Useless but essential pop culture tidbits and trivia from the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror that will not be useful at your upcoming Book Club meeting.
The original Star Trek series aired in the late 60’s but struggled in the ratings during its first run and its audience did not explode until it became a staple in syndication in the early 70’s. But did you know that shortly after Star Trek became a hot property a mini sub-genre of sorts emerged that followed a similar template to that show?
These shows followed a group of people usually in a post-apocalyptic world traveling around and encountering different societies from episode to episode. So instead of traversing the stars and meeting new races, they stick to the ground but still encounter a different culture each week. Thus the reason I have dubbed these “Land Trek” or “Earth Trek” shows. This trend actually started with a pilot created by Gene Roddenberry himself, called Genesis II, about a man who awakes from suspended animation into a future world where society has collapsed. He encounters a group called PAX, who want to rebuild society and who control a system of underground transportation tunnels they can use to travel across the globe and make contact with the pockets of civilization that still exist. This pilot never went to series, but Roddenberry tweaked the concept for a second attempt called Planet Earth. One more shot at turning this into a series came a few years later with Strange New World, though Roddenberry had bowed out at this point.
After Roddenberry took the initial steps, several shows followed his lead using a very similar format, though none of them lasted long. In 1976 on Saturday mornings, Ark II followed a group traveling around the planet in an amped up all-terrain vehicle after pollution has led to the collapse of society. This show was actually better than you might think (though definitely not a classic), but it lasted only one season and 15 episodes. In Prime Time in 1977, Fantastic Journey followed a group traveling through various timezones in the Bermuda Triangle trying to find their way home. D.C. Fontana, who had worked on Star Trek, helmed the show, but it disappeared quickly after 10 episodes. The following year the Logan’s Run TV series took up the Land Trek mantle and followed Logan, Jessica, and android Rem travelling outside the dome cities in a hovercraft and encountering the remnants of civilization. D.C. Fontana also worked on this one, along with some other names that had contributed to Trek including Harlan Ellison, but it had little more success than its predecessors as it faded after 14 episodes. A last stab at this sub-genre came with 1985’s Otherworld. This one followed a family that stumble into a parallel Earth while touring the Great Pyramid of Giza. They find themselves outlaws there by inadvertently breaking the laws and they flee to the separate “zones” that cover the planet looking for a way to return to their own Earth. This one met with even less success than the others, lasting only 8 episodes.
The format actually had some promise and seemed budget conscious, but multiple misfires at launching a series from the template seemed to discourage any further effort in that direction and nothing of note from the sub-genre has emerged since Otherworld got the axe. But who knows? There’s talk of reviving Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes pilot, so maybe somebody will take a stab at Genesis II as well.
Buy Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Strange New World on DVD from the WB Shop:
