Roaring Reviews!

As the casts and crews of these series are steadily taken away from us by time, we are also losing all personal contact with this most heroic (in several senses of the word!) era of early live television broadcasting. So it is very welcome to find this 400-plus-page book by Jean-Noel Bassior entirely devoted to SPACE PATROL. She began work on the book in the early 1980s, when almost all the cast and crew except for Lyn Osborn (Cadet Happy) were still alive and available for interview, and those interviews are incorporated throughout the book.

A large number of individual chapters tell parallel stories related to the series, with some repetition and a significant degree of disorder.

Chapter 2 is devoted to the somewhat sinister Mike Moser, self-proclaimed "creator" of SPACE PATROL (which from the beginning looked, sounded and scripted very much like a West Coast version of the East Coast DuMont series CAPTAIN VIDEO).

Chapter 3 covers the early days of SPACE PATROL as a daily local 15-minute broadcast over KECA-TV in Los Angeles, and the coming-together of the core cast, namely Ed Kemmer as Commander Buzz Corry, Lyn Osborn as Cadet Happy, Ken Mayer as Major Robertson, Virginia Hewitt as the leggy Carol Carlisle, and Nina Bara as the sultry and equally leggy Tonga.

Chapter 4 , "The Right Stuff," gives us a brief biography of Ed Kemmer up to the time he joined the cast.

Chapter 5 deals with the program's jump to a once-a-week ABC network slot and resulting national fame for the cast.

Chapter 6 gives us some background on the series' usually-sole writer, Norman Jolley, who also played continuing villain Agent X.

Chapter 7 is a further appreciation of and interview with Ed Kemmer mainly exploring his career after 1955.

Chapter 8 recounts some of the problems faced by cast and crew in doing a different 30-minute live show with often-complex special effects, sophisticated lighting, and surprisingly elaborate sets each and every week.

Chapter 9 covers the life and career of Lyn Osborn, up to the beginning of his serious medical problems.

Chapter 10 discusses the premiums and toys connected with the TV series.

Chapter 11 is devoted to the life and career of Ken Mayer, while...

Chapter 12 focusses on Lou Houston who wrote the radio version of the series-- a version often much superior to the TV incarnation.

Chapter 13 centers on Dick Darley, the energetic and demanding director of the series... and a source for many great "behind the scenes" photos that adorn the book's pages.

Chapter 14 re-explores the on- and off-screen aspects of the friendship between Ed Kemmer and Lyn Osborn.

Chapter 15 turns to continuing series villain Prince Baccarratti and his alter-ego, the tormented Bela Kovacs.

Chapter 16 tells the complex and inconclusive story of the two large "Ralston Touring Rockets" of 1953 one of which was stripped inside, converted into a clubhouse on wheels, and given away to a "lucky" kid in the legendary "Name Planet X" contest.

Chapter 17 covers the last days of the series. Like SPACE CADET and CAPTAIN VIDEO, SPACE PATROL vanished from the air in early 1955. The next fall, to the greater satisfaction of sponsors, TV programming was dominated by half-hour filmed westerns.

Chapter 18 covers the tragic last days of Cadet Happy himself. Other chapters profile Virginia Hewitt and Nina Bara, and ask, "Where have all the heroes gone?" Where, indeed? There are appendices contributed by various experts describing various Space Patrol-related toys and premiums, the 30-minute network TV episodes, some of the surviving 30-minute radio episodes, and the most-often-seen minature buildings and spaceships of the series.

Mike Moser's sudden death in the spring of 1953 (struck by a car as he stepped off a dark curb) tolled the end for SPACE PATROL. When Nina Bara reminded Moser's widow of various unkept promises made by Moser to the cast, she was promptly fired. The daily 15-minute broadcasts vanished from the lineup, a development welcomed by the greatly overworked cast and crew. More ominously, by the fall of 1953, kids and their parents who ordered from the impressive catalog of SPACE PATROL toys and merchandise were receiving only a letter explaining that neither the items nor a refund would ever be forthcoming... from a company Moser had mainly operated out of the trunk of his own car! Moser's widow Helen didn't really know what to do with the program she inherited, and as soon as the key sponsor pulled out, that was the end, except for a syndicated series of old kinescope recordings on 35 mm film that could be seen spottily on TV in the late 1950s.

Many kinescoped episodes of SPACE PATROL are available for viewing today on video tape. Seen more than half a century after they were broadcast, and by jaded adults rather than starry-eyed children of the early Space Age, they don't hold up well. The weakest element by far is the scripting while the sets are often extremely impressive. Ed Kemmer is a completely convincing hero; Lyn Osborn would be funny and charming were his part not so poorly written, and his character's relationship with Kemmer's is always believable. Virginia Hewitt and Nina Bara come across as simultaneously sexy and intelligent; Ken Mayer is reliable as the only other SPACE PATROL officer we usually get to see; and whatever the name of the villain he plays, Bela Kovacs is always just on the verge of a terrifying burst of hysterical ill-temper. You don't have to watch many episodes to like these people and to wonder how this unique series came into being. And here's the book to answer almost any question you might have!

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