this on two fronts: one, just this criminal, who’s coming in and trying to take over the city by force and being what he is, the villain. The flip side of this is that this is something from Batman’s past that has returned from beyond, which is maddening, confusing and horrible. And what does he do when he stops him, if he can stop him? These are wonderfully complex issues, which is why I just fell in love with the idea that this is Batman at his most unbalanced. What the Red Hood represents is Batman’s Achilles heel, and he tortures himself over it. The situation he is being forced to deal with is his fault, and it’s something he never lets himself forget.”

VOICES UNDER THE RED HOOD
One of the most impressive aspects of the various DC made-for-DVD animated projects is the sheer spectrum of voice talent involved in bringing the characters to life. Particularly distinct about Batman: Under The Red Hood is that the project brings into the fold a couple of vocal newbies.

Bruce Greenwood, most recently seen on the big screen as Captain Christopher Pike in last year’s Star Trek, takes on the role of Batman, whose gravelly voice he spent a lot of time experimenting with. “We just toyed around with different timbers for 20 minutes or so,” he explains. “We read the script the whole way through while we were looking for the tone of the voice. And by the time we’d sort of finished the first read through, we were kind of saying, ‘Okay, it’s got a little bit of smoke in it, but not too much.’ It became smokier as we went along.”

As to working in animation, he says, “I didn’t come in with too many preconceptions. I read the script beforehand, and the emotional through line of the story is what I’m trying to connect to. So when the director asks you to give it a certain tone, then you just go for that. But it was interesting to work this way. [Vocal director] Andrea Romano provided the visual – she’d describe everything. So you just kind of close your eyes and she’d set the scene and you could really imagine it very clearly, and then you do your thing.”

The other newcomer to animation acting is Jensen Ackles, who voices the villain of the piece, the Red Hood. Ackles, of course, is best known for his portrayal of Dean Winchester on the CW series, Supernatural.

“There really wasn’t any heavy acting choices to make,” says Ackles regarding Red Hood. “It pretty much just bounced off the page, and I just tried to do it justice. With working in this medium, once you get clear on all the specific pronunciations and how the tone of the voice needs to rise and fall, it was really about focusing on the more emotional elements of the script, especially in the intense moments and trying to envision the scene with the characters. And envisioning yourself in that scenario. A lot of times if you can do that, if you can put yourself there, I think the voice follows suit.”

Between his work on Supernatural and now the world of Batman, Ackles obviously has had some experience working in what has affectionately been called the “fan boy genre.”

“The positives of working in this genre are that the fans are extremely devoted,” he offers. “People really invest themselves in these stories and characters, and the mythology behind them. To be a part of something that so many people really get behind and want more of is extremely gratifying.”

Batman: Under The Red Hood will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in October.

Percy Jackson: An Exclusive Interview with Author Rick Riordan

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief will be reaching theatres next week, so it seems appropriate to go back to the source of it all, author Rick Riordan. In the course of this interview, he discusses the origins of the Percy Jackson novels, how the character has evolved, his feelings about the film and plans for a spin-off book series.

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Smallville: Exclusive Interview with Erica Durance

In this exclusive audio interview, actress Erica Durance discusses season nine of Smallville, the evolving relationship between Lois and Clark and her feelings about the show delving even deeper into the mythology of the Man of Steel.

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The Making of the Star Trek Pilots, Part 3: “Assignment Earth”

The second season of STAR TREK concluded with a pilot for a proposed spin-off series that would have starred Robert Lansing as Gary Seven, a human captured by alien beings and trained to save mankind from destroying itself. Helping Seven is secretary Roberta Lincoln (Terri Garr), though the two of them first have to convince the time traveling Kirk and Spock that they are there to save the future, not destroy it.

“Assignment Earth” was written by Gene Roddenberry and the late Art Wallace (who is also the creator of the storyline for the soap opera DARK SHADOWS). “It’s interesting in a sense,” said Wallace, “because I had gone to Paramount and pitched a series idea to them. They had said that Gene Roddenberry had come up with a very similar idea. So I saw Gene and we decided to pool the idea, which was about a man from tomorrow who takes care of the present on Earth. That was intended to be the pilot, although it was never made into a series. It was a very good pilot and it’s a shame, because I think if they had done it as a series with just Gary Seven, it would have been a very successful show. I believe Gene and I split the credit on that one.”

