![]() ![]() The 2100 date was also retained, but the most interesting aspect of this film is that several brand new scenes were filmed featuring Patrick Allen and the rest of the International Lunar Commission (operating from what seems to be a hotel conference room) reacting to the events of Breakaway as they unfolded. Again the show’s opening and closing titles were dropped, and the movie opens with the same narrator (Marc Smith, who had also voiced The Beta Cloud) explaining the premise of the series no Star Wars-style opening text crawl this time, but just as much cheesy inaccurate dialogue and again new opening and closing titles sequences. The following year another Space:1999 compilation, Alien Attack, combined two episodes from the show’s first season the series opener, Breakaway, with a later episode, War Games. Patrick Allen leads the turtleneck-wearing members of Alien Attack’s Lunar Commission. The existing opening and closing titles sequences were dropped in favor of new titles that now set the series in the year 2100, featured a narrated Star Wars-esque opening text crawl, a new opening theme composed by Mike Vickers, and a closing song from Oliver Onions. Only minimal changes were made to the episodes the recap at the start of part 2 was cut for obvious reasons, as was the episode’s final scene. ![]() Homing in on the show’s only two-part story, The Bringers of Wonder, they decided to edit the two episodes together and release it as a feature film, with a new title – 1978’s Destination Moonbase Alpha. Desperate to find anything with which they could cash in on this sudden explosion of interest in science fiction they naturally turned to Space:1999, which had been cancelled the previous year. All over the world studios rushed to cobble together sci-fi movies as quicky and cheaply as possible, and ITC were no exception. Then in 1977 a little movie named Star Wars arrived in cinemas, and suddenly science fiction was big business again. This idea was nothing new even at the time but so far, except for some Italian UFO and Space:1999 compilations, the Gerry Anderson shows had yet to be subjected to this treatment. ITC themselves produced several such compilation movies during the 1960s, taking two-part episodes of shows like The Saint, The Baron and Man in a Suitcase and releasing them overseas as films. These features were collectively known as Super Space Theatre, and their origins actually stretched back to the 1960s. If you were a Gerry Anderson fan growing up in the 1980s or 1990s then chances are you were familiar with a range of videotapes that claimed to be feature film versions of various Gerry Anderson shows, with such exciting titles as Thunderbirds in Outer Space and Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars, yet when you put them into the VCR just turned out to be several episodes bolted together with new opening and closing title sequences.
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