Buck Rogers: Planet of the Slave Girls (Part 1)
By Lisa Fary
Buster Crabbe, Roddy McDowall and Jack Palance! Jack effing Palance in a cape! With glowy red hands!
You can kiss food goodbye in the future. On 25th century Earth, there is no funky blue future-food. There are only food discs that look like giant, white Altoids. The disc has all the nutritional stuff you need, but is probably a lot like subsisting on rice cakes (rice cakes are vile – no one believes you when you swear you like them).
On the plus side, there are no dirty dishes to wash. On the downside, Earth’s food disc supply has been poisoned!!!!! It’s up to Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, and some dude harboring lots of male aggression to find out what’s going on before all of Earth’s pilots DIE!!!!
The three trace the poisoned food discs to. . . . ummmmm. . . I’m not sure I’m hearing this right.
Planet Fistula?
That’s gross.
A fistula is a hole between the bladder and the vagina. I learned about it on Oprah (about fistulas, not vaginas). That’s a horrible name for a planet.
Not only is the place unfortunately named, it’s a den of civil rights abuses. Buck, Wilma and Duke (the aforementioned dude with aggression problems) have a lovely dinner with Fistula governor Roddy McDowall and discover that, in addition to being forced to wear shiny, orange, go-go dancer uniforms, their waitresses are slaves.
The only African-American at the dinner table inquires, “What’s slavery?” and Buck has to educate her.
Right- have the African-American girl ask what slavery is. I get that Earth’s holocaust gobbled up history, but that’s messed up. Have Wilma or Duke ask. Don’t make the African-American girl do it.
So, slavery is afoot, but Governor Roddy is too lazy to do anything more than purchase the slaves and too dense to really be sinister. I mean, he wears a sparkly turban. That’s not exactly the universal symbol for “Bad Guy” in the Buckverse.
Capes, however, are the universal symbol for “Bad Guy”, and Jack Palance has a really big cape, which he wears over a white and purple satin dress (call it a “robe” if you want – it’s a dress). Then, as if the cape wasn’t enough of an evil giveaway, he has glowy red hands, which he uses to control and kill his minions (who are also being sold as the slaves).
But, the slave trade is all a ruse to further Jack Palance’s true goal: GALACTIC DOMINATION!!! The slaves are being trained as fighter pilots and spies in Governor Roddy McDowall’s palace. They’re also. . . .
. . . contaminating Earth’s food discs.
That’s part of Jack Palance’s evil plot, too. Poison the food discs, make Earth’s pilots too sick to fly, send in slave fighters, take over the world.
Which seems really stupid. Earth can’t make it’s own food and has very little in the way of resources. So, why try to take over Earth? It’s kind of a worthless planet in the 25th century.
All is revealed by a slave girl sent to entertain Buck for the evening. Being the conscientious 20th century guy he is, Buck sets out to free the slaves and save Earth. While he’s doing that, Wilma and the slave girl get snatched and taken back to Jack Palance’s hollowed-out mountain lair.
Yeah. His evil lair is inside a hollowed-out mountain. I think that’s one of the signs that you’re stuck in a cult. If you suddenly find yourself living inside a hollowed-out mountain, I think it’s time for an intervention.
Next time: a gold leather clad Buck Rodgers intervenes in “Planet of the Slave Girls Part 2”!
And BTW, the planet isn’t called Fistula. It’s Vistula, which sounds a lot like “fistula” when Roddy McDowall says it.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
Part 2 of this story is as far as I’ve gotten in my Buck Rogers set. I’m still decompressing a bit from that mountain!
This is hilarious! You know, I’ve never seen the original Buck Rogers. But you know what I have seen?
Dang it! Can I not imbed???
Oh well – here’s the link for what I was TRYING to share:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-HmBUYkE48
And yes. I know the word is “embed.” Shut up.
I remember being a super-happy 12 or 13 year old when this first aired, and being a super-unhappy 12 or 13 year old when it was over. I loved the Buck Rogers movie, and saw it 4x in the theaters, partially because I was kind of stupid, and partially because my wild-eyed missionary zeal made it particularly easy for me to talk others into seeing the movie and taking me with them (And paying.) When the show came to NBC, I was super-excited, though I was a bit confused by how different the ‘new footage’ (Buck in his Apartment, the whole “Be a spy for us” coda in the 1st ep) looked from the existing movie footage. I still think the movie looks, y’know, nice. The badly-inserted TV footage looked cheezy, even to a Jr. High Schooler. When this ep aired, I watched it w/ my family, most of whom grumbled and walked away while it was on, leaving me rather embarassed, and despondent, so this episode marks the point where my great big dreamy dreams fell apart into yet another example of Glenn Larsony Badness. (And being 12 or so, I couldn’t even admit I thought the slave girls were kinda’ cute, or else it would have been an endless barrage of “Fag! You like girls! That’s so gay!” because that’s how oddly off-base Jr. High was in those days.) Of course I still watched every episode of the show because that’s the kind of big dope I am.
FWIW: @ Teresa: This isn’t the original Buck Rogers by a long shot, the original was a movie serial back in the 30s, and there were one or two tv shows prior to this one. @ Alphagirl: A fistula is strictly speaking any accidental plumbing connection between two organs. F’rinstance, they make use of an “Intravenus Fistula” to move the sub from one set of veins to another in “Fantastic Voyage.” Wait, is “Fantastic Voyage” the one w/ the tiny submarine, or is that the one w/ the dog and the cat and the giant squid try to find their way from indiana to california…?
I figured as much. That was a Looney Tunes cartoon from the 30s, so I imagined Buck Rogers must have been pretty old. It’s funny, though, there’s so much that exists that I wouldn’t know about were it not for Looney Tunes.
I know BR isn’t exactly top notch TV, even for 1980, but I love it the way I love Flash Gordon, which I love the way I love elephant ears at the county fair.
And a fistula is still gross.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, a fistula is *DAMN* gross, it’s just not automatically Vagina-and-Blatter-Without-A-Factory-Warantee gross.
Oddly, I like the Glen Larson “Buck” more now than I did as a kid. I like playing “Spot the Galactica Castoffs” and stuff, and of course I like Wilma plenty super-much big. And I’ve always liked Tim O’Connor. And any show that has Buster Crabbe show up as stunt-casting has my respet. (BTW, remember the scene in Planet of the Slave Girls, Pt. 2, where they have Gil and Buster standing side-by-side in those embarasing spandex uniforms? And remember how Gil looks all middle-aged and doughy, and Buster looks oddly cool and extremely fit, and like he could easily rip Gil’s head off with his bare hands if he wanted to? I just looked it up on Wiki: When that scene was shot, Gil was 36, and Buster was – I am not freakin’ makin’ this up – Buster Crabbe was SEVENTY ONE YEARS OLD at the time! Good God!)
So, just out of curiosity, will we be getting more Gil Gerard BR25C reviews someday, or did Twiki and Dr. Theophilos put you off permanently?
I’ve actually seen all of these before when I was a kid (explains a lot about me, I know). I just got all caught up in moving and starting my new job that Buck and the gang fell by the wayside. I’ll get back to it. No one can resist Buck.