Today, if you search YouTube for a 1950s version of Buck Rogers, you’ll find plenty of smooth, AI-generated-looking trailers that seem like comic strips come to life. This kind of faux-1950s sci-fi is a mishmash of half-remembered styles and aesthetics and, somewhat hilariously, doesn’t fully capture just how weird the real 1950s Buck Rogers actually was. Here’s why the first Buck Rogers TV series is barely remembered today, why it was important anyway, and why the show is much wackier than you can possibly imagine.
Seventy-five years ago, on April 15, 1950, ABC launched the first Buck Rogers TV series, which, technically, was a reboot. This simply because the more famous Buster Crabbe-led Buck Rogers movie serials had been around since 1939. But, as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction pointed out in 1995: “...restrictions imposed by TV production necessitated its being shot live on a cramped interior set, [as a] result... the cinema serials seemed visually extravagant by comparison.” Essentially, a show that came out 10 years after a series of short films looked much cheaper and was simply less well-edited because it wasn’t edited at all.