Guest star Robert Lansing told STARLOG magazine, “What Gene had done was go to futurists and scientists and ask them what advanced societies out in space might do towards more primitive societies like ours. One of the futurists said that they would probably kidnap children from various planets, take them to their superior civilization, raise them, teach and enlighten them and then put them back as adults to lead their worlds in more peaceful ways. That was the idea behind Gary Seven.”

“It was interesting trying to balance the episode between the regular crew and Robert Lansing,” said the late director, Marc Daniels. “It was also difficult because we came back to the present and it’s always a dangerous idea to take the STAR TREK characters into the present. Suddenly you’re in a very tangible situation. The show’s reality becomes that much harder to sustain.

“We were simulating Mission Control, which, on our budget, was not easy. You had to make do with very abbreviated sets. In terms of the story’s physical demands, this is a problem of any kind of science fiction. For example, the original STAR TREK set, the Enterprise, was practically nothing; corridors we kept using over and over again, a few basic cabins which were constantly reused and, of course, the engine room. With the exception of those and the bridge, it was extremely limited.”

Gary Seven and his mission is another element of the original series that has found significant after-life. Writer Howard Weinstein included the character during his run on DC Comics’ STAR TREK title.

“With Gary Seven,” he muses, “there’s the intrigue of a character about whom so little was revealed in the TV episode. Since we really knew nothing about who he was, who he worked for, and how he knew what he did, it just begged for expansion. Fortunately, Paramount pretty much let me do whatever I wanted in establishing details of Gary Seven’s organization (which I called The Aegis), and how and why they wielded knowledge and technology far beyond what the Federation had. The goal was to take readers and the Enterprise crew inside Gary Seven’s universe – to discover that the greater the power, the bigger and more dangerous the conflicts. And even though I’m a dog person, I loved writing more of his interplay with his cat-associate, Isis. One year, when my pal and TNG comic writer Michael Jan Friedman and I bounced around ideas for a big story which would span both the TOS and TNG annuals, we wanted to do something involving both Enterprise crews. And Gary Seven’s Aegis organization came back into play. But we took the bold, shocking step of killing Gary Seven early. That probably surprised some readers, but killing off a familiar guest character raised the stakes and made the bad guys even badder.”

Ignoring those events was comic book writer John Byrne, who wrote and drew a six-issue ASSIGNMENT EARTH series for IDW, with plans to do a follow-up. When the first series was announced, he sat down for an interview with Newsarama.com, noting, “As a kid, I just thought [‘Assignment Earth’] was really neat. First, I was a Robert Lansing fan from his other work. Also, I am a sucker for time-travel stories (which the ongoing Assignment Earth would not have been, but the TOS episode was). And Terri Garr was so darn cute.

“There is no set timeline,” he continued. “I will cover a number of years – toward the end I want to touch on Nixon’s visit to China, which was in 1972 – but I am not going to be setting clear dates. Anyone who is not familiar with those years might well think all the stories take place in the same year, same week, even. The main indicator of time passing will be Roberta having a different hairstyle in each issue. Possibly a different hair color, too, playing off the Beta V’s comment that her hair was ‘presently tined honey blonde.’”

Author Greg Cox had fun with Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln in his novel ASSIGNMENT: ETERNITY and the two-book THE EUGENICS WARS. Of these efforts the website www.assignmentearth.ca offers, “ASSIGNMENT: ETERNITY is fun and involved, and we get to see a possible outcome for the team of Seven and Lincoln. THE EUGENICS WARS pair open in 1974. Gary Seven watches with growing concern as the children of a top secret human genetic engineering project called Chrysalis grow to adulthood. In particular, he focuses on a brilliant youth named Khan Noonien Singh. Can Khan’s dark destiny be averted, or is Earth doomed to fight a global battle for supremacy?”

“Part of the appeal is the ‘60s spy-fi vibe of the whole thing,” says Cox. “I was always into James Bond, THE AVENGERS, MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. and all that. Basically Gary Seven is Our Man Flint of the STAR TREK universe. Also there’s the fact that they teased us at the end there would be many interesting adventures to come, and I wanted to know what those adventures were. I also had this theory that as STAR TREK is to FORBIDDEN PLANET, ‘Assignment Earth’ is to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. It’s basically THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: THE TV SERIES. Gary Seven is basically Klattu. It made an impression on me as a kid and I was obsessed with bringing it back.”

