From the poster for the 1979 Buck Rogers TV series (NBC/Universal City, via IMDB) It’s no secret that we live in a world of remakes, re-imaginings, reboots, revivals, and whatever other “re. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century began as a plan for a series of TV movies, but the first one was strong enough that Universal released it theatrically before it aired on NBC. This led to a 2-season run on the network starting in 1979. Buck Rogers Complete Series Torrent Free From The; Yager had formal art training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and was a talented watercolor artist; all the strips were done in ink and watercolor. For specific works featuring this character, or for other people with the same name, see Buck Rogers (disambiguation). The saga of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the world's most famous science-fiction newspaper strip, continues with Volume Seven of Hermes Press' critically acclaimed complete reprint of this ground-breaking title.
One would imagine that Brian K. Vaughan, the award-winning writer of such productions as Y: The Last Man and Lost, has his pick of cool science fiction properties to adapt. So why did he sign on to write Legendary Television's Buck Rogers series, centered around a character almost a century old? Why did Don Murphy and Susan Montford, whose credits include Transformers and Real Steel, jump to dust off a property that most people under the age of 50 don't even know about? What, exactly, is the appeal of this fictional spaceman from 1928?
The short answer to these questions is that Buck Rogers is awesome. Fantasy and sci-fi fandom currently dominates the mainstream, and no fan's knowledge of the genre can be complete without an acknowledgement of Buck Rogers as the granddaddy of all popular space heroes. From his earliest imitator, Flash Gordon, to his later successors like Captain Kirk, Han Solo, Buzz Lightyear, and beyond, he's a major origin point. Beyond his legacy, Buck Rogers is also simply cool, even today. This is his untold story, from his must-have toys to his fascinating future.
From pulp fiction to the mainstream
In the early 1900s — before the internet, movies, TV, and even most radio — genre-loving folks got their science fiction and fantasy fixes from pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Air Wonder Stories. Those super-old-school fans were geeking out over the two-fisted heroics of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, who took their readers to the far-off fantasylands of the lawless jungle, the wilds of outer space, and even further beyond.
Buck Rogers, originally named Anthony Rogers, first appeared in a 1928 issue of Amazing Stories as the star of Armageddon 2419A.D., a novella by Philip Francis Nowlan. The following year, Nowlan was hired to expand the story into a comic strip serial entitled Buck Rogers by the John F. Dille Company, a syndication service providing comic strips and other content to local newspapers. With that nationwide exposure, Buck Rogers fever swept popular culture, introducing science fiction to a mainstream audience in a whole new way, and creating an important progenitor for the modern superhero.
An early superhero in an early dystopia
The original Buck Rogers series follows a man named William Rogers, who is a World War I veteran working as a mine inspector. A combination of a cave-in and exposure to weird chemicals leaves Rogers in a state of suspended animation for 492 years. He awakens in the future, where he is paraded around for public relations purposes. He soon learns that the leadership is lying to him, and he is drawn into a civil war. Sounds like a certain Marvel super-soldier, doesn't it? Buck Rogers' influence on the superheroes that dominate modern pop culture is just that obvious.
America in Buck Rogers' 2419 is dominated by an economically and technologically privileged upper-class called the 'Hans,' who rule the 15 remaining cities with fleets of deadly airships. The poor and disenfranchised are left behind in the barbaric wilds of what was once rural America. Buck Rogers' heroics against the 'airlords' unite the lower classes against the oligarchy in a way that prefigures modern dystopian sci-fi: Everything from The Hunger Gamesto The Walking Deadowes a debt to these dark visions of the future.
His forgotten namesake
For unknown reasons, when Philip Francis Nowlan helped adapt his own story to comic strip form, he retroactively changed his hero's name from 'Anthony Rogers' to 'William Rogers.' Perhaps Nowlan, or his publisher, John Dille, wanted the name to remind audiences of the everyman humorist Will Rogers, who was one of the most popular public figures of the day. Nowlan also gave his hero a snappy new nickname: The monosyllabic, instantly memorable 'Buck.'
The origin of this nickname is actually well documented: One of the most popular movie stars of the 1920s and 30s was Charles 'Buck' Jones, who was known for playing heroic cowboys in silent era Westerns. By giving Rogers the nickname 'Buck,' Nowlan and Dille were assuring their audiences, many of whom were new to the strange imagery and ideas of science fiction, that their hero was still of the familiar two-fisted he-man variety.
