Sci-Fi World Tour Stop Two: Germany's Raumpatrouille

Welcome to the rebellion.

Though our first stop on our Sci-Fi World Tour, Australia's Phoenix 5, has yet to be collected on DVD, you can check a small review of it here at Black Hole DVD Reviews. They also have a review of the long-awaited DVD release of a show created in the next stop of our tour, Germany! Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol), the fantastic adventures of the Spaceship Orion is a show I was turned on to a year or two ago. Now this is a series with production value and truly happening sixties design!

What seems like a fairy tale today may be reality tomorrow. Here we have a fairy tale of the day after tomorrow. There are no more national states, only mankind and her colonies in outer space. We settle on stars far-off, the bottom of the sea is developed as living place. With what are today unimaginable speeds, the starships of tomorrow transverse the Milky Way. One of this starships is the ORION, a little piece in the giant security system which protects the Earth from outer space threats. Let's accompany the ORION and her crew at their patrols-service on the edge of infinity...

If you're anything at all like me you're wiping up drool with your sleeve right now. Sadly, all that production value came at too steep a cost and only seven adventures were ever filmed. But that makes these few episodes that did get made all the more precious! If you're seeing spans of black on this post, its because my embedded Youtube vids are taking a while to load lately. Rest assured, patience will be rewarded.

A terrific taste of this amazing looking series is contained in this Youtube Remix of the music.



Did you catch the futuristic dancing? Want more? How could you not? It's too awesome to waste words on. We can thank Youtube once again for this little piece of future joy.



Oh the dancing! That's how people thought dance clubs of the future would look. Prophetic, huh? It turns out they were right! Here's a quick tour of Orion, a German club based on the series.



Starlight Casino, the extensive German home of Raumpatrouille fandom, has a page in English for the uninitiated. Click the banner below to visit. And yes, those are giant goldfish swimming above the club.

The German home page for the Starlight Casino is here. You can also find more Raumpatrouille awesomeness here, and here, and you can buy the soundtrack here or download it here. Where Phoenix 5 was sunk by a low budget and being aired against adult sci-fi shows like Star Trek instead of the kid shows it was designed to compete with.

Leave it to the Germans to out-cool the Aussies. Then again, they co-produced Star Maidens with Great Britain so perhaps we shouldn't give them a free just yet. So let's program our auto-controls for the European system and pay a little visit to an unlikely combination of English and German sensibilities.

See you there.

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Sci-Fi World Tour Stop One: Australia's Phoenix 5

Welcome to the rebellion.

An Imperial informant has brought Micheal Pinto's Fanboy.com to our attention. This spy droid is proving to be a reliable, if extremely opinionated, source for dang funny and fascinating intel from the world of sci-fi and animation going back back decades. He writes well too and I suspect, can fluently make funny, snarky comments in over six million intergalactic languages.

Inspired by his recent intel on those sci-fi loving Australians, we have decided to start our Sci-Fi World Tour of unique sci-fi shows whether incredible and unfortunate.

Take three attractive Aussie actors, dress them up in psuedo-Star Trek uniforms, team them with a walking garbage can, stuff them onto a bridge set so tiny they have to face away from the camera and shuffle just to get by each other (The bridge doors opens up to reveal a long hall set. Why not just use the entire space for the bridge so they breathe?), toss in a jazzy, 70's theme with shots of our heroes running and jumping and then stop everything with a script so slow it creates it's own black hole event horizon, dragging all time in the episode to a slow crawl wherein every minutes feels like an eternity, and you've got...

...Phoenix Five!

The fatherly Captain Roke (that is, if your father was a dick who'd let you blithely walk into near-certain death because you've "got to learn!") presides over a crew consisting of the hot-headed and arrogant (but extremely polite) Ensign Adam Hargreaves, the lovely, sensible (and therefore generally ignored) Cadet Tina Kulbrick and a lumbering, robotic cross between a garbage can and a popcorn popper named Karl (Karl?!) who speaks like a tape recorder with dead batteries.

Truth is, the show seems rather charming, though the entertainment value is a little hard to spot from the episode Pinto found on Youtube and re-posted here. But the opening credits do rock in a groovy kind of way! I dare not to frug in your bell-bottoms on your shag carpet as they play! This definitely goes on my all-night dance party mix CD! If you see spans of black below it means the Youtube vids I've attached are taking their time loading. Give it a minute. It's worth it.

A terrific write-up on Phoenix 5 and its immediate predecessors, The Interpretaris and Vega 4 can be found here at ClassicAustralianTV.com. That's where I got all these pics. They have a list of episodes and synopsis' here along with more photos.

Can we get a shout out for the all the Space Ladies in the house?!

While the budgetary restrictions are evident in the low-fi special effects they do seem to have had a great time with the costumes and make-up effects. Some real imagination is displayed in aliens like the gents below.

I dub thee, Mr. Aspar Gus, Artie Choke, and Dr. Blueberry.

Though Phoenix 5 has yet to be collected on DVD, you can check a small review of it here at Black Hole DVD Reviews.



This show should not be confused with Manny Coto's (Tales From The Crypt, Outer Limits, Star Trek Enterprise, 24) Odyssey 5 series on Showtime starring Peter Weller. According to Sci-Fi Wire by way of Akasha's Guide to Sci-Fi and Horror on the Net, it was Showtime's second highest rated series at the time and their number one show in the male demographic and with adults 25-54. Showtime was so excited buy the seriess performance it didn't bother renewing it for a second season.

There's something a sci-fi show that's so thoroughly a product of its time, budget and cricumstances that you can't help but fall in love with it despite the cheese factor. Phoenix 5 has officially inspired me to take a Round the World tour of unlikely sci-fi shows from across the Globe, with a healthy serving of the old fromage!

Round and round we'll go and where we'll stop not even our astromech droid knows!

Strap yourselves in!

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