The Women of Sci-Fi (1970’s)

Earlier this month, SciFiTVZone provided a list of women who paved the way in science fiction within the world of television. This next installment continues in that path, focusing on the actresses from 1970’s TV:

• Lynda Carter was legendary Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman in the 1970’s cult-classic series. In her red, white and blue costume she saved mankind from themselves on a daily basis.

• Lindsey Wagner as the one and only Jamie Sommers in The Bionic Woman in the 1970’s series was the first female cyborg, who was saved after a near-fatal parachuting accident and worked as a secret agent masquerading as a school teacher.

• Joanna Cameron in the short-lived series Isis was Andrea Thomas, a high school teacher, who, on an archaeological dig, found a mythical amulet given to an Egyptian Queen. After using an incantation, the amulet bestowed on the wearer great strength, the ability to move inanimate objects and fly at super speed, making her Isis.

• Deidre Hall and Judy Sturgis were Electra Woman and Dyna Girl for one year in 1976 in the series of the same name. While they were seen as gorgeous superheroes in skintight outfits, they battled a bevy of villains and worked out of the Electrabase that featured sophisticated equipment.

• Anne Lockhart starred as Lieutenant Sheba on the original sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica during its one and only season on the air from 1978 to 1979. Sheba was the daughter of Commander Cain and the leader of the Silver Spar Viper squadron.

• Maren Jensen also appeared in the original Battlestar Galactica series, appearing as the only daughter of Commander Adama, serving as both a bridge officer and as a pilot. She was also seen working as a teacher to the children of the Colonial Fleet.

• In the classic comedy Mork & Mindy, Pam Dawber starred as Mindy McConnell, the comedic foil, eventual love interest and wife to extraterrestrial Mork who arrived on Earth from his home planet of Ork.

• British actress Jan Chappell appeared in the UK series Blake’s 7 as Cally for all three season for which it aired. She was a guerrilla fighter for the anti-Federation resistance forces for the planet Saurian Major; she was also a telepath who could transmit thoughts silently to the rest of the crew.

• Belinda Montgomery appeared in the short-lived series The Man from Atlantis as Dr. Elizabeth Merrill, who nursed Mark Harris (played by Patrick Duffy) an amnesiac man believed to be the only surviving citizen of the lost civilization of Atlantis.

• Barbara Bain appeared as Dr. Helena Russell on the UK series Space: 1999 during the mid-1970’s. The series centered on the plight of the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha following a calamity, where nuclear waste from Earth stored on the moon explodes in a catastrophic accident, knocking the moon out of orbit and sending it and the inhabitants of the Moonbase uncontrollably into outer space.

• Lucy Fleming starred as Jenny Richards in the UK series Survivors also during the mid-1970’s. The premise of the show was the plight of a group of people who survived an accidentally released plague that kills nearly the entire population of the planet. Jenny was the only character to survive all three seasons of the show.

The next installment of this article series will focus on the women of sci-fi from the 1980’s.

New Moon: Chaske Spencer and Alex Meraz, Part 3

In the final part of SciFi Media Zone’s exclusive audio interview with New Moon wolfpack members Chaske Spencer and Alex Meraz, the duo discuss the ways they’re attempting to stay grounded despite the phenomenon they find themselves a part of, as well as their own recognition of the responsibility their newfound fame brings to them as Native Americans.

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Exclusive Interview: Bruce Timm on “Justice League: Crisis on Two Earth”

In February Warner Bros. releases its latest DVD animated adventure from DC Comics, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Utilizing the parallel world theory, the plot has the Justice League from “our” earth being recruited by a parallel earth’s Lex Luthor (who is a hero there) to take down their evil counterparts, the Crime Syndicate. In this exclusive audio interview, producer Bruce Timm discusses the film, sharing on its connection to the Justice League Unlimited TV series.

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The Questor Tapes: Now and In Retrospect

Roddenberry Productions has announced that it’s aligned itself with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment to produce a new version of Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes, the 1974 TV pilot starring Robert Foxworth and Mike Farrell. Also in that announcement was the statement that Angel, Firefly, The Inside, Dollhouse producer Tim Minear is being negotiated with for the show (unusual to say the least — no one ever really says that they are negotiating with someone; names are usually held until the deal is done).

