For a show that ran only two seasons, the live-action Gerry & Sylvia Anderson project Space: 1999 has quite a storied history, stretching from its earliest inception as a possible second season of a complete different Anderson series (UFO), to its own third season being aborted because the head of the studio wanted to direct that entire budget toward an unrelated feature film that had become a personal obsession. And in the middle of all that came Super Space Theater.
Actually… no. It’s not that simple.
To get Space: 1999 off the ground at all with the lavish budget that was expected of a prime-time science fiction show just a few years after the cancellation of Star Trek, ITC Entertainment cut a deal with an Italian broadcaster, gaining co-
production funds, and making some concessions that were most visible in the show’s frequent casting of Italian guest stars. But another concession was that the first three episodes would be combined for an Italian theatrical release, with all of the actors dubbed and featuring a new soundtrack by legendary composer Ennio Morricone. The result was Spazio: 1999, which actually gave the denizens of Moonbase Alpha their world premiere before they ever appeared on a small screen.
Morricone’s music was abstract and very unlike Barry Gray’s understated, morose scores that, combined with library tracks including Gray’s work on earlier Anderson productions, 
would become the show’s signature sound in its first year. The cuts made to the three episodes made the story a bit more frenetically paced and trippier, and… the whole thing ended with a quote attributed to Shakespeare that wasn’t actually written by Shakespeare. And this stylistic variation of Space: 1999 was a one-off, because when the television series premiered on Italian television, it was very much like the British version of the show, except dubbed.
This might seem like an inauspicious start to Space: 1999’s attempts to inhabit a feature-film-sized space, but the story only gets weirder from there, and that’s why we have this entire box set, lovingly crafted by Network, which had already bankrolled the rescanning of Space: 1999’s original film elements that brought the ’70s show back to blu-ray in a much more vivid form than we were used to. No more murky DVD transfers, the show honestly looks great in HD. And having already scanned all that film, Network decided to reconstruct the series’ oddball movie legacy as well. Why not?
The next attempt to bring Space: 1999 to the big screen as an international movie release that might penetrate markets that hadn’t bought Space: 1999 as a TV series was 1976’s Alien Attack. Combining bits of the pilot episode and others with newly-
shot footage seems like a recipe for something exciting and new, except that the newly-shot footage was basically a drawn-out boardroom meeting, with dour men talking about Moonbase Alpha’s predicament. At length. With slide shows. Exciting stuff. Fairly well-known actor Patrick Allen was somehow recruited to anchor these scenes, but to no avail – every time the movie cuts to the boardroom to cover for the extensive edits and to try to narrate some of the missing action, it just lets the air out of whatever excitement might have inadvertently built up in the segments cobbled together from TV episodes.
“And that,” most rational folks would think, “would be the end of the experiment, right?” Of course not! Even if Space: 1999 wasn’t going to be viable in theaters, it was gathering dust in ITC’s vaults after its TV run concluded. There was no home video market at the time, since home vidoecassette players and recorders were still a luxury item, and ITC had a syndication 
market to service, hungry for new material. The solution? Keep jamming together more episodes of Space: 1999 (and other Anderson shows, but only in pairings of episodes of the same series, as amusing as it is to consider the comedy potential of suddenly jumping from live action to Supermarionation in the same 90-minute time span). Offer them to TV stations as part of an affordable package of sci-fi “movies” called Super Space Theater. And that’s where we really get to the meat of this box set: syndicated “movies” like Destination: Moonbase Alpha, Journey Through The Slack Sun, and Cosmic Princess, which probably has the highest profile of any of the above due to Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing it in its earliest days on Minneapolis indie station KTMA.
Network being Network, it wasn’t enough to simply reconstruct the shows in HD. Each movie’s disc included a new widescreen version – something which simply didn’t exist before – with slightly upgraded effects. The option is available to hear each movie’s music as audiences heard it back in the day, or to replace it with the Barry Gray and library music that graced the episodes from which each “movie” was assembled. The opening titles, especially those that were originally created on vintage video equipment that wouldn’t upscale cleanly, are replaced in some cases, though the originals – as seen above with Journey Through The Black Sun – can be seen as bonus clips. Topping it off is a booklet illustrated with vintage ITC syndication sales material and a short essay by David Hirsch who, as a key contributor to Starlog Magazine who had already rubbed elbows with the show’s makers and ITC’s public relations department, was chosen to recommend episode pairings that would make viable syndicated movie offerings. Some of the classic Super Space Theater promotional material reprinted in the booklet show their origins quite clearly: the fonts and the artwork style are vintage Starlog through and through. Hirsch also appears in a featurette detailing the creation of the original syndication package and the HD upgrade that was probably the last thing anyone was ever expecting to see.
And yet it exists, and it’s wonderful, and it sold out quickly, hence the lack of the customary ordering button at the top of this review. With that in mind, I offer two predictions: Cosmic Princess may yet again be the victim of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in its new, widescreen, HD form, and these movies may yet resurface as individual offerings since there was such a demand for them. Both of these might seem like long shots, but then again… so was any of this material returning in the age of blu-ray to begin with.
Do you want to add a snazzy, classy Italian quote attributed to Shakespeare that Shakespeare never actually wrote to your own photos? Now you can! So enamoured was I of this oddball element of Spazio: 1999 that I isolated it in transparent PNG form for you to enjoy and abuse as you see fit.
