For this tricky letter, I had to go with something I had never seen, only heard of. Some time ago, a link to a list of Forgotten Science Fiction shows from the 1970s from MeTV came up on my Facebook newsfeed and one that was included was Quark. The show was also mentioned recently when one of its stars passed away. It was created by Buck Henry, who'd created Get Smart, a spoof of spy shows, a decade earlier. Henry tried to do the same for science-fiction with this one, but Quark only lasted a few weeks in 1978. The pilot aired in May of 1977.
The setting was the United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol Cruiser, an interstellar garbage scow operating out of United Galaxies Space Station Perma One in the year 2226. The cast included Richard Benjamin as the title character, Adam Quark, a commander put on garbage duty on the ship, cloned twins named Betty (real-life twins Cyb and Patricia Barnstable), a transgendered engineer known as Gene/Jean (Timothy Thomerson), officer Ficus Pandorata (Richard Kelton, who died seven months after the series was cancelled), and Otto Bob Palindrome (Conrad Janis, who passed away in March), who is charge of Perma One. Janis went on to play Mindy's father Fred on Mork and Mindy, which premiered the following season and ran for four years. It took several months for a successful sci-fi comedy to reach the air, and more then a decade before Mel Brooks scored a sci-fi spoof with the film Spaceballs.
This is not something I likely would have watched at the time. There are episodes on Youtube, but I don't know if I ever will watch them. I can only take so much science fiction. I've been watching Land of the Giants on Youtube and that is a lot to take in. Below is the series intro, with a very disco-like instrumental theme:
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteI might pop to the tubular and have a gander - I do like scifi, but whether this will cut the mustard... Well done on finding something for the letter Q... thought I might have gone for The Quatermass Experiment. YAM xx
Q=Query
Now there is something I'm not familiar with--The Quartermass Experiment must not have made it to US TV.
DeleteI like the name of this show, but never saw it. Sounded interesting, though. ;)
ReplyDeleteI remember this show. I'm obviously a lot older than you. I was 20 years old I think and I remember my roommate and I watched it. It was so silly stupid. It was a spoof on all the sci-fi shows that were so popular on tv during that time. It was not a series show by any means. I thought it was funny but again, I was 20 yrs old and I probably watched it stoned.
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