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By Andrew Liptak
on February 12, 2015
Science fiction has a long history in
the pages of pulp magazines and paperback novels from the early days of the 20th century. Beyond magazines such as Weird Tales,
Astounding Science
Fiction and Galaxy Science
Fiction, the genre enjoyed popularity in comic books, and,
beginning in 1949, on television. Throughout its history, science fiction has
kept up with the various technological advances which it trumpeted, whether it
was better printers in order to print paperback books cheaply and efficiently;
better infrastructure and computerized inventory systems; or a newfangled
device which brought the motion picture into homes. Captain Video and his
Video Rangers, written by some of the best authors in the business, is one
such program that took advantage of the home television and brought science
fiction into a promising new world.
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Agent Scott Meredith brought in some of the
authors he worked with, including Isaac Asimov,
Arthur C. Clarke,
Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth,
Walter Miller, Robert Sheckley, Jack Vance,
and Dan Wilcox, all major figures in the sci-fi marketplace who had plenty of
experience in the areas in which Captain Video was lacking. Their presence
helped to improve the quality of the daily show, allowing them to "tell
complex stories that tackled concepts like freedom, democracy and scientific
ethics." Jack Vance recounted in his autobiography that "when I
arrived at [Druce’s] office in New York, I found myself part of a group which
included Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke and a few others." He was to be
paid $1500 per episode (almost $15,000 in 2014), and set to work, thrilling (producer) Druce with his scripts.
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In the meantime, Jack Vance soon ran
into trouble with the show's producers: "On my last script or two, I had
been letting my imagination range too far, injecting humor into the scripts and
putting the characters into amusing predicaments. I got a call from Olga Druce
complaining that I was turning Captain Video into a farce, and that my
scripts would get her fired. Instead, she fired me."
Captain Video and his Video Rangers, despite its cheap production, was a forerunner of what would
become a major television genre: the science-fiction television show. Its
follow-up show, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, went through several network
changes before also ending in 1955. Other television shows blossomed at this
time, like Buck Rogers and Space Patrol, and major anthology
shows such as Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone found incredibly
successful runs in the late 1950s and 1960s. However, it was in 1966 that the
best-known space program of them all appeared on CBS: Gene Roddenberry’s Star
Trek. Like Captain Video, Roddenberry hired prominent
science-fiction authors, including Richard Matheson, Theodore
Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and others, to
help with the show.
Unfortunately, most of the episodes
of Captain Video have since been lost: much of the content from DuMont
and other early television networks were destroyed in the 1970s, although some episodes still remain online.
The show likely had some lasting impacts on some of the authors who helped
create it: Arthur C. Clarke collaborated on another sci-fi film venture, 2001:
A Space Odyssey, with Stanley Kubrick over a decade later. He heavily
consulted on the story’s development alongside Kubrick.
Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer
and historian from Vermont. He can be found online at his site and on Twitter @andrewliptak.
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