full image - Repost: [PARTIALLY LOST] Captain Video and His Video Rangers (from Reddit.com, [PARTIALLY LOST] Captain Video and His Video Rangers)
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‘Captain Video and His Video Rangers’ was a television series from the true Golden Age of Television. It aired from June of 1949 to April of 1955. Cast by the DuMont TV Network, it was the very first science fiction television show in America, and it set the scene for the dozens of shows to come after. Later episodes were even written by several famous sci-fi writers, including the likes of Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, and James Blish. Captain Video, who was said to be the Guardian of the Safety of the World, fought villains in space alongside his sidekick, the Ranger, and backing of the Video Ranger Army. Though incredibly low-budget, the show proved to be massively popular with both children and adults. It was even popular enough to have both a spin-off Saturday morning show and a film serial, as well as dozens of pieces of merchandise and a short comic book run.Honestly, the show was absolute garbage. The acting is awful, the early plots were said to be completely incomprehensible, and even the props and stage backgrounds are laughable. The production was so low-budget that the actors made more off of live public appearances than they did the show itself. The original actor for Captain Video, Richard Coogan, was so put out by the lack of pay that he quit, leaving him to be replaced by Al Hodge not even a year and a half after taking the role.Suffice to say, the entire series is horrendously 50s, and I’m completely in love with it. Nearly every episode is completely lost— out of an estimated 1,537, only 24 are known to have survived. 5 have surprisingly had a home media release and are publicly available online. The remaining 19 are locked away in the UCLA archives. From what little research I’ve been able to do it seems that none of the Captain Video TV series was ever copyrighted at all. (Besides copyright, what is it that keeps the UCLA from just… letting people see the lot of their collection? Inconvenience, maybe?) God knows they won’t be, but I really do want all the available episodes to be public instead of hidden away in some back room like an overly-expensive peep show.
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