Several years ago, SciFi Media Zone editor Edward Gross wrote a retrospective of the original Questor Tapes, which follows.

Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes: The Unfulfilled Promise
by Edward Gross

The late Gene Roddenberry obviously had a thing for machines sparked with superior intelligence and in search of their purpose.

It’s a subject he dealt with in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which he had V’Ger — the metamorphosed Voyager 6 spacecraft — returning to Earth in search of its creator. The theme was embraced yet again in the creation of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which offered an android science officer named Data whose Pinocchio-like quest was to ultimately become human. It was thematic territory he came this close to exploring on a weekly basis via The Questor Tapes.

In this 1974 television pilot, Roddenberry postulated that an alien race had spent eons helping mankind’s progress by placing human-like androids within society to help guide the species. In the pilot, Dr. Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell) ultimately teams up with Questor, who is on a quest to meet with his creator, Dr. Vaslovik, and learn his own destiny.

“Vaslovik, who was actually an android himself,” Roddenberry had explained, “realized that the line of androids who had been helping to guide earth for thousands of years was about to end. He was unable, because of certain conditions, to complete his replacement: Questor. Instead, he left all of his plans with a five-nation scientific consortium. They begin constructing the android for their own purposes, not really understanding all of the components or systems. However, Vaslovik had left a tape of secret programming that is only partially assimilated by the android. That part instructed the android to escape once it had been completed and go about its work.”

In his background for the pilot, Roddenberry pondered the notion that if you “awoke” on the first day of your life with a vast amount of information in your brain on science, mathematics, literature, history and economics, how would you react if you discovered that you had no knowledge of yourself? “Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am,” he wrote. “…You think, you wonder, you move like a living thing. But can a mechanical thing like yourself be called ‘alive’? Whatever you are, that question leads inexorably to the enigma which has puzzled and plagued Man himself from his own beginning, it is the most powerful of all dramatic themes. Who was my architect? For what reason am I placed here?….We boldly challenge the audience to identify with an unusual television character who begins as a machine but who may turn out to share more of their own thoughts, doubts, frustrations, loneliness and dreams than many human fictional characters. Questor, in fact, is designed to become more human than human.”

As the pilot unfolds, soon after becoming activated — thanks to the efforts of Robinson — Questor escapes from the government research lab where he was assembled and begins his search for Vaslovik and his purpose. He is pursued by the government in the persona of Geoffrey Darro (John Vernon), who views him as the ultimate weapon that must be controlled or eliminated. Questor is aided by Robinson, at first reluctantly. In some ways, the set-up is strikingly similar to The Fugitive, but this dissipates toward the climax when Darro sacrifices himself to throw the government off of Questor’s trail, having been touched by the revelations of the android’s purpose on earth, and allows the duo to escape.

Director Richard Colla recalls The Questor Tapes and working with Roddenberry fondly. “It was a wonderful experience for me,” he says. “We were kind of reinterpreting Spock and Kirk, because that’s really what it was — the emotional side of man and the intellectual side of man and they come into conversation with each other. So what you really have is a character talking to himself, and that’s delightful.”

Colla, who would go on to direct the pilot for the original Battlestar: Galactica and the “Last Outpost” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, notes, “Since I’d talked to Gene while he was putting [TNG] together, I told him that I felt Data was a combination of Spock and Questor. When I was over there I said, ‘Brent [Spiner], you’ve got the part, because this is the intellectual side of man, this is the other side of the conversation. All of the other characters are dealing from an emotional standpoint, but this character alone is the intellectual side of man. So you’ve got the entire other side of the conversation.’”

Handling that side of the conversation in The Questor Tapes was actor Robert Foxworth, who had his choice of lead characters in the pilot and ultimately chose the android.

“I chose Questor,” says the actor, “because I thought, frankly, it would be more of a challenge to play a machine, an android. But getting into it I thought, ‘If this scientist is so clever, why make a guy who looks like me? Why doesn’t he make a guy who looks like Robert Redford at the time?’ I still haven’t figured that one out.”
Appealing to Foxworth was the evolution of the character, who went from a featureless humanoid on a lab table to a herky-jerky human male to a superior being determined to help guide us toward the future.

