Reaching the Outer Limits

Part One: There is Nothing Wrong With Your Television Set...

These days, it’s easy to get information on any vintage piece of film or television, even if you’ve never heard of it before. There are episode guides online, and in many cases, complete episodes to watch. Often, there’s a DVD release available. Compare this to the situation back in the 1970s. I’d never heard of the science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, and it had hardly made an impression here in the UK, clocking up only sporadic appearances on a couple of regions across the ITV network. Then, in 1975, it popped onto my radar...

It was a magazine that put me onto the scent. World of Horror was a short-lived, cult publication, focused on the whole genre of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Issue 4 caught my eye with its cover featuring Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, and it was in here, on page 48, that I got my first glimpse of the weird creatures – or ‘bears’ – that had been a feature of the 1960s science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits. The magazine’s editors didn’t seem to know very much about it. A reader had sent in a set of bubblegum cards (which were apparently never returned), and a very brief panel of text informed us that 'these creatures are very rare and seldom seen’, as if they were describing some rare fauna. I liked the look of them, especially the bizarre ‘Man With Super Sight’, who boasted eyes the size of fried eggs. Also depicted were ‘Man From Galaxy X’, ‘The Radio-Active Man’, ‘Incredible Ice Man’ and a reptilian creature ‘Hunting New Victims’. The descriptions had nothing at all to do with the TV series: Topps, who produced the cards, had licensed only the images, and were not permitted to include any material from the scripts, so they simply made up their own stories, printed on the backs of the cards.

Not long after seeing these examples in print, I was shown some of the real things – a friend of mine had a handful of the cards, including ‘The Man With Super Sight’, and they looked even better in colour. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get him to part with them. Much later, I chanced upon a few examples in a random bag of old gum cards, but complete sets sell today for significant sums.

Here in Britain, the cards had been issued in 1964 by A&BC (who later produced several Batman sets). It seems a strange decision to release a set of bubblegum cards based on a series that was almost unknown in the UK, but perhaps the manufacturers thought that the weird monsters would appeal to kids regardless, and the cards were indeed sold under the banner ‘Monsters From Outer Limits’. Any kids who had chanced to see an episode would have had to sit up well past their bedtimes. Granada had broadcast a batch of episodes between April and October 1964, scheduled at 9.40pm on Thursday evenings, with a further selection shown sporadically between July and December of 1966, at the later time of 11.05pm on Friday evenings. Elsewhere across the ITV regions, the series was either absent from the schedules or as good as.

It was no wonder then, that I’d never heard of The Outer Limits when I turned up those gum cards in World of Horror. But my interest had been piqued, and I needed to know more. I held out no hope whatsoever of actually getting to see any episodes, and it was as much as one could hope for to find a few stills and the odd paragraph of description. For this, I had to wait until Christmas 1975, when a copy of Jeff Rovin’s A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films found its way into my collection. The book focused primarily on movies, but the author had (I suspect rather grudgingly) conceded a chapter dealing with science fiction on television. Rovin was dismissive of the likes of Irwin Allen, and had almost nothing to say about the efforts of Gerry Anderson, but he did find room for two paragraphs in praise of The Outer Limits, which he described as ‘a consistently high quality series […] One is hard pressed to recall a bad episode.’ This all sounded very promising. The book didn’t run to an episode guide, but the text mentioned a few key episodes including Demon With a Glass Hand, I, Robot, and Cold Hands, Warm Heart, all of them name-checked on account of their notable guest stars. There were also two photographs, one depicting the Andromeda creature seen in the pilot episode Galaxy Being, and the other showing David McCallum as a highly evolved human in The Sixth Finger. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start and, more importantly, I knew now that The Outer Limits was a series worth watching out for – in the unlikely event of its ever resurfacing on British television.

A few years later, I chanced upon an Outer Limits Annual at a jumble sale, one of two published by World Distributors in 1965 and 66 and made up of reprints of American comics. As with the gum cards, it seems an odd choice of publication for a series that was clearly not aimed at a juvenile audience. The stories offered a few clues to the style of the series and the type of stories one might expect from it, with a preponderance of silly monsters, one of whom also featured on the cover painting.

As things turned out, it was almost five years to the day after I’d seen those bubble gum cards that I finally got to see what the fuss was all about. Inexplicably, BBC2 bought the series and began broadcasting episodes on 28 March 1980, scheduling them in a very late timeslot, with many not starting until after midnight. Like ITV before them, the BBC chose to ignore the original US broadcast order, and went even further by mixing up episodes from the two seasons. Thus it was that this UK network premiere kicked off with Harlan Ellison’s Demon With a Glass Hand, whose reputation preceded it – although it wasn’t exactly typical of the series as a whole.

Of the scripts, Jeff Rovin’s summary had described the plots as ‘fresh and exciting, and with rare exceptions when a moral or fable took centre stage, they were all classic science fiction’. Now at long last, I would get the chance to find out if he was right in his estimation or hopelessly deluded...

In part 2, I’ll revisit those BBC2 broadcasts in more detail…