Recent viewings

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954-55). This one was a pleasant surprise. It's on the same disc as the rather silly Flash Gordon episodes that I viewed a few months back, but it's far superior to them in terms of plot, acting, and even special effects.

Jones and his compatriots, as representatives of the "United Worlds", try to keep order and enforce the law on a wide open frontier, somewhat like the legendary Texas Rangers of the 19th century. I'll grant that the characters are not much more than a collection of stereotypes. Rocky is stalwart, strong and incorruptible. Sidekick Winky is witty, sadeyed, and always without a date on Saturday night. The Secretary of the United Worlds, to whom everybody in the Space Rangers seems to report directly (no doubt due to a lack of budget for additional players), is wise and avuncular. Vena Ray spends most of her time being ornamental in a miniskirt and cape, although she's occasionally seen relaying orders to unseen landing crew and otherwise making herself useful. And there's a precocious little kid who, for some reason, hangs around the United World headquarters and occasionally rides along on hazardous missions.

Despite this, and despite the fact that the strategems used to defeat the bad guys are sometimes laughably juvenile, there are moments when it rises above itself. So help me, Jones and his sidekick actually act like responsible, professional law enforcement officers, rather than triggerhappy space cowboys. In the episode "Escape into Space", Rocky and Winky rescue a fugitive from his crippled spaceship, and have reason to suspect he may have murdered his co-conspirator. But they can't just slap him in irons or beat him up or shoot him with a Destructo-Ray because he's The Bad Guy. As Jones says, their mission is to enforce the law, and until they have proof that he's committed some crime within their jurisdiction, they don't have the authority to arrest him. In "Kip's Private War", we even get a somewhat sympathetic depiction of a kid from a bad background who may -- or may not -- still be salvagable, given a chance to prove himself and a good role model to observe.

The visual effects, although primitive by today's standards, are surprisingly good for their time. Jones' spaceship, the Orbit Jet, looks and behaves exactly like the sleek, needle-nosed, tailfinned rocketships of Ray Bradbury's Mars stories, and its drive flame actually looks like a rocket exhaust, instead of the fizzling sparklers and smokebombs that all too often "propelled" Flash Gordon's various craft. The launching and landing facilities at the United Worlds headquarters bear a plausible, if somewhat blurry, resemblance to the launch facilities constructed at Cape Canaveral in the early 1950s. The videophones depicted in at least one episode are believable, even if the "futuristic" furniture surrounding them looks like Woolworth's surplus. The spaceship interiors are sketchily portrayed, but someone had the sense to make the walls of the spaceship visibly curved and visibly reinforced with interior framing similar to that of a WWII bomber. When spaceships are damaged, they lose air pressure and the folks inside either don pressure suits or asphyxiate. The spaceships' maneuvers, when shown from the outside, are not exactly textbook models of vector mechanics, but then you can't have everything.

Even the fight scenes are mostly believable, partly because they don't try to get too fancy. Really, it's neat when Captain Kirk pulls a clever judo move and uses his ankles to throw someone across the room, or when the Doctor uses "Venusian Aikido" or whatever it's called. But it's not quite as viscerably credible as when Rocky Jones ducks a crook's wild haymaker, then closes in like a professional middleweight and slams two or three solid jabs to the guy's gut to take him down. It's enough to make me think that someone on the show may have had some actual boxing experience.

Part of Rocky Jones' appeal may be in its limitations. The show is deliberately vague about the various locales visited, but in these two episodes they're usually referred to as "moons", suggesting that the scope of the Space Rangers' patrols may very well be limited to the solar system. The missions that Jones et al embark upon are not grandiose missions to save the galaxy, but missions to pursue and bring back fugitive criminals, or to try to keep a politically hostile demagogue from seizing control of a colony. (Shades of 1950s US policy toward communist movements in the third world?) It's true that the visible inhabitants of these moons never seem to amount to more than a handful of actors, sometimes in wondrously tacky costumes, but I'm willing to cut the show some slack given its evidently nonexistent budget for extras. After all, colonies in space might very well have very small populations, most of whom would not be able or inclined to take a day off from their jobs and come hang around and gawk at some cops from the capital who have dropped in to consult with the local bigwig.

It's clearly intended for a juvenile audience, and clearly working with a budget which was wholly inadequate by later standards. But it has its redeeming qualities. Star Trek was famously conceived as "Wagon Train to the stars", but I suspect it may have owed another debt of inspiration to this "Marshals in Space" predecessor.