“They called me Super Chicken on the set in the beginning,” he laughs, referring to the way he moved his head early on, which mirrored the movements of a chicken. “I really thought one of the fun aspects of Questor was the growth and change. How he taught himself and how his relationship with others taught him to deal and think. We don’t get very many opportunities to play characters that evolve that fully in such a short span of time. I believe the film had an impact on a core of intelligent people who wanted more from television. I think it speaks to a desire in all of us to achieve some power and good or good through power.”

Mike Farrell, who of course went on to star in the long-running acclaimed CBS series M*A*S*H*, echoes Foxworth’s sentiments regarding the film, and still recalls it fondly.

“It was one of the first major opportunities for me to play a role in a movie for television that could have been a series,” says Farrell. “But more to the point, it was about something. It was not a show that was kind of mindless or silly, although I suppose there are some who consider science fiction to be those things. I was always impressed with Gene’s desire to make statements about the human condition through the use of his dramatic work, and I thought this did it wonderfully. The issue of dealing with a man who had a brain and capacities that were beyond the ordinary, but didn’t have emotional capacity and recognized how it diminished him, was, I thought, quite extraordinary at the time and quite touching.

“And I loved Jerry Robinson as a character,” he continues. “He’s a smart guy who had a heart and wasn’t driven by the usual scientific mumbo jumbo, letters and dollars and fame that seduces so many people. He seemed to have some access to his heart and his feelings and, as happened between Bob [Foxworth] and I, he really developed an emotional attachment to Questor. I thought that the way that played out was, personally, quite wonderful.”

Although proud of what had been accomplished in the film, Roddenberry had a number of run-ins with network and studio executives that made bitter the making of a film that would ultimately be embraced by the critics. Despite this, a 13-episode go-ahead was given for The Questor Tapes, with Foxworth and Farrell continuing in their roles. Joining the actors behind the scenes, besides Roddenberry, were producers Michael Rhodes and Earl Booth and story editor Larry Alexander, who notes that there were numerous creative differences with NBC and Universal.

Part of those problems had to do with the show’s science fiction trappings, particularly its base of operations. Set up under the cover of “Robinson Enterprises, Ltd.,” a charitable organization that has rapidly become a financially successful business, the duo work out of “The Information Center.” As Roddenberry wrote in the show’s bible, “Using the advanced science of the same superior race which put Questor and his predecessors here on earth, it is as advanced in its way as Questor is in his. It uses communications techniques, not yet discovered by mankind, which are completely untraceable and undetectable. They allow Questor to select and follow activity taking place anywhere in the world, whether a war plans conference in the Kremlin or the White House, or a romantic liaison taking place in a bedroom in Paris.” As such, it gives Questor access to those people that are most in need of a push in the right direction.

Laughs Alexander, “The executives just didn’t get it. They would say to Roddenberry, ‘How does he see into all of these different places so he knows what’s going on? Does he have a camera in every room?’ Roddenberry said, ‘No, it’s by coordinates.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘Like grids on a map.’ ‘How does that help him see?’ ‘It’s an advanced thing that this civilization supplies him with.’ They simply couldn’t understand it. It made no sense to them because they didn’t have the hardware right in front of them. At the same time they were developing The Six Million Dollar Man, and that they understood. The guy crashes in a plane, he’s a wreck, they rebuild him with bionic parts and now he’s a superman and they can send him out to do wonderful things.”

Another problem, he feels, was the very nature of Questor himself; that an android would essentially be solving the problems of human beings.

“They had a moral problem with that,” he notes. “From a series point of view, they also didn’t like the idea of this super race — or shall we say Master Race — overlooking the affairs of mankind. ‘Wait a minute, where does God fit into that?’ An entire amount of metaphysical questions came up, which were ludicrous on the face of it. It was like, ‘Come on, guys, we’re doing entertainment here.’ Maybe the show was before its time, if it ever ‘had a time.’ Certainly its time was not when The Six Million Dollar Man was being developed. It was in direct competition with a low-life version of itself, and the low-life version, especially in television, will always win. That show also didn’t have the metaphysical problems for the executives. The Lee Majors character they could understand because it deals with the human experience as we currently run our civilization. But to have an alien android who goes into a Captain Marvel-like cave every now and then to get his marching orders from an alien — this is very disturbing to them. They were truly scared shitless that the more fundamental parts of the country would find it anti-Christ. All you needed was Billy Graham, or even a minor-league Billy Graham, to denounce the show or say that it’s unChristian and strange and promoting an alien god. You’d be surprised at what those people think of.”

