Placing an emphasis on science before fiction, television viewers were treated to a variety of complex challenges from mental telepathy, robots, man-eating ants, killer trees, man's first flight into space and time travel.
Typically, the stories related to the life or work of scientists, engineers, inventors, and explorers, the program concentrated on such concepts as space flight, robots, telepathy, flying saucers, time travel, and the intervention of extraterrestrials in human affairs.
[1] The first season was filmed on 35mm Eastmancolor negative, which was then not considered the best color available for television, often fading over time due to vinegar deterioration.
[citation needed] Syndication packages for a second season were renewed at an 80 percent retention ratio, borderline for color production.
[1] Each episode was introduced by a stirring brass, string, and woodwind fanfare (most likely composed by Ray Bloch, longtime music director for Ed Sullivan), while the camera panned over a science laboratory.
Bradley's duties included visits to the studio for hosting assignments, often filmed in batches of two, three and four episodes in a single day.
[1] Because of the limited budgets and intense production schedules of ZIV episodic television shows, most of the scientific, and not-so-scientific apparatus appears again and again as props with many different functions.
Posters, paintings and electronic gadgets appeared that were used previously as props in producer Ivan Tors' The Magnetic Monster (1953), Riders to the Stars (1954) and Gog (1954).
Every station featured regional sponsorship and depending on the price tag, Truman Bradley was hired to film commercials for those local spots as inserts.
From 1996 to 1998, Science Fiction Theatre aired weekly on Friday evenings over the Sci-Fi Channel on cable TV.
A young couple discovers that their neighbors, who possess a sonic broom and many other technologically advanced household items, are fugitives from the future who have fled to the past to escape an oppressive government.
The Magnetic Pole Weather Station receives a strange distress message and initiates one of the greatest rescue missions of all time.
His friend, psychiatrist Dr. Elliott Harcourt, reasons that placing Professor Sheldon in a similar environment will reverse his condition.
He is placed in a wheelchair in the "Cone of Silence", consisting of a raised circular platform suspended by 3 wires tied to a common vertex.
Although the cone's surface is open, anyone sitting inside would experience silence due to the phased ultrasonic noise generators located just below the vertex.
The eccentric Dr. Pliny visits a university where he builds a device purported to provide free energy from cosmic rays.
Then, just when it seems that Miami is doomed, a freak high-pressure system forces the storm back out to sea, where it dissipates over colder waters.
While examining his laboratory and unfinished work, workers of his institute discover he had been receiving his discoveries from extraterrestrials orbiting 1,500 miles above the Earth.
An obsessive scientist is unaware his wife is gravely ill as he works to develop a machine for generating high energy photons.
When his "photon gun" generates living matter, he uses it to treat his wife's degenerated endocrine system with positive results.
Fortunately, the extended daylight prevents an unscrupulous housing developer from attacking an ex-convict's family to force them out of his newly constructed neighborhood.
"Project 44" gives a husband and wife research team one year to determine if a select group of specialists can travel safely to Mars.
A reporter and the daughter of a respected astronomer, watching the stars one evening from their parked car, see what they consider a flying saucer.
A false laboratory is outfitted with hidden cameras and microphones, and technicians begin simulated work on another piece of vital equipment.
The man was a brilliant but paranoid scientist who wanted to be recognized for contributions to science and was stealing mining ideas and equipment he would later "invent".
Ironically, his sleep machine, now totally destroyed, would have insured his place in scientific history as the greatest method of surgical anesthesia ever invented.
A pair of metallurgists is approached by an escaped convict with samples of a light and flexible metal that will stop bullets.
Taking inspiration from the insect world, a psycho-pharmacologist elicits an enzyme that can turn mentally defective humans into useful hive workers.
A mysterious and vaguely menacing medical researcher develops a vaccine that both cures and prevents all microbial infections known to man.
Government security agents manage to track down and destroy the sonic projector, but the only recoverable part of the debris is melted beyond recognition and is composed of a material unknown on Earth.