A Forgotten ‘50s Sci-Fi Reboot Is Nothing Like You Would Imagine
This isn’t the retro space opera you’re looking for...
Today, if you search YouTube for a 1950s version of Buck Rogers, you’ll find plenty of smooth, AI-generated-looking trailers that seem like comic strips come to life. This kind of faux-1950s sci-fi is a mishmash of half-remembered styles and aesthetics and, somewhat hilariously, doesn’t fully capture just how weird the real 1950s Buck Rogers actually was. Here’s why the first Buck Rogers TV series is barely remembered today, why it was important anyway, and why the show is much wackier than you can possibly imagine.
Seventy-five years ago, on April 15, 1950, ABC launched the first Buck Rogers TV series, which, technically, was a reboot. This simply because the more famous Buster Crabbe-led Buck Rogers movie serials had been around since 1939. But, as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction pointed out in 1995: “...restrictions imposed by TV production necessitated its being shot live on a cramped interior set, [as a] result... the cinema serials seemed visually extravagant by comparison.” Essentially, a show that came out 10 years after a series of short films looked much cheaper and was simply less well-edited because it wasn’t edited at all.
In fairness, like all progress, the story of filmed sci-fi isn’t a straight line. The 1990s are full of cheap-looking sci-fi shows (like Space Rangers) with fake-looking spaceships, running around a decade and a half after the visually stunning first Star Wars came out. Today, we tend to hold sci-fi TV — especially sci-fi TV that takes place in space — to the same visual standard as movies, but that’s a relatively new phenomenon. So, to say that the 1950s Buck Rogers was bad because the rocket ships looked faker than the Buck Rogers of 1939 isn’t exactly fair. But, what is true is that the 1950s Buck Rogers was cheap in a different way. And that’s because decades before Cerveza Cristal had Obi-Wan Kenobi pulling out beer in the middle of cable versions of A New Hope, the 1950s Buck Rogers not only often opened with a word for the candy bar sponsor, Peter Paul, but the characters themselves, including Buck, Wilma, and Barney talked about eating Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars as part of the plot. The main role of Buck Rogers changed three times, played by three different actors: Earl Hammond, Kem Dibbs, and Robert Pastene. In the only surviving episodes, it's Pastene in the lead role as Buck.
Considering the 1950s version of Buck Rogers was one of the first family-friendly TV-native sci-fi shows ever, it’s shocking that it is borderline unwatchable today. And I mean that in both senses of “unwatchable”; there are few episodes available to watch today (just two exist on YouTube), and actually watching the episodes isn’t super fun, mostly because the pacing is excruciating and the stories are relatively uninspired.
In one of the surviving episodes, “The Queen of Venus,” Buck, Wilma, and Barney discover a planet run by women. Even for 1950, this episode is regressive and backwards, and the fact that you can tell it was filmed live, complete with bloopers, doesn’t make it more charming, it just makes it seem bad.
For this reason, it’s easy to see why, in the 1950s, Buck Rogers lost to itself on TV. During the ‘50s, the 1930s/1940s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers cinematic serials (both starring Buster Crabbe) were shown on TV, introducing a new generation of kinds (including a young George Lucas) to space opera adventures. And so, like its comic-strip predecessor, the 1950s Buck was destined to look and feel cheaper and less serious than its competitors.
A scene from the 1939 Buck Rogers, “ Destination Saturn,” which would have run on TV in the 1950s, along with the 1930s Flash Gordon, but after the end of the failed 1950 Buck Rogers.
In fact, the 1950s Buck marks an interesting hiccup in a strange series of events that involves reboots, remakes, rip-offs, and space operas inspired by and reliant on one another. Here’s how it all goes:
- 1928-1929: Philip Francis Nowlan writes the novel Armageddon 2419 A.D, then adapts it to the Buck Rogers comic strip.
- 1934: Alex Raymond creates the Flash Gordon comic strip, a low-key rip-off of Buck Rogers, but much higher quality.
- 1936: Buster Crabbe stars in the first Flash Gordon movie serial from Universal Pictures.
- 1939: Buster Crabbe stars in the first Buck Rogers movie serial from Universal Pictures.
- Early 1950s: Both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials air on TV. (Though Buck starts later, around 1953)
- 1950-1951: Buck Rogers show airs on ABC, is quickly forgotten.
- 1954-1955 Flash Gordon show (starring Steve Holland) airs in syndication, suffers the same fate as the 1950 Buck Rogers, though more episodes survive to this day.
- Early 1970s: George Lucas tries to buy the rights to Flash Gordon from King Features Syndicate. He is turned down.
- 1977: Star Wars is released. Early marketing compares the story to Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
- 1979: Inspired by the success of Star Wars, Glen A. Larson makes Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, starring Gil Gerard as Buck. Buster Crabbe guest stars as Brigadier Gordon in the two-part episode “Planet of the Slave Girls.”
- 1980: Flash Gordon film starring Sam J. Jones is released.
Two Bucks: Buster Crabbe and Gil Gerrard in the 1979 Buck Rogers. Nobody bothered to call Robert Pastene.
Today, the 1979 Buck Rogers perhaps remains the most enduring version of the character, thanks in no small part to the excellent production spaceship designs from Star Wars vet Colin Cantwell. But, again, there’s a circuitous path to get this Buck onto the screen. The 1950s Buck Rogers may not have worked, but it was the first version of the story to be made for TV exclusively. It was a bridge between one era of sci-fi filmmaking and another, but like Indiana Jones busting out a massive knife to cover his tracks, by the time Buck made it to the 70s, that bridge had been severed and forgotten.
The existence and ephemeral nature of the 1950 Buck Rogers is an interesting example of the non-linear nature of science fiction history. The series both moved the genre forward from a media point-of-view but also set the character back. There’s been talk of reviving Buck Rogers on TV for several decades now, but considering how the character has been cursed before, one wonders if it isn’t best that today, Buck Rogers be left in suspended animation just a little bit longer.
