Th!s Week:
Apr. 5th, 2010 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frustratedpilotWas flipping stations on TV after seeing the weather forecast...clicked to Th!s Network and saw the day's schedule: Starflight 1: The Plane That Couldn't Land, followed by The Panic In The Year Zero.
Starflight was the logical end of the Airport series but made by other hands, it might have been called Airport '83 and nobody other than Arthur Hailey would have cared. The plot: the first hypersonic passenger jet is forced to boost into low-Earth orbit to avoid debris from a failed satellite launch and is stranded in space. Lee Majors is the captain of the flight, Hal Linden is the mission control chief leading the response and rescue effort. The effects were fairly top-notch for the time. Looks like the cut Th!s is using is much shorter than the premiere version, tho'.
The Panic In The Year Zero is about a family struggling to survive in an America that had just suffered nuclear weapons strikes. It came out roughly the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis and so probably got marks for its topicality. But what I think is strange about it...a while after I had seen it, I got a copy of the Robert Heinlein anthology The Menace From Earth which includes the story "The Year Of The Jackpot". Reading that, I realized that much of it was copied, nearly verbatim, into The Panic In The Year Zero. Which makes me wonder if Heinlein was plagiarized or if he consented and allowed his work to be used. Heinlein's story was first published nine years earlier, so the timing isn't unclear.
These movies will probably be shown again in their usual rotations. If your curious, check your local listings.
Starflight was the logical end of the Airport series but made by other hands, it might have been called Airport '83 and nobody other than Arthur Hailey would have cared. The plot: the first hypersonic passenger jet is forced to boost into low-Earth orbit to avoid debris from a failed satellite launch and is stranded in space. Lee Majors is the captain of the flight, Hal Linden is the mission control chief leading the response and rescue effort. The effects were fairly top-notch for the time. Looks like the cut Th!s is using is much shorter than the premiere version, tho'.
The Panic In The Year Zero is about a family struggling to survive in an America that had just suffered nuclear weapons strikes. It came out roughly the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis and so probably got marks for its topicality. But what I think is strange about it...a while after I had seen it, I got a copy of the Robert Heinlein anthology The Menace From Earth which includes the story "The Year Of The Jackpot". Reading that, I realized that much of it was copied, nearly verbatim, into The Panic In The Year Zero. Which makes me wonder if Heinlein was plagiarized or if he consented and allowed his work to be used. Heinlein's story was first published nine years earlier, so the timing isn't unclear.
These movies will probably be shown again in their usual rotations. If your curious, check your local listings.
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