(This post originally appeared on December 4, 2005. I have no idea what DVD I'm talking about below, and at any rate, it's long gone whatever it was. But I still have fond memories of ROCKY JONES, SPACE RANGER from my childhood.)
I've now watched both episodes of ROCKY JONES, SPACE RANGER that are on that DVD I bought the other day. They don't hold up extremely well, but they're fairly entertaining. The special effects are very crude, but that's to be expected. I've always felt that Richard Crane, who plays Rocky, looks more like a villain than a hero, but he works all right here. One bit of sort of interesting trivia is that the Space Patrol, for which Rocky works, has no jurisdiction on Earth. Rocky and his sidekick have to wait until criminals leave Earth's atmosphere before they can arrest them. That makes perfect sense, but for some reason I never even considered it before. I would think that jurisdictional disputes might make for some interesting episodes.
I did a little research and found out that this series was produced for only one year. 39 episodes are all that exist. I would have thought it ran longer than that, because I watched it in syndicated reruns on Saturday mornings for a long time when I was a kid.
5 comments:
"This post originally appeared on December 4, 2005. I have no idea what DVD I'm talking about..."
Worry not, James. Most of us have no idea what we were talking about five minutes ago.
Coincidentally, I just recently saw the first episode (movie, really) of Rocky Jones. My wife bought me a DVD collection for Christmas with 50 "Sci-Fi Classics" all on 12 DVDs. The quality isn't all that good but I am gaining an education slowly but surely.
If you do a little Googling, you can find a seller offering all 39 episodes on 13 DVDs. I can't vouch for the picture quality myself, but he says they're "high quality, beautiful black and white prints." Would that be worth $39.99 to you? I might go for it if I didn't already have 1000s of hours of movies and TV shows to watch, both old and new. (If I'm exaggerating, it's not by much.)
I am a fan of Rocky Jones---what it lacks in quality acting (and it really, really lacks in this department), it makes up for with resourceful handcrafted effects and funky sets and pulp-flavored, highly impossible space adventuring.
I've purchased all of the authorized releases of this--with packaging and art available on Amazon, but that's only about half of the complete collection. This show and Space Patrol are certainly fun to check out (and likely inspirations for Star Trek to varying degrees). My expectations weren't high, but it did exceed what I was expecting. And the fact that it is often 3 episode arcs makes the storytelling a bit bigger.
This gives me a chance to vent on something I never liked--kids in adventure shows. I didn't see Rocky Jones when I was growing up, but if I had the kid would have bugged me. That said, I have seen some of them as an adult and enjoyed them for what they were.
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