TV and Burgers

"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw.  These are Unidentified Flying Objects that people say they are seeing now.  Are they proof that we are being visited by civilizations from other stars? Or just what are they? What you are about to see is part of a 20-year search." Those words, spoken by Jack Webb, were the introduction to each episode of Project U.F.O. which ran on NBC for two seasons beginning in February 1978.  The show was based on the files of Project Blue Book, which was a study of unidentified flying objects by the US Air Force between 1952 and 1969.  The show starred William Jordan as Major Jake Gatlin and Caskey Swaim as Staff Sergeant Harry Fitz as two Air Force investigators working on Project Blue Book.  In season two Jordan was replaced by Edward Winter as Captain Ben Ryan and the show suffered greatly.  Winter, who had been brilliant as Colonel Flagg on M*A*S*H*, was a dud here.  His presence and th...

Back in the day, before it was so popular to turn old TV shows into movies, it was fairly common to have a popular movie turned into a weekly TV series.  This rarely worked, but there are some notable exceptions such as M*A*S*H and Alice.  But for every one of those there are dozens that littered the TV landscape.  The problem was that most of those cinematic features did not really translate well to a television audience.  No one was really interested in watching Animal House get watered down to a weekly series called Delta House.  Some shows took the film’s original premise, tweaked it a bit, ignored the film’s ending and started over.  Such was the case with the 1977 series Logan’s Run. A little background for those who have forgotten:  Logan’s Run was a 1976 science fiction film about a dystopian society in the 23 rd century.  The people live in a “perfect world of total pleasure” with only one catch.  No one is allowe...