According to Earl Booth, the constant battles were wearing Roddenberry out. “Gene was a very private person,” says Booth. “Very nice, but he didn’t talk a lot about what he was going through. I sensed he was going through a lot with the executives at Universal in not being able to do what he wanted to do. They so frustrated him, I felt, that that was the main reason that nothing, ultimately, was done. In all my experience with him, he was very vocal about what he wanted and what he thought would work, and was perfectly willing to try anything that he felt was legitimate. So it was becoming more and more a series of frustrations.”

And those frustrations continued. Unlike his experience on Star Trek: The Next Generation where he had complete autonomy (at least in the beginning), Roddenberry was at the mercy of any studio or network executive who had an “innovative” idea to “improve” his show.

“One of the difficulties,” offers Robert Foxworth, “was that though the Questor character did develop feelings, it’s kind of hard to create conflict with a character who can do anything. That was the feeling, I think, of whatever the powers that be. The question was addressed on a daily basis. As far as I was concerned, it was overcome in the way that we saw the characters go in a possible series. But there were guys in tassel loafers sitting up in Universal’s Black Tower that didn’t have the vision.”

Perhaps the biggest “innovation” to come along was the decision to abruptly drop the Jerry Robinson character. This alteration is best summed up in a November 7, 1973 revised bible to the series which is simply called “New Questor Series Format.” On page one, it notes, “Questor is a dual-quest series. He is being sought and, at the same time, is a seeker himself. Questor is a fugitive from the five-nation combine headed by Darro or a Darro-type. They know the android is alive somewhere and want to recover what they consider to be a fantastically valuable ambulatory computer. Questor is himself a seeker, his quest being to discover his purpose and reason for having been constructed and given the imperative of helping mankind. Why am I here? Who and where is this mysterious Vaslovik who created me?” The paragraph concludes with this particular beauty, “We ignore the ending of the pilot in which he did find Vaslovik and got a full explanation of his identity and purpose.”

Ugh!

Obviously the intention was to turn Questor into either The Fugitive or The Immortal, both of which were series of the era in which the main protagonist was on the run.

“It goes along with the thinking that if something else worked, then this should work,” says Foxworth, “rather than doing something original.”

One of the primary proponents behind this shift was producer Michael Rhodes, who points out that it was his suggestion; a suggestion the studio seemed to support completely.

“What Universal had bought in their own minds, maybe without realizing it, was the relationship between Mike Farrell and Robert Foxworth,” opines Rhodes. “But in developing the scripts for the series, we realized that each character was flawed in their own way and as long as they were together they were perfect. They made a complete person, so you really couldn’t create any jeopardy for them because they had each other to handle what the other was missing. You had to separate them, but when you separated them you didn’t have the relationship. It was really a vicious circle. It didn’t work.”

Rhodes is the one who thought it would be best to forget Questor’s discovery of his purpose. “It was radical surgery,” he says, obviously the only person on the creative team who thought that this was the way to go. “It’s The Fugitive, then, because you’ve got all these government bad guys chasing him. He is still very vulnerable because he’s incomplete. He’s got parts missing and can make the same kind of relationships in each episode that he had with the Mike Farrell character.”

Earl Booth was not pleased with this direction, noting that it felt like the decision to drop Robinson was made “overnight.”

“It mystified me,” he admits, “because whatever the thrust of the show was, you had an alien — really — whose communication with the modern world was completely nil unless he had someone to talk to, and it was then that I began to see that what the people at Universal wanted was basically a carbon copy of The Fugitive, which they have tried to copy many times and for the most part have been unsuccessful. I personally felt that this was wrong. To have this unique being constantly chased by people who are after him for whatever stupid reason, I could never tell, was ridiculous. From that point on, things went downhill.”

In all of this decision making, the person most impacted was, obviously, Mike Farrell, who had even gone so far as to have wardrobe fitted for the series. His being dropped was actually rather ironic, considering that a series was the last thing he was thinking about at the time.

