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Gene-ology 51 – The Marquis of Donnybrook Gene-ology: A Roddenberry Podcast

Gene-ology examines the last produced script Gene Roddenberry wrote for the western series Boots & Saddles, one which happened to mark his first collaboration with one DeForest Kelley.  But did Gene's script land a knockout punch? Guest starring Jeff Gauntt as Captain "Shank" Adams and Larry Nemecek as Captain Merriweather
  1. Gene-ology 51 – The Marquis of Donnybrook
  2. Gene-ology 50 – The Prussian Farmer
  3. Gene-ology 49 – The Gatling Gun
  4. Gene-ology 48 – Alice
  5. Gene-ology 47 – El Paso Stage

Retrogram #7718: B.S.W. Retrogram – theLogBook.com

The week of May 2, 1977: Before the Dark Times, before the Empire – well, approximately three weeks before the Dark Times and before the Empire – television sci-fi is just doing its thing on both sides of the Atlantic, unaware that audience expectations are about to change drastically. Retrogram examines five shows that were on the air during one of the last few weeks before a little movie called Star Wars took the world by storm. (1:06:06) Right-click here and “save as” to download the podcast – trust me, it sounds better this way than it does on 8-track. Links: Feel free to help support the show at Patreon or Ko-Fi! November 1983 in theLogBook’s History Timeline Special thanks to Ashley Thomas – The Nerdy Blogger (and all of our other Patreon supporters) Support Retrogram by purchasing through links and search boxes in theLogBook.com Store. The #1 song of that week… Music (in order): “Great Dark Spot” by Jahzzar (betterwithmusic.com) CC BY-SA “O Crebro do Morto” by Dr. Frankenstein (freemusicarchive.org) CC BY-SA “Queen” by Soft and Furious (freemusicarchive.org) CC BY-SA (break music) “League Of Mice” by Dee Zee (freemusicarchive.org) CC BY-SA “Nine Stones” by Andrew Howes (freemusicarchive.org) CC BY-SA “Theme from Man From Atlantis” by Fred Karlin “AVV Revisited” by Hermelin (freemusicarchive.org) CC BY-SA
  1. Retrogram #7718: B.S.W.
  2. Retrogram #9060: What Did You Do During The Syndication Wars?
  3. Retrogram #8347: The Day After The Day Of The Doctor
  4. Retrogram #7152: 72 @ 50, Part 1
  5. Retrogram #2214: The Little Black Bags

It happened on this date…

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Published On: October 15, 2021

Joanna Cameron in The Secret of IsisActress Joanna Cameron, perhaps best known for starring in the cult classic 1970s live-action kids’ superhero series Isis (a.k.a. The Secret of Isis), dies at the age of 70s after suffering complications from a stroke. Launching her career in 1969 at the behest of family friend Bob Hope, Cameron at one point held the Guinness World Record for the most commercial appearances for a single actor. Following her two-season stint as Isis, she moved on to TV guest roles in The Amazing Spider-Man, McMillan & Wife, and Switch, with her last TV credit in the appropriately titled 1980 made-for-TV movie Swan Song. After leaving Hollywood, she produced and directed promotional films for the U.S. Navy, and then moved into careers in health care and hotel marketing.

Published On: October 15, 2020

Star Trek: DiscoveryStreaming service CBS All Access releases the 30th episode of Star Trek: Discovery, opening the series’ third season, which has been delayed for the better part of a year due to the COVID-19 outbreak forcing an unexpected switch to remote post-production. David Ajala (Doctor Who) joins the series’ regular cast for the third season, which takes place in a future centuries beyond what has previously been chronicled in any prior Star Trek series.

More about Star Trek: Discovery in the LogBook and theLogBook.com Store
Star Trek: Discovery now streaming on Paramount Plus

Published On: October 15, 2019

ArrowThe 161st episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Susanna Thompson (Star Trek: Voyager) and John Barrowman (Torchwood, Doctor Who) guest star in the season eight premiere.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 2018

ArrowThe 139th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. This is the premiere of the series’ seventh season.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 2014

ArrowThe 48th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Caity Lotz (Mad Men, Legends Of Tomorrow) and Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) guest star.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 2004

GenesisA week after the Genesis sample return mission tumbled back to Earth, slamming into the Utah desert floor at nearly 200 miles per hour after its parachutes failed to open, investigators find a likely cause of the crash. It appears that four gravity-sensitive switches, designed to sense the sudden deceleration of the Genesis capsule through Earth’s atmosphere and set off a timed sequence that would’ve opened the parachutes, had all been installed backwards. The four switches were designed to be redundant, so that if some failed the others could still carry out their assigned task…but this doesn’t do a lot of good if all of them are all installed incorrrectly. The investigation indicates that an erroneous schematic diagram of Genesis may be to blame. In the meantime, researchers begin to examine the surviving chunks of the broken collector plates containing particles of solar material.

Published On: October 15, 2003

Shenzhou 5China becomes the third country to independently launch a crewed mission with the flight of Shenzhou 5, an orbital flight lasting almost 22 hours. Taikonaut Yang Liwei becomes the first Chinese citizen to leave Earth, though an American astronaut born in China had flown aboard space shuttle Challenger in 1985. Derived from Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, Shenzhou 5 comes in for a rough landing, causing Liwei some minor injuries upon impact.

Published On: October 15, 2002

Buffy The Vampire SlayerThe 126th episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on UPN. James Marsters and Alyson Hannigan also star.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 1997

CassiniNASA/JPL’s interplanetary probe Cassini, with the European Space Agency-built Huygens Titan probe tagging along, lifts off on a Titan IV-B rocket. The voyage to Saturn will last seven years, during which Cassini does close flybys to receive gravity assists from Venus, Earth, Earth’s moon, and Jupiter en route to Saturn. It will operate in Saturn’s vicinity for over a decade and launch the Huygens probe, the first landing probe to visit a body in the outer solar system.