Buck Rogers, master of merchandise
In 1932, just three years after making the leap from pulp magazines to comic strips, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century became one of the first science fiction programs on the radio. Originally broadcast under the title The World in 2432, this program debuted episodes of 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the year of broadcast. The series ran until 1947, introducing a generation to the sci-fi genre ... and to a brand new world of product tie-ins.
Department stores dedicated massive amounts of floorspace to Buck Rogers merchandise, complete with costumed salespeople. Over the next decade, toy guns, model rockets, space helmets and practically every other product that could bear the Buck Rogers logo hit store shelves. The Buck Rogers XZ-31 Rocket Pistol, an art deco beauty manufactured by the Daisy Manufacturing Company, was the must-have Christmas gift of 1934. The day it hit shelves, lines of eager customers stretched across city blocks to enter Macy's 'World of Tomorrow' exhibit and get their hands on the coveted toy.
It happened at the World's Fair
In 1934, the John F. Dille Company decided to produce a short feature to promote the growing Buck Rogers brand on the biggest public stage of the day: The 1933 Chicago World's Fair, officiously christened the Century of Progress International Exhibition. This marketing idea may have been brilliant, but the John F. Dille Company lacked either the faith or the funds to deliver a film adaptation worthy of their character. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which boasts the totally awesome and super-explanatory subtitle, An Interplanetary Battle with the Tiger Men of Mars, is spectacularly amateurish in every imaginable way, from the wooden performance by Dille's own non-actor son as Buck, to the special effects, courtesy of repurposed Buck Rogers toys. But as this film was screened in the Enchanted Island playground area, perhaps the shoddy craftsmanship didn't matter. It's easy to imagine that the little ones of 1933 were just delighted to see their hero in motion.
Only one man can save Buck Rogers ... Flash Gordon!
In 1939, Universal Studios produced a 12-part Buck Rogers serial starring two-time Olympic gold medalist Larry 'Buster' Crabbe as Buck. Crabbe had already put his charisma and swimmer's physique to good use in Hollywood, starring as Flash Gordon in that character's own Universal serial. Universal, thinking like a studio, repeated their successful formula with little reinvention and even less of a budget in Buck Rogers, even re-using the distinctive studded belt Crabbe wears in Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars.
Thus began a long, strange trip for the Buck Rogers serial — and Crabbe's place within it. In 1953, Goodwill Pictures recut the Buck Rogers serial into a feature entitled Planet Outlaws. The footage was recut again in 1966 to create a TV movie, Destination Saturn. Finally, in 1977, a third feature, simply titled Buck Rogers, was once again edited from the same footage, to take advantage of interest in the material renewed by Star Wars and the new Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series. An early episode of the first season of the latter series, entitled 'Planet of the Slave Girls,' features an appearance by none other than Buster Crabbe as Brigadier Gordon.
A comic book hero who predates comic books
Long before they became respected as 'graphic novels,' comic books didn't even tell original stories. Instead, the earliest comic books were reprinted collections of newspaper comic strips. 1933's Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics is one such anthology of strips, and considered by most historians to be the first true American comic book. Buck Rogers comic strips were collected and reprinted in this new form almost immediately, spawning a series of 'Big Little Book' collections.
Starting in 1940, Famous Funniesbegan running reprints of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as a regular feature. In 1969, when those same comic strips were collected into a scholarly hardback with a foreword by Ray Bradbury, Buck Rogers was re-discovered by a new generation of fans, who were now beginning to view comic books as their own art form. Buck Rogers' adventures, both new and old, have made their way into comics repeatedly ever since, most recently with Dynamite Comics' retelling of Buck's story in 2012.
A Buck Rogers TV show! No, not that one!
In 1950, Buck Rogers made a daring leap into television, a futuristic technology if ever there was one. Unfortunately, just as Buck Rogers was beaten to the big screen by his imitator, Flash Gordon, so too was he beaten to the small screen by the DuMont Network's 1949 production, Captain Video and his Video Rangers, which takes the honor of being the first weekly science fiction television series.
Already late to the party, ABC's Buck Rogerswas plagued by other issues that would spell its doom. These factors included stiff competition from the era's biggest star, Milton Berle, and the misfortune of having to recast the role of Buck not once, but twice during its one and only season. With the re-edited Universal serial starring Buster Crabbe already playing on television — and looking better, despite being over a decade old — this new television series was canceled and quickly forgotten.
