The folks out at A&E sent over a special treat for us today, folks, and this one’s a full-on doozy. They sent out a copy of Space:1999 Season One, and though the title makes it a raging anachronism, getting a look at what the hopeful souls of 1975 thought we’d be doing with the space program back then is a downright hoot today.

Space:1999 follows a group of astronauts on a lunar colony, when an accident involving nuclear waste storage blasts the moon out of its orbit, thus turning it into the equivalent of a huge, largely unsteerable spacecraft that the crew of Moonbase Alpha now ride upon. Not surprisingly, now that they’re stuck on the flying moon, they also find themselves eventually in deep space, and thus, find themselves also discovering all sorts of new phenomenon, species, and even some societies as part of their huge adventure.

This one is going to be a difficult one to deal with. Finding the nearly twenty one hours required to watch this will be no small task. Science fiction buffs might get along well here, but a good chance exists that the look will simply be too dated to deal with. Retro buffs will patently love this, though, as it’s gone well past “collectible” age and is well on its way to full-bore “antique” status.

The plots are a little on the preposterous side; you’d think that a moon hurtling through space might actually, you know, hit something at some point. Slim chance, yes, but chance all the same. And while I’m at it, I didn’t notice much of an explanation as to how they actually manage to go see any of these civilizations when the moon is literally hurtling through space.

Admittedly, it’s a little–okay, a lot–on the dated side, but the end result here is a fairly engaging dose of retro science fiction, a wonderful study of how writers in the seventies seldom thought about the future, and how their work would be irreparably damaged by the calendar rolling to the year 2000. It can be entertaining at times, even if the overall effect puts you in mind more of “low-budget Star Trek knockoff” than “clever science fiction enterprise”, because it’s willing to do some interesting things. The problem of course, as explained at length above, is that these “interesting things” are poorly explained at best.

If you’re willing to tolerate a really unpleasant look and some thoroughly bizarre plot, well, Space:1999 could be just what you’re looking for.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Space: 1999 a throughly excellent seven out of ten–it’s an interesting dose of retro science fiction, but if you keep the eye of a science fiction buff, well placed for making retro fans happy.