How A Forgotten Space Show Got ‘50s Kids Hooked on Sci-Fi

“You don’t play down to children,” Space Patrol lead Ed Kemmer once remarked. “A lot of shows make that mistake.” It’s an approach which explains why his 1950s series spawned more than 1000 episodes and introduced a generation of Saturday morning TV viewers (and often their parents) to the wonders of science fiction.

Space Patrol was conceived, rather aptly, in heroic circumstances. Indeed, it was while journeying across the Pacific Ocean during World War II that U.S. naval aviator William ‘Mike’ Moser had his lightbulb moment: recapture the excitement of his childhood favorite comics Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers but on the burgeoning medium of television. Luckily, Los Angeles ABC station KECA-TV bought his vision and in March 1950 — 75 years ago, today — the fictional United Planets Space Patrol launched the first of their 1110 missions.

Mirroring the space race that would gather pace toward the end of its lengthy run, Moser’s brainchild had to fight for kids’ attention with two similarly-themed shows. Premiering just seven months later, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet traversed across all four of the era’s major networks in its five years on air. Meanwhile, DuMont’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers had already beaten Space Patrol to the punch, having first started showing in the summer of 1949.

The three shows inevitably had their similarities. They were all beamed to the nation as they were being made, a remarkable state of affairs considering any live scripted affair is now hailed as event television. And they all had to make do with budgets that would barely cover the catering on the era’s more adult-oriented shows: Space Patrol’s cast members, for example, were initially paid just eight dollars per episode.

But the latter also made their money go much further — literally, in the fact that while its rivals spent almost as much time on Earth as orbiting the solar system, the UPSP’s motley crew were far more intergalactic. Just look at the very first episode in which Commander Kit Corry (Glen Denning) and his comical sidekick Happy (Lyn Osborn) take down a traitor who’d fled to Mars. Space Patrol also had one of Hollywood’s biggest sound stages — named in honor of Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera — at its disposal, allowing the show to paint a much more expressive picture of deep space.

The 30th century saga was unarguably the most immersive of the three shows, too, although no doubt much to the disdain of younger viewers’ parents. Indeed, Space Patrol certainly recognized the power of an engaged, captive audience, bombarding its audience with product placement more blatantly than Mac and Me. Corporate sponsors also roped in popular characters to help sell everything from Chex cereal to Nestle Coconut in the ad breaks (and even in the wait for the following episode’s teaser), while kids were encouraged to enter premium competitions such as “Name the Planet” which would then tie into the narrative.

Still, at least the content surrounding such crass commercialism was wholesome enough. Indeed, the moral ambiguities typically associated with the genre were notably absent, with recurring boo-hiss villains such as Prince Baccarratti (Bela Kovacs) and man of many disguises Mr. Proteus (Marvin Miller) ensuring the battles between good and evil were always crystal clear.

However, the series could be more forward-thinking in other ways, particularly in its use of broadcast technology. It was the first morning network show to be beamed from the East Coast to the West, for instance. Even more impressively, one particular half-hour episode in 1953 was given the 3D treatment, another milestone in the history of U.S. television. Space Patrol may have required a huge suspension of disbelief, yet it was still taken seriously by the powers that be.

In fact, ABC were so delighted with how it captured the nation’s imagination that its 15-minute Mon-through-Fri run was quickly accompanied by a half-hour weekend episode. Execs also greenlit a radio spinoff starring the same actors in September 1950 which outlasted the TV show by several weeks. There were even a handful of records released which explored the two leads’ origins stories.

“[It] gave the country a positive vision of a space-age future that seemed to be just around the corner,” argued Jean-Noel Bassior, author of Space Patrol: Missions of Daring in the Name of Early Television, about its inherent appeal. “Space Patrol modeled a kind of very human, caring behavior that’s gone from TV today.”

Kemmer, who replaced the line-forgetting Denning as the leading man after just 25 episodes, was certainly proud of Space Patrol’s legacy. Also a war hero having served as a fighter pilot (and spent 11 months in a POW camp), the actor once revealed a NASA engineer had admitted the show ignited his passion for space. “So it had an importance that I never knew existed,” he added.

Luckily, unlike many shows from its era, the majority of Space Patrol’s broadcasts have survived into the digital age. And while its “high adventures in the wild reaches of space” and “missions of daring in the name of interplanetary justice” are unlikely to have inspired many of today’s spacemen, it’s still fascinating to watch how with so few resources, it became such a pivotal sci-fi gateway.