THE LOST STARLOST

A friend of mine, Mark, wrote an e-mail to me a couple of weeks ago saying that while he liked my blog he felt that it had to be improved. I will let his own voice speak: "You have to spice up the blog....maybe some Doug McClure movies or Canadian SciFi shows......Star Lost!!!" Well, luck would have it that he e-mailed again today: "Barry Smight has not blogged about Star Lost yet.... I am losing interest." He says, "Starlost"? For those of you who are too young to remember, The Starlost was a Canadian science fiction television series made back in 1973. In fact, it started as a U.S. series but due to a variety of circumstances it ended up being shot at Glen Warren studios here in Toronto. (Glen Warren was a state-of-the-art television facility back then, and might still be. They had the finest equipment and studios a producer could hope for; well, any producer who wanted to commit their series to video-tape.) Writer Harlan Ellison was the initial brain behind the whole project. At any rate, no need to go into the genesis of this series; that can easily be studied via the Internet. One other note: Visual effects guru, Douglas Trumbull, was originally on board and once it was decided to shoot the series on tape -- much money could be saved by using the electronic chroma-key process -- his job was to develop the "Magicam" process. This system would use electronic tape's ability to instantly matte together various picture elements relatively cheaply and, in addition, do so with a 'motion control' capability. NBC was the intended network for this new series. They already had screened Star Trek just a few years before. (Trek was very hot in reruns.) What ended up happening is that this new show would not get a main network run, but instead, would be shown by NBC "O & O" (owned and operated) stations. Now, not every station would carry the show on "Thursday nights at 9" kind of thing, and not every station would show it, necessarily; therefore The Starlost missed out on having network prestige. CTV carried the program in Canada... Glen Warren studios were also the CFTO (CTV's flag-station) studios. Trumbull was not able to get the Magicam system up and running in time, and in addition to this, there was a writers' strike in the U.S. so the series' scriptwriting duties were undertaken by Canadian writers -- most of whom had never written anything of the sort before. (To be fair, Harlan Ellison himself stated that these writers worked hard to get their scripts shootable.) So, instead of a 'motion control' type electronic matting, regular static camera blue screen was used; instead of writers like Richard Matheson, Jerome Bixby, and the gang, the show got writers who did not necessarily understand television science fiction. This all leads to the reason for this blog, outside of making my friend, Mark, happy... On Saturday, September 22nd, 1973, my friend Dennis I sat in his family's living room and waited for the big show to premiere on their 26-inch colour television (mine was only 20). There had been a review in the Toronto Star which said The Starlost was even better than Star Trek (which was only four years old at that point). Dennis' mom, a francophone lady who had the habit of laying down on her side on the couch while watching television, and who sported a terrifically profane mouth which factored into the viewing experience, joined us for the opening episode. To be continued...