Ruminations of an Old Goat

I remember sitting in my kindergarten class while we all watched a rocket launch on TV. I'll show my age by admitting it was one of the Mercury launches; probably Friendship 7, when John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. I've loved spaceships ever since.

I remember drawing spaceships during art in the first grade, blasting through the blackness of space, riding a column of yellow and red flame, whizzing past planets are incredible speeds.

I remember watching every Saturday morning cartoon that had anything to do with space. There's one, whose title I can't remember, that featured a sleek, swept-winged spaceship that looked a lot like the now-retired SST. It landed on retractable skids and fired some kind of spheres from its nose if forced to defend itself. I can't remember the characters, just that spaceship. From last week's Geek Fu, there's already been a discussion about one of my favorites, Fireball XL-5 -- in Supermarianation! And Space Ghost was another obvious cartoon for me to watch, even if he didn't really need a spaceship. The two kids who "helped" him out had a cool spaceship they and their monkey used to keep up with Space Ghost.

Live action TV didn't have as much science fiction, but there was some. There was Lost in Space, which never really appealed to me. Maybe it was the rather boring looking spaceship that turned me off of the show. I did like Robot, though, and to this day am known to wave my arms about while calling, "Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!" (I used to do that back in my tech support days. Unfortunately, the customers couldn't see my arms waving. I don't think I scared too many of them but I might have scarred them.) The Wild, Wild West had a fair bit of science fiction in it and, while it didn't have a spaceship it did have the neat little train they used to travel around in. It wasn't until Star Trek that live action TV gave us a spaceship I thought looked cool. After Star Trek, it was many years before TV gave us anything new in the way of spaceships.

I'd like to say that I was able to turn to the movies to find cool spaceships, but that wasn't the case. As man was landing on the moon for the very first time, there weren't that many spaceships showing up on the big screen. There was 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course, and I thought the idea of Pan American running regular space flights was pretty cool. (Pan American, for those who are too young to remember, was one of the larger airlines at the time. They have since gone the way of the dodo.) But the Discovery One spaceship the astronauts took out to Jupiter was designed to look practical, not cool. And while the Planet of the Apes series featured a spaceship or two, they were only onscreen briefly before sinking into the ocean. As the Apollo project was winding down, Silent Running was released. Once again, though, the spaceships were practical and, despite the entire movie being set in space on one of those practical ships, we rarely saw the outside of the ship.

Despite the success Star Trek had in syndication, TV and movie science fiction had retreated from space almost entirely. We had movies such as THX-1138 and Logan's Run. We had A Clockwork Orange and Rollerball. And we still had Planet of the Apes movies. But we didn't have much of anything featuring spaceships. Well, there was Dark Star, one of John Carpenter's many low-budget films, but it had been out for four years before it came to a theater even remotely near me. Even then, the spaceship in Dark Star was hardly cool.

After Star Trek was canceled, it was a truly sad time for spaceship lovers. But all of that was about to change.

In June of 1977, I settled into my seat in one of the largest theaters in Greenville, SC. Every seat facing the 70mm screen was packed. The lights fell, the familiar fanfare sounded and George Lucas answered the dreams of spaceship lovers everywhere. As the text crawl faded away, a spaceship raced across the screen. I can still remember the first thought I had as Princess Leia's ship appears. It was, "What a big, cool spaceship!" And then the theater began to shake as the nose of the Star Destroyer appeared. It just went on and on and on! It was enough to send chills down the spine of a spaceship lover like me! Before the movie was over, we were introduced to all those famous spaceships and every single one of them was cool beyond belief. The screeching TIE fighters, the Y-Wings, the cool X-Wings and, of course, the Millennium Falcon. In the span of two hours, the model makers at Industrial Light and Magic turned the world of science fiction spaceships on its head.

Star Wars brought TV and movie science fiction back into space. Along the way, it made cool spaceships -- plural -- a requirement for any kind of reasonable space opera. Not that everyone understood cool the way the guys at ILM did. Glen Larson didn't do that well with the original Battlestar Galactica, managing to make the Viper fighters look like a poor man's X-Wing and, to my mind, not really hitting the mark with the Battlestars, either. The Cylon manta fighters weren't bad, though. On the other hand, Larson did rather well a year later with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I particularly liked the lines of the princess. I mean, the lines of the princess's flagship. It looked menacing even when it wasn't in combat.

Since the late '70s, lots of spaceships have appeared on both the big and small screen. Along the way, some of them have really appealed to me. If you check my desk at work, you'll find five spaceships models. Most are from Star Wars (X-Wing, Y-Wing, Millennium Falcon), there's an original series Enterprise and a beautiful model of Serenity from Firefly. When I find myself getting a bit stressed, looking at the spaceships I love so much helps take my mind off of work. And, for just a few minutes, I'm that five year-old boy again, watching the coolest thing ever -- a spaceship blasting off towards outer space.