Inspiring other wars in the stars
Filmmaker George Lucas has frequently cited the Universal Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials as inspirations for Star Wars. In fact, before he wrote the screenplay for Star Wars, Lucas attempted to acquire the rights to adapt the Flash Gordon comic strips. Fortunately for everyone, Lucas failed in that attempt.
Yet the echoes of those pulp stories live on in Star Wars. Consider Star Wars' infamous 'Style A' poster. Beyond its now-common images of space ships dogfighting in the stars and pistol-packing space princesses, it borrows many stylistic elements from those long-ago adventure serials. Just look at how brawny Luke is, and how much Leia resembles a slinky '30s femme fatale, complete with a low-cut dress she never sports in the movie. Moreover, many visuals that are now considered integral to the vocabulary ofStar Warscome straight from Buck Rogers. This includes the use of 'wipes' to transition from one scene to another, and even the iconic opening text crawl, which was first used in the 1939 Buck Rogers serial.
A Buck Rogers TV show! Again!
Just as George Lucas was inspired by Buck Rogers, the success of Lucas' 1977 blockbuster Star Wars inspired a legion of imitators ... including a reboot of Buck Rogers. In 1979, NBC produced Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, starring Gil Gerard and Erin Gray. This version reimagines Buck Rogers as an astronaut revived centuries too late from suspended animation, and introduces new characters, including the robot sidekick Twiki, voiced by cartoon legend Mel Blanc. Coincidentally, Blanc also voiced Daffy Duck in the Looney Tunes Buck Rogers parody, Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century.
The feature-length Buck Rogers pilot was given a limited theatrical release, much as the producer, Glen A. Larson, had done successfully with Battlestar Galactica. But Buck Rogers' budget and quality never matched its sibling show. Frequently, sets and costumes from Battlestar Galacticawere recycled for Buck Rogers. Even the designs for Rogers' Thunder Fighters were actually just the original designs for Battlestar Galactica's Colonial Vipers.
Buck Rogers' untimely end
Fans amped up by Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica were clamoring for another weekly science fiction series, and were thus willing to overlook the low budget effects of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century's first season. But the second season left everyone — including star Gil Gerard — a little cold. New directives from NBC pushed more comedy and family-friendly adventure into the scripts, and the producers, in an attempt to replicate the success of space-focused series like Star Trek, moved Buck's story from the futuristic world of New Chicago to a wandering starship called the Searcher.
Gerard felt that the series had strayed too far from its original premise, and his protests soured the mood at the network. 'It was such a ripoff of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica,' Gerard said, 'I was thinking, 'Why are we doing this?' I always wanted Buck to stay on Earth, but we got a new executive producer who had no respect for the audience and the show.' Thus, the show dwindled into nothingness, its last episode airing in 1981.
A legacy ... and beyond!
When Buck Rogers first zoomed onto the scene back in 1928, he displaced the cowboys, longtime heroes of American youth. Almost overnight, a fascination with space ships and ray guns swept America's kids. Cowboy heroes would persist through the 1950s, thanks to TV series like The Lone Rangerand The Roy Rogers Show, but they still had to share space with Buck Rogers and his growing legion of imitators. As the era of space travel and the race to the moon dawned, the battle between the Western hero and the science fiction hero for dominance of American popular culture was finally won by the men from beyond the stars.
Westerns layered on moral ambiguity and grew increasingly dark. Though this has yielded many artistically superior movies, the commercial successes of the day still largely belong to sci-fi. This conflict — the displacement of the cowboy by the spaceman — is so ingrained in American popular culture that it is essentially the plot of Toy Story, with Buzz Lightyear standing in for Buck Rogers and his ilk.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - The Complete Epic Series (1979)
Actors: Gil Gerard, Erin Gray, Felix Silla, Mel Blanc, Tim O'Connor
Directors: Daniel Haller
Writers: Glen A. Larson, Leslie Stevens, Philip Francis Nowlan
Producers: Andrew Mirisch, David G. Phinney, Glen A. Larson, Leslie Stevens
Format: Box set, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
Subtitles: Spanish, French
Region: 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 5
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Release Date: November 16, 2004
Run Time: 1799 minutes
Movie:
Disc:
That sound you hear is fanboys having apoplectic fits at hearing the news that Paul WS Anderson, of Resident Evil and Death Race infamy, is going to direct the upcoming Buck Rogers reboot . . .