Published On: October 15, 1994

Young Indiana Jones ChroniclesThe feature-length 29th episode of George Lucas’ historical adventure series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles airs on cable channel The Family Channel, starring Sean Patrick Flanery. Allison Smith (Kate & Allie) guest stars.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 1992

Doctor WhoThe ninth Doctor Who New Adventures novel, “Love And War” by Paul Cornell, is published. A pivotal point in the young book series, “Love And War” sees the exit of TV companion Ace and the introduction of an older companion, archaeologist Professor Bernice Sumemrfield, for the seventh Doctor. Using a non-sequitur mention of the “Hoothi and their great gas dirigibles” from the television story The Brain Of Morbius as a starting point for this book’s enemy, author Cornell crafts a novel that forces the series to grow into more mature territory, with a truly unsettling adversary for the Doctor to fight. An audio version will be produced by Big Finish Productions 20 years later.

More about Doctor Who books in Book Reviews

Published On: October 15, 1988

SuperboyThe second episode of the syndicated Alexander and Ilya Salkind-produced Superboy series, starring John Haymes Newton and Stacy Haiduk, airs. Julie McCullough (Growing Pains, Robin’s Hoods) guest stars.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 1985

EnterpriseWith $4 billion having been spent on upgrading and customizing a special launch facility since 1972 to handle (mostly military) Space Shuttle launches in polar orbits, Vandenberg AFB declares Space Launch Complex 6 launch-ready, with a year to go before the first scheduled polar orbit shuttle launch. But in 1986, amid jitters in the wake of the Challenger disaster, planned use of the west coast launch facility is curtailed and finally cancelled, despite the money and time spent.

Published On: October 15, 1984

Hammer House Of Mystery And SuspenseThe fourth episode of the Hammer Studios-produced horror anthology series Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense airs on ITV; the series will be shown later in the U.S. under the title Fox Mystery Theatre. David McCallum (The Man From UNCLE, Sapphire & Steel) and Jan Francis (Just Good Friends) guest star in an episode written by David Fisher (Doctor Who) and directed by Gabrielle Beaumont (The Tomorrow People, Star Trek: The Next Generation).

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 1981

Insert CoinGeneral Computer Corp., a small company making “grey market” modification kits to freshen up Pac-Man and Missile Command arcade games, cuts a deal with Midway, the American licensee for Pac-Man, handing over the code to its Pac-Man modification kit Crazy Otto. Midway contracts GCC to continue work on the kit, but now under license. The first thing to go are the kit’s name and its modified Pac-Man character, who now has legs. A few changes and a few months later, the game’s central character has no legs, but will now sport lipstick and a pink bow, as Midway prepares to officially release the new game as an authorized Pac-Man sequel, Ms. Pac-Man – amazingly good luck for a small business that could just as easily have been sued into oblivion.

Published On: October 15, 1977

Space ShuttleNASA prepares a preliminary schedule of Space Shuttle launches, covering the years 1979-1982 (and assuming the shuttle will be ready to launch in 1979). The ambitious schedule (which also assumes, in line with current planning, that the test orbiter Enterprise will be upgraded to spaceworthiness) includes almost-monthly flights from 1979 onward to deploy communications and weather satellites already on the drawing board, as well as frequent science missions with the cargo-bay-mounted Spacelab. On only the second test flight, the schedule has OV-102 (yet to be named Columbia) slated for a mission to the abandoned early 1970s space station Skylab, using a teleoperator retrieval system which also exists only on paper. While many of the schedule’s goals will be met, the delay in the shuttle program will be longer than NASA anticipates at this time.

Published On: October 15, 1977

The Bionic WomanThe 41st episode of The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner and Richard Anderson, airs on NBC. Andrew Prine (V, Weird Science) guest stars.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Published On: October 15, 1976

ELOElectric Light Orchestra‘s sixth album, A New World Record, is released, featuring the singles “Livin’ Thing”, “Telephone Line” and “Rockaria!”; the record goes gold and then platinum by the end of the year. This is the group’s first album to sport artwork with the now-familiar ELO logo, created from a mirrored image of the upper part of a Wurlitzer jukebox; following the post-Star Wars science fiction revival, future albums render this logo as a flying saucer.

More about ELO in Music Reviews

Published On: October 15, 1972

NOAA / ESSA satellite seriesNASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration launch NOAA-2, a weather satellite intended to operate in a near-polar low Earth orbit. NOAA-2 is based on the already-flown ITOS satellite design, and will function in orbit through October 1974, with a break of only a few months due to a failed vertical temperature profile radiometer instrument. NOAA-2 will be shut down in January 1975.

Published On: October 15, 1971

25 cents pleaseBoasting a curved, futuristic fiberglass cabinet that truly looks like an alien art object, Nutting Associates’ arcade video game Computer Space hits an amusement market dominated by pinball machines and jukeboxes. Devised by Nolan Bushnell, Computer Space is a coin-operated homage to the mainframe game Spacewar, complete with complicated controls, and fails to sell well. Bushnell later has a revelation: arcade games will need to be easy to learn (but not easy to beat) in order to catch on.

More about Computer Space in Phosphor Dot Fossils
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Published On: October 15, 1970

The ImmortalABC airs the fourth episode of the modern-day science fiction series The Immortal, starring Christopher George. Susan Howard guest stars.

This series is not yet fully chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.