Planet Patrol

Space Patrol is a series that has stayed vividly in the memory so it must have had something special about it. I loved it almost as much as I loved Fireball XL5. It was quirkier somehow and the characters were lively and varied. I remember giant leeks for aliens and the robots that patrolled the ship while the crew were in suspended animation were a treat. It was a show packed with original ideas. I hadn't realised it ran to three series. What I remember most was the immortal catchphrase used every time a voyage was about to begin and the ship had to be powered up - 'Gamma rays on. Yobba rays on'. The series deserved an award simply for coming up with the idea of yobba rays!

I don't remember this first time round but it's just started to be shown on Talking Pictures TV in the UK (As Space Patrol) so get over there quick!

Looks like a mid 1950s effort rather than ten years later but I love it. A few gadgets used so far, including "the plasticiser" and I can't wait to see lots more. A very nice model city but the cars don't half whizz along the roads a bit too quickly for the scale of it, but as it's set in 2100 they may be Tesla's Model 30, or nuclear powered is more probable.

Great fun which even the young may enjoy now but there is no colour which might spoil it a bit for them.

I never even heard of Space Patrol until a couple weeks ago when we went out for a movie and one of my friends gave me a disc of episodes, saying I had to watch it. It was definitely a lot of fun! It was not a very good show and definitely looks and feels very old, I'm not sure how much people would have enjoyed it back in the fifties or sixties when it was first on television but it's very campy with bad production values and hammy acting, and you definitely don't want to miss the puppetry, but the show is still a lot of fun. I know it's mostly laugh at it not with it kind of fun but still worth checking out if you can track it down.

Space Patrol is not something I would spend much time on these days, but it has the distinction of being the earliest TV programme I remember from the early 60s. For years I racked my brains trying to remember what it was called. Some elements were quite futuristic. One thing I recalled was the Galasphere - in space there is no reason apart from the aesthetic why a spaceship should have the more traditional rocket shape. Travel on earth is by a vehicle inside a tube, now recognisable as a hyperloop.

The most memorable aliens are the effeminate but ruthless Neptunians with their imperious demands for slaves. If Space Patrol is ever on TV again the Neptune related episodes would probably need to be accompanied by trigger warnings to avoid upsetting easily offended snowflakes. That's even supposing outright cancellation can be avoided.

I regret I don't recall much of this show, and I have no knowledge of it ever being rebroadcast or issued on video, but I believe it tried to be technically accurate in its predictions of foreseeable future technology. For example, the spaceships ('galaspheres' - spelling?) were toroidal, and rotated to simulate gravity. I also have an idea that they used suspended animation on long trips (journey times never seemed to be more than a couple of hours in Fireball XL5!), but can't be certain of that. In response to the question "why 39 episodes?": I believe that TV series are/were often commissioned for 13-week 'seasons', so 39 episodes = 3 series/seasons.