Plans for a Buck Rogers reboot has been floating around for ages now. At one point graphic novelist and sometimes director Frank Miller (300, The Spirit) and the workman-like Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III, The Wolfman) were said to be working on the new full-length movie version of Buck Rogers.
Now comes the news that Paul WS Anderson is going to direct the new Buck Rogers.
To be honest one can’t think of a director more ill-suited to the task: Anderson’s brand of violent action just seems, well, wrong for the more light-hearted Buck Rogers universe!
The question remains though whether Anderson will do a worse job than producer Glen A. Larson (Knight Rider) did with the 1979-1981 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series . . .
Blasphemy we know, yeah. But the point is that the late-1970s Buck Rogers television series that lasted two seasons and starred former soap star Gil Gerard as Buck and former model Erin Gray as the foxy Col. Wilma Deering isn’t particularly good (trust us, we’ve recently rewatched it on DVD again).
Gen X-ers may remember Buck Rogers as the hero of a television series made to cash in on the Star Wars sci-fi fad of back then, but the character itself is much older than that. Buck Rogers began life as a cartoon strip in 1929 – actually predating Flash Gordon who made his first appearance only in 1934!
Ageing baby boomers may recall the B&W serials (George Lucas watched them as a kid), but most people will probably go “bidi-bidi” when you mention Buck Rogers to them, imitating the “cute” robot sidekick voiced by Mel Blanc, who also supplied most of the voices to the various Looney Tunes characters such as Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig.
It is unclear what director Anderson’s plans are for the franchise is.
Word has it that Miller wanted to take the character back to its roots as dashing retro 1930s hero. Maybe Anderson wants to remake the 1970s TV series instead in which Rogers was a womanizing Han Solo wannabe. (“Buck Rogers is a slut,” I thought aloud watching one episode.)
The plot is a sci-fi retelling of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in which a 20th century man wakes up 500 years in the future. Needless to say he becomes involved in various adventures, gets outfitted with a ‘Seventies-style bachelor pad and a midget-sized robot sidekick – wouldn’t we all?
THE DISC: No special features whatsoever. Nothing. Image and sound quality aren’t too consistent either.
WORTH IT? It isn’t particularly good even though nostalgic Gen X-ers who watched it as kids back then will probably be more forgiving. The plots are rather superficial and usually involve Buck deposing some tin pot dictator lording it over his or her unfortunate underlings on some distant planet. (If only it was this easy in real life!) Not particularly deep.
The special effects and sets may have dated, but were pretty decent for their time (Larson recycled them from his Battlestar Galactica show). The show’s biggest problem – or its best attribute if you have a highly developed sense of MST3K-type irony – is the costumes! The spaceships and laser guns may have been, ahem, “inspired” by Star Wars, but the costume department’s job seems to have consisted of trips to the nearest S&M store! That and dusting off designs from old Flash Gordon serials – you just gotta love that cape Jack Palance is made to wear in one episode! (Palance joyously hams it up all the way of course.) Gerard also looks like a ‘Seventies leisure suit lounge lizard and is made to wear such tight pants that one is amazed that he doesn’t speak with a permanent Barry Gibb falsetto.
Logan’s Run zipper suits aside, the production designers also labored under the illusion that the 1970s will last forever and that Disco Will Never Die.
Yup, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is pretty cheesy all right and some of the scenes are 100% guaranteed to make you cringe like hell. (One scene in which a regular villain dubs her new bodyguard “pantherman” because he is so “black and beautiful” will make you feel so dirty that you’d want to take a shower afterwards!)
Things also aren’t helped by the reuse of stock footage (check out that spaceship in the exterior establishing shot now flying in reverse!) and a very dull Gerard who famously went on to famously struggle with his weight. (Beware: this will happen to you too one day.) Check out the scene in which he dully reacts to a tearful Col Deering who tells him that he is “more than a friend” and makes her feel like a woman for the first time – that is, despite his incessant womanizing, which she takes with the good humor of an indulgent asexual TV sidekick.
RECOMMENDATION: This is one nostalgia trip that isn’t particularly worth taking unless you’re the type who regularly page through your parents’ photo albums to poke fun at their dated fashions. (Beware: your kids will do this to you one day.)