SPACE
ACADEMY: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Space Academy: The Complete Series
Actors: Brian Tochi Director: Jeffrey Hayden, Arthur H. Nadel
Directors: Jeffrey Hayden, Arthur H. Nadel
Format: Box set, Color, NTSC
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Number of discs: 4
DVD Features:
- Available Audio
Tracks: English (Unknown Format), Spanish (Unknown Format)
- 15 episodes on four
discs
- "Back to School with
Space Academy" featurette
- Commentary on two
episodes
- Still galleries
- DVD-ROM scripts and
series bible
- Commercial bumpers
- Easter Eggs
- Bonus trailers
Movie:
  
Disc:
An American TV show aimed at children between the ages of 6-12,
Space Academy had the good fortune to have been in production the same
time as the first Star Wars flick back in
1977. Not only did it thus manage to ride whole late-1970s sci-fi wave,
but the makers of the show also managed to hire two special effects
experts newly unemployed after Star Wars
wrapped production.
It shows in the space ship model work for Space Academy which isn't
too bad for this sort of zero budget breakfast television show. Still, the
budget was pretty small and it shows particularly in the
alien-planet-landscape-sets-so-fake-it-would-shame-the-original-1960s-Star-Trek-show
sets.
The youthful teenaged cast though is game even though the campy Jonathan
Harris (best known as the villainous Dr Smith in the original
Lost in Space) is miscast as the
kindly Commander Gampu who is in charge of the giant floating asteroid
which doubles as a training academy for youthful space explorers in the
year 3732.
THE DISCS: The entire series fits on four discs and the print
insert offers some deliciously pointless trivia about the show. There are
only audio commentaries for two of the episodes. A half-hour long
documentary ?Back to School with Space Academy? offers an interesting
glimpse into how the original cast members have aged throughout the years.
However, it only manages to reunite three or four of the original cast
members (none of the female cast members are included).
WORTH IT? Space Academy,
which one of its own cast members accurately describe as Star
Trek for kids,
would most likely appeal to die-hard nostalgists who saw the show as kids
and for whom the show's zipper-suit aesthetic probably informed their
notions of what the future will look like one day (they must be pretty
disappointed nowadays come to think of it).
Space Academy might also appeal to its intended demographic of
small children, particularly boys, between the age of six and ten, but
with the ADD-informed entertainment of today it is difficult to tell. The
plots are simplistic (they have to be to fit in the twenty minute per
episode slot) and offer genuine family-friendly entertainment in that
there isn't much
- if any
- violence in the
show. As one participant on an audio commentary points out, the aliens in
the show are seldom genuinely hostile and their ?belligerence? can usually
be chalked up to some gap in communication. There is a cute robot named
Peepo too.
RECOMMENDATION: It is difficult to believe that anyone else would
be interested in Space Academy though as it doesn't offer any real
so-bad-it's-good guffaws in the same way that a spectacularly bad and
over-the-top show such as the 1960s Japanese kids TV show
Ultraman for instance does.
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