Jetpacks, a talking monkey, capricious gang leaders, child endangerment, full-on societal collapse — children’s TV in the mid-1970s was awesome. I revisited the short-lived series Ark II for hilobrow.com. The piece begins:
A year before the arrival in theaters of a movie we’d come to call A New Hope, CBS broadcast the serial Ark II, now a mere 15-episode footnote from the Golden Age of Saturday morning television. While our current cultural moment, a Golden Age of Golden Age reboots, has arguably run its course, I’d sure welcome an opportunity to revisit and perhaps revise this short-lived bit of just-pre–Skywalker science fiction. I, then age 10, wouldn’t learn to regularly employ the four syllables that constitute “millennium” for another 12 months, but Ark II was already set a full half millennia in the future — 2476! — on an Earth so devastated by societal collapse that it could almost pass for the desert planet of Tatooine.
Not music-related, but wanted to mention it here. Read in full at: