Hey, I'm Alive

A pretty much forgotten made for TV film about a college educated girl and a graduate from the school of hard knocks Canadian who are stranded in the Yukon when their small plane goes down. Sally Struthers and Ed Asner made for a strange pairing to say the least. The picture had some annoying religious overtones and never touched enough on how they actually survived.

I was a sensitive little kid when these trashy TV movies came out. They were manipulative towards a far more naive society. I even remember every other week on Marcus Welby the plot was some happy beautiful girl preparing for her wedding then BOOM! She finds a dreaded mole and it is all over.

A lot of people died from moles on 1970s TV.

Anyway, back to this film. Lou Grant and Gloria Stivic stranded together might be interesting but not these two characters. They are unbearably annoying.

With Struthers crying out in hunger on this film, one can only remember the SNL skits spoofing her weight gain in her feed the children commercials.

This film is not to be taken seriously. Which is a good thing.

I was disappointed reading some of these comments.

I work at a museum that has a display about the event that this movie is about. To Flores' granddaughter, they crashed in the Yukon Territory, in CANADA. The Yukon is not in Alaska, rather beside it in Canada.

While I have yet to see the film I know plenty about the event and trust that the events were portrayed fairly accurately from the book written by Klaben. Helen Klaben has returned to the Yukon to hike into the site a couple of times and may be returning again this year.

It is a pretty incredible story and their incredible survival should not be downplayed by the people who doubt the possibility or validity.

Hey, I'm Alive (1975)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Made for TV movie is based on a true story. The film tells the story of a religious freak (Ed Asner) and a free loving girl (Sally Struthers) who crash their plane in the Yukon wilderness and have to survive for 49 days. This film makes the fatal mistake of having a downright horrid screenplay that gives us two very annoying characters and makes us stay with them for 75-minutes. The first thirty-minutes is nothing more than Asner preachers and going on religious spells while Struthers acts stupid and says one dumb comment after another. Struthers voice over narration is among the worst I've ever heard and what she says is just downright silly. The screenplay usually just centers on them talking and it never really gets the wilderness involved, which is a shame as some of the visuals are quite good. The film starts to pick up during the second half when the two start talking about normal things but by then it's way too late because the movie is almost over. Asner is decent in his role but Struthers is pretty bad from start to finish as it seems she thinks she's playing Gloria from All in the Family.

Sometimes interesting events are lost over time. I had no idea this plane crash story really happened until I came across this movie. It's pretty amazing that there's any story tell when a small plane crashes in the huge, unpopulated expanse of the Yukon (way up near Alaska). One would expect, esp. in 1963, that you just disappear and are never heard of again.

Well, the two very different individuals on this crash had an experience that we learn about in this movie. The people (strangers to each other) couldn't be more different: a brash, Jewish New York lady in her 20s and a quiet, highly devout Mormon / Mexican-American man in his 40s.

Their clash is immediate: the man pushes his religious beliefs on the lady ... and she is rebellious yet vulnerable. You wonder if and when this might go from bad to worst... What's great is that you get to see Sally Struthers and Ed Asner kind of in their prime and putting out great performances.

One thing to be prepared for is the playup on religion / god. It's kind of done in a 1970's mystical style which, by today's standards, might seem a little like there was a religious agenda.

While the movie mainly focuses on the interaction between the two wildly diverse characters over an amazing 49 day period ... it's only 75 minutes long and is worth the watch just to learn about this amazing story.