Shark Bytes

Was there ever a reason given for the purple wigs worn by the women on the moon base? I never did get that whole bit.

I'm very nostalgic about this show. I remember as a kid being fascinated by the spinning UFO's, the missile defense rockets, the moon base (with the purple wigs on the girls), and especially the alien helmets filled with liquid. I especially remember a scene showing Col. Foster (at least I think it was Col. Foster) wearing an alien helmet and it is slowly filling with liquid. Quite a fright as a youngster.

It may seem really hokey by today's standards, but at the time the special effects were wonderful, especially given the pitiful budget they had to work with, and the extremely tight production schedule. The DVD set is on my list of must-haves.

Unmissable when it first screened, although even then it seemed strange that the interceptors only had one big bomb each and once it was gone, it was gone. Also, how come the Moonbase girls had to wear purple wigs and the guys didn't? On the plus side, the dark tone and the liquid-breathing aliens were great concepts. I hired the series box set and found that the aliens' appearances were sensibly kept to a bare minimum. They weren't overexposed, but that did leave an awful lot of people talking in rooms to carry the show, and sometimes it got a little flat. Never Jumped, though.

RIP Ed Bishop and Michael Billington, tragically both lost during the same week in 2005. We have also lost Vladek Sheybal, George Sewell and others...

No, Lew Grade pulled the plug. Too bad, UFO was better than anything on TV at the time. Smart, sexy(!!!), and the stories always moved. Space 1999 was better? Hardly!

Fantastic show, bought it on DVD. The quality is far better than the Sci-Fi channel's airing in the 90s. It never had a chance to jump. Ed Bishop (Straker) recently passed on.

remember as a small boy the white wigs, the weapons/missles/bombs the good guys shot from the front of their ships, the flying saucer blowing up... the hole show took me away , away to a differant place and isn't that what they were supposed to do?

Re the suggestion about Patrick McGoohan turning up as Number 6 and meeting Alec Freeman. When Alec disappears in the series, could he not have been kidnapped and taken to the Village, where he tells them "I am not a number, I am a Freeman!"

Some of best acting in sci-if series untill the new Battlestar. The one were Striker has to desided between hunting for a UFO and getting drugs to his son is a classic. Mybe the wigs were part of the uniform ?

Never jumped. Could be the best work Gerry Anderson ever did. Could never be remade, because Hollywood couldn't do it without managing to throw in a dog and a cute kid.

For it's time, UFO was probably (along with the exception of another ITC cult fave, "The Prisoner") the most intelligent, "adult" sf series ever aired. Yes, the overall "look" of the show indicated a very strong late '60's sensibility, but after recently re-watching many of the episodes for the first time in 20 years, they hold up remarkably well, certainly better than the subsequent "Space: 1999". Many of the scripts were simultaneously "fantastic", but additionally delved deeply into the human side of running a super-secret quasi-military organization: the pressures of having to make life-and-death command decisions, the effects on living such a double-life has on family and personal relations, and the inevitable stress fractures that appear when people are pushed to the edge of physical and mental breakdown. It was a very psychological series, with plenty of action and eye-candy (yeah, the purple moon wigs made no sense at all, but they DID look cool!) for the young-uns. And besides, it's not like "2001" got everything exactly right, either!

UFO never actually jumped the shark - but came pretty close on a couple of occasions. Most notably, the episode 'Close Up', in which SHADO are able to 'modify' a conventional NASA space probe to follow a UFO back to its planet of origin. Bearing in mind that we have already been told by Straker that the aliens' technology is at the very least hundreds of years in advance of our own (they travel at many times the speed of light, for example, this seems unlikely at best. SHADO are also able to calculate exactly how long it will take for a) the probe to reach the alien planet and b) how long it will take the pictures to be transmitted back to Earth. Again, bearing in mind that the alien planet is almost certainly in another galaxy, any guesswork will have been either wildly inaccurate or ludicrously optimistic. Having said all that, the episode is quite atmospheric and we do at least get the chance to see an earthbound Gay Ellis showing a bit of leg (mind you, when didn't she?). Not one of Tony Barwick's better scripts, but neither is it a complete waste of time.

The claims about Lt. Mark Bradley having been sacked, and allegedly implying racial reasons, are simply bogus. And he appeared in far more episodes that just those that specifically dealt with race (one of many examples: 1x07 Kill Straker). His voice was high pitched and his delivery was tepid. Has came across as both Jamaican, and gay. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But he didn't seem like a credible military space pilot. His removal from the show was clearly a net positive.

Never jumped. I agree with the majority here, the show was years ahead of its time, was cut down before it had hit its stride, had perhaps the coolest theme song and opening title music in TV history, and I'll hear arguments anytime that it may well have been the coolest show in history, let alone sci-fi (SciFi Channel, are you listening? We want it back!). I was only thirteen when it aired, and today with a bad memory and all, I can still see and hear those UFOs on approach to Moonbase. I had no complaints then and I don't now. It never jumped.

There is one thing about this show (at least as it was shown on American television) that seemed just damn peculiar when it aired, and still seems peculiar to me today. U.F.O. had only one prominent black character, and that was Lt. Mark Bradley (played by Harry Baird). The character only showed up AT ALL in two episodes... and both episodes made an issue out of his being black. In the first, Bradley refuses an assignment offered by Straker because he thinks he's only getting the offer because of his skin color. (Straker replies that the whole racial hatred problem "burned itself out years ago" -- don't we all wish?) The other ep had one of the women on the Moonbase having a major issue with working with a black man. (Telling moment: During her psych evaluation they give her a word association test, and when the doctor says "black" she stammers for five seconds before replying "Bird! That's right, 'black bird'!") A U.F.O. site online states that the producers were unhappy with Baird's acting and phased him out after a few early episodes. Maybe his contribution to the series was greater than the show's American showings suggest, but it looked to me as if he was a token black character who was only used in stories that made a big deal about his being black.