Sheriff Taylor.... in SPACE

[pyat]

mwbard informs me that, in 1979, Andy Griffiths was the star of a TV show called Salvage 1. It's a semi-hard SF show about a salvage and scrap dealer who builds a rocket out of junk, and flies to the Moon to retrieve the Apollo hardware. Isaac Asmimov worked on the show.

Naturally, it is on Youtube.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

A blast from the past, indeed. I remember this show being discussed in OMNI at the time (back when it was a very good mag), and IIRC it was based loosely on the exploits of one Gary (?) Truax.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

You know, I have very vague memories of having watched this - or a show like it at any rate. I also got it mixed up with a light SF show about the captain of a garbage scow - the only thing I remember is that the president of the galaxy was played by Mindy's dad...

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

I believe it was Quark:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077066/

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I loved this show! Too bad it didn't last very long. This wasn't so very beyond the realm of plausibility. When I was a kid, you could buy old an astounding array of old military aircraft and missile parts in Southern California. Granted, most of it was Korean War vintage or older and almost certainly broken. Still, I thought it was neat. You just can't find tank gun gyros anymore or let alone control sticks from Hughey helicopters. Man, I used to love digging through the scrap dealers in the San Fernando Valley and inland Orange County. This one section of the Valley in particular was where all the Army's surplus quonset huts went for retirement. I think every transmission shop and scrap dealer there used one of these as their office. They usually had their business name painted on an aircraft drop tank mounted on a signpost out front. There was even an Army/Navy story out in Orange County that had the first stage of something like an Atlas-Aegena rocket out front as a signpost(what I remember was that it was a huge rocket). All that was disappearing around the time this show aired and it was long gone by the mid eighties. Anyway, that's why I dug this show.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The pilot movie (simply entitled Salvage) detailed the construction and launch of Griffith's rocket. The series, Salvage 1, followed his crew's escapades in various other unlikely tasks.

A reviewer at the time noted that at least one astronaut had come back from the moon saying, "Wow, now that I've done THAT, what else IS there?"

Unfortunately, the show suffered the same issues.

Needles to say, I watched it religiously -- this being smack in the middle of that long, long SF drought on TV.

A modern remake would stretch the moon mission out to a full season -- and inevitably be accused of ripping off (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Nohamotyo) The Astronaut Farmer

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

I remember this show, so did the people at DragonCon. A couple years back, the commented on Salvage 1 in one of their DCTV bumps.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I actually saw this on TV at the time, and thought then it was pretty cool stuff.

::B::

[kesmun.livejournal.com]

One tiny beef... Andy's last name is Griffith. No S.