Le fantastiche avventure di Capitan Zoom

This was a fine, funny, tongue-in-cheek spoof of early television space shows. Its only drawback is that this movie never made it to serialization or video/DVD to be enjoyed by others.

This movie pilot debuted before "Galaxy Quest" but is the same premise. A distant planet is in trouble. A young scientist picks up TV video signals from Earth and sees stage-managed heroic exploits of Captain Zoom on a children's TV show. He believes the heroics to be real. The young scientist snags the egotistical actor with some kind of space transport tractor beam, and beams the actor who was playing Captain Zoom to the besieged planet to aid its inhabitants.

This movie is light-hearted and features some good performances by the sexy and funny Gia Carides as Vesper, Dan Riordan in the title role, Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura of Star Trek fame)as Sagan and Ron Perlman as Lord Vox aka "The Bad Guy."

I'm sorry MCA didn't put more money into promoting this film. It had an unpolished gem on its hands. But perhaps, with thinking like that, it's the reason MCA is now owned by Universal, and not the other way around.