“Although I wasn’t looking to do a series, the idea of doing that as a series was intriguing,” he says. “When this was a pilot, my sense in doing it was the opportunity of doing the movie and I kind of let go of the notion of the series. Then when I got word it got picked up, it was very exciting. I thought, ‘Shit, we can do this, we can do that, we can travel, we can have some fun and say some things that are of some significance.’”

Throughout the preparation period, Farrell was in almost constant contact with the producers and Gene Roddenberry. One day, however, his phone call to Michael Rhodes went unreturned. He wasn’t concerned until a second phone call wasn’t returned either.

“It was a Friday — I’ll remember that for the rest of my life,” he reflects. “Over the weekend, all of those little gremlins went to work on my mind. Finally, my agent called and said, ‘I don’t know what this is about, but I’ve got a message here that you and I are being asked to come to a meeting at the Tower on Monday morning.’ Over the weekend I didn’t sleep well and I thought, ‘I’m being dropped from this goddamn show and I can’t understand it.’ I finally got a hold of Gene and he said, ‘Oh my God, nobody called you? Yeah, there’s a problem. Some people think the series will work better without the Jerry character.’ I may be creating dialogue to serve myself but as I recall, Gene said, ‘I think it’s a crazy idea, but we have to bow to some degree to the powers.’ Anyway, the long of the short of it was that the decision was made that Questor would more likely be in jeopardy if he didn’t have Jerry to get him out of trouble, so they were dropping the Jerry character.”

Farrell’s tale doesn’t end there, though. A couple of months later he received a phone call from an executive named Mervin Gerard, who had been given the assignment of making the series “happen.” The first thing he did was view the original pilot film.

“I will forever hold Mervin high in my regard,” smiles Farrell. “He told me that after watching the pilot he went to [Universal's] Frank Price and said, ‘Tell me who the idiot is who decided he wanted to drop Mike Farrell from the show.’ ‘I’m the idiot.’ ‘What works about this show is the chemistry between these two characters; they together become the one person that we root for and you destroy it by eliminating the human character. I’m not going to do this show unless we resurrect the Jerry character.’ By this point I said to Merv, ‘You’re very sweet to tell me this story, because it obviously does a lot for my ego, but I wouldn’t touch this thing with a ten-foot pole after what they did to me. That feels like exactly the wrong move.’ He tried to persuade me, but as I understand it, for reasons having nothing to do with that, they finally decided just to shelve the whole thing.

“It’s unfortunate,” he adds, “because my sense of it was that there was high hopes for this as a show. The other piece of it that I find kind of heartwarming is the longevity of it. Somebody within the last few weeks said something to me about Questor. I thought, ‘God almighty, how can something so old maintain that sort of impact?’ It speaks to all of the kind of things that we in television ought to be more aware of — that it’s an extraordinary outreach and impact that the medium has as well as the responsibility inherent in all of that. But that’s another talk for another time. I think that responsibility is something Gene took seriously; the responsibility of telling stories that are somehow life-affirming.”

By the time that Gerard had tried to convince Farrell to come back to the series, Roddenberry himself had decided that he had had enough and left. Having come off of his well-documented battles with NBC executives during the run of Star Trek, he had no interest in going through that again.

“I think the Jerry Robinson character was vital to Questor,” he said in the mid ’70s. “You can’t have just the android; you’ve got to have a partnership between an android and a human. Then they wanted Questor to be constantly on the run from the scientific consortium. That’s not the way I wanted to go and maybe I was wrong. But I really didn’t want to do a chase series. So I just let it die.”

Larry Alexander considers this thought and decides that the time is right for a Hollywood life lesson.

“I don’t know if you know how things die in Hollywood,” he muses. “Nobody shoots them between the eyes. What they do is continually hang up hope that some miracle will occur, so you twist slowly in the wind for months and years before one day you wake up and say, ‘Oh, this does not work. It’s not happening. It’s never going to happen.’”

In the case of The Questor Tapes, however, Alexander just might be wrong. The announcement of Roddenberry Productions teaming up with Imagine at least holds out the hope that Questor will live again.

Let’s hope so.

Questor deserves it.

So do we.

“My father always felt that Questor was the one that got away,” said Rod Roddenberry, Gene’s son who will serve as producer of the new version. “He believed that the show had the potential to be bigger than Star Trek.”

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