Space Patrol is a British science fiction television series featuring marionettes that was produced in 1962 and broadcast from the beginning of April 1963.
The series features the vocal talents of Dick Vosburgh, Ronnie Stevens, Libby Morris, Murray Kash and Ysanne Churchman, and comprises 39 half-hour episodes.
The series is set in the year 2100, by which time the indigenous and autonomous civilisations on Earth, Mars and Venus have banded together to form the United Galactic Organization (UGO).
Space Patrol is the UGO's military wing, and the series follows the actions of this interplanetary force, focusing on the missions of a tiny unit led by the heroic, bearded Captain Larry Dart.
[2] The imperfect Slavic accent variants and six-pointed star chest emblems of these two may have been a sly nod to the Jewish-Russian heritage of the English series creator/writer.
Providing technical support on Earth is the brilliant and inventive Irishman Professor Aloysius O’Brien O’Rourke Haggarty,[3] called "Pop" by his daughter Cassiopeia, to his perpetual dismay.
Haggarty's garrulous pet Martian "parrot" (a Gabblerdictum bird), taught to talk in "The Slaves of Neptune" episode, accompanies the crew on rare occasions.
[4] The series was sold overseas and broadcast in the US, Canada and Australia, and in spite of the very low budget – which meant that sometimes the shadow of a puppet could be seen behind a "TV Screen" before the communication device was supposedly turned on —the show rated strongly with young audiences in many regions (including New York City)[5] and garnered a huge following.
Whereas Gerry Anderson had a rocket ship in Fireball XL5 that could travel light-years to planets around other stars as though they were just a few million miles away, Space Patrol took a more realistic approach.
On other planets, they would use dial-selector translators (dial P for Pluto) to talk to alien beings—at the time, even some serious scientists considered the possibility of life on Venus, Mars and maybe elsewhere.
Life support in hazardous atmospheres was provided by a "Mo-lung" (short for 'Mobile Lung')—a sealed cylindrical transparent helmet, and the crew would often ride around on "Hover Jets", or more rarely, an "Ion Gun" which looked like a giant sparkler firework.
Neptune was said to have atomic heating but none of the planets were really cold, such as when Dart walked about on Pluto (in "The Buried Spaceship") without any extra protection in what would be temperatures of about −230 °C.
Another time, an alien from Alpha Centauri visited them and installed a device which allowed the Galasphere to travel faster than light (at which point it vanished).
For many years it was believed that all but a handful of episodes had been destroyed, until a complete cache of 16 mm prints was discovered in the garage of Roberta Leigh's home.
Although compared (and often confused) with the Gerry Anderson productions (due to the similar use of voice-synchronised marionettes), Space Patrol is distinguished by some of its creative choices.
Space Patrol debuted on Sunday, 7 April 1963 on ABC Weekend TV, at the time the ITV contractor for England's Midlands and North.
In March 2018, the Network imprint announced that a Region-free Blu-ray box set of the complete series, restored using the latest technology, would be released on 2 April of that year.