Chez Letha

Wish List

Do you have a wish list of old TV series or movies that are not available on DVD that you wish were?  I know I do.  I though I might post about them from time to time.  So here is the first post and the series that I thought I would highlight is Star Cops.

I know some of my friends from the San Francisco Bay area have seen this series, but most other Americans will be unfamiliar with it, which is just a shame.  This series was made in the late 1980s by BBC, and it was a very well done and intriguing show.  Unfortunately, it only ran for one series of about 9 episodes.  The premise of the show is that it is set in the near future where there are many national space stations orbiting the earth and a multinational moon base.  And one of the things people have brought with them as they have moved into space is crime.  So there is a multinational police force set up to handle this.  In the first episode, a reluctant detective is sent up to as a possible candidate for the commander of the Starcops and is very disturbed when a spacewalk turns deadly apparently because of suit malfunction.  Turns out there have been several suit malfunctions over the years, and the question is, is this normal, have the suits been sabotaged, or has the Russian company who makes them deliberately overlooked suit safety for some reason.  The opening scene will give you the answer, but it will take a determined detective to come up with the truth.

I loved this series, for several reasons.  This series was made during the Cold War and it has that era’s tensions between countries.  No nationality was portrayed in a rosy light – each one had its own faults.  And although the setting was futurist, the crimes were what could come with the advancement of men in science and space.  Even though this series was made in the 80s, it still has a futuristic feel to it.

I made a recording of this show on VHS when it played on the local PBS station and I have since transferred it to DVD.  In fact this is one of the few recordings that I bothered to transfer to DVD.  If you want your own copy, you are going to have a hard time finding it.  This series was apparently put out on DVD in the UK, but there was never a region one encoding made.  So most of us in the US are out of luck.  But even those in the UK will have a hard time finding it since it is, to my knowledge, no longer being sold.  I would love it if they put this series out on DVD here so that I could replace my poor quality recording, but I am still glad that I have my recording so I can revisit this show every once in a while.

If you want to look into this series more, check it out at Amazon, on Wikipedia, and at this BBC site.

One more note, although I would love this series no matter what the theme song was, this is one of those shows that I find myself rewinding just to listen to the haunting theme song.  It was written by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues and I wish I had a recording of it.  I think I have just inspired myself.  I am going to go to YouTube and search for it.  It has to be out there.

Tags: science fiction, TV, wish list

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.