1975 Making Of Logan’s Run Featurette

Friends, while I was all of four years old when Logan’s Run was originally released to theaters on June 23rd of 1976 – I did in fact catch it a few years later at the local Drive-In. I have shared before on the site as well as on the Saturday Frights podcast – there were many times in my youth that I saw a film at that glorious outdoor theater – that turned out to have been released a couple of years earlier. While that would actually change at the end of the ’70s – that is how I could enjoy a fantastic double feature with 1977’s Damnation Alley and Logan’s Run in the Summer of 1978.

Now I quite enjoyed Damnation Alley – the cockroaches scene in particular stuck with me long after the film had ended. However it would be fair to say that I LOVED Logan’s Run – it’s utopian future with a very dark secret just really clicked with me. Although it didn’t hurt the film that the cast was made up of Michael York (The Island of Dr. Moreau), Jenny Agutter (An American Werewolf in London), Peter Ustinov (1973’s Robin Hood), and the late and great Richard Jordan (Dune, The Hunt for Red October). Having said that I would be remiss to not point out that my favorite character in the film – the misguided and murderous robot known as Box – was voiced by the legendary Roscoe Lee Browne of The Cowboys and Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light to name just a few of his roles.

Logan’s Run is based off the 1967 book of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Although the screenplay for the 1976 film, written by David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs), really only uses the basic elements of Nolan and Johnson’s novel. Interestingly enough, the attempt to bring Logan’s Run to the big screen was started by none other than George Pal (The Time Machine) back in 1969 – although the producer and director would eventually leave the project to tackle Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. As a matter of fact it would actually be Michael Anderson, the director of the film adaptation of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, that would be chosen to also helm Logan’s Run.

Thanks to Andrew Patrick Ralston, who also uploaded that clip from the 1983 US Festival I wrote about the other day, we can enjoy this 1975 making of Logan’s Run featurette. Which provides some opportunities to hear from the cast and crew, and some glimpses of the hard work that it took to bring the film to the big screen.