Star Trek and Fireball XL-5
March 2009
One of the things I've been doing lately is buying the complete DVD sets of various series I grew up watching. These include UFO, Captain Scarlett and Fireball XL-5. While aimed at the younger audiences, I wanted to clarify some of the memories I had from watching those Gerry Anderson shows. And what wonderful memories they were.
But while watching Fireball XL-5, I was struck by a few similarities with Star Trek: a Scottish engineer of all things; an alien ship that's a dead ringer for one of Ralph McQuarrie's Enterprise designs for Star Trek: Planet of the Titans; the commander that XL-5 answers to is a bit of a jerk (like Admiral Komack). Some of the stories were interesting, if not pretty darn good. Some of them were pretty darn bad. But you had a family of characters who were basically heroes, good people, caring folks. It was a good show.
Don't get me wrong. There are more than a few problems with it. The dreaded oxygen pills which allowed the characters to float about space without a suit. The nearness of so many habitable planets without lightspeed. And most of all the sexism of the early 1960's is prevalent in several episodes ("Venus can't command a mission; she's a woman, Steve!"). Of course, how often did you have Uhura sitting in the center seat? Did Number One from "The Cage"? Nope. Never. But the creative team behind Star Trek was at least enlightened enough to know that one day women would be in command (the ridiculous "Turnabout Intruder" not withstanding).
Perhaps that's one of the reasons for the enduring nature of Star Trek...
Randy
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