From: David Acheson (dkach@hot44mail.com)
Subject: Space1999: Intellectualizing 1999
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 17:03:57 EST

I happen to agree with Simon and Brian that intellectuallizing anything
beyond a certain point brings any joy out of it and usually makes one
misses the point of the whole subject in the first place. No one person
can read the writer's mind when he or she  writes a screenplay but
everyone will have a somewhat slightly different interpretation of the
presentation. Thats fine but usually most screenplays are up front about
what they are trying to get across so going beyond the obvious gets into
the interpreter's personal style and not the originators'. This is the
point where one has to be careful about what the writer was trying to
say.

Clear as mud? I'm even confusing myself. 1999 did cover some
philosophical issues but it was never only a deep thinking TV series.
Even during year one it was promoted as a big budget high adventure
series and Gerry Anderson sold it himself as entertainment. There is
nothing wrong with one person proposing a possible reason for a certain
scene or set of actions in a story but to come out and actually say that
the writer was commenting on such and such a thing is very daring.
Unless the writer actually said such a thing these comments can
backfire. I am not aiming this at any one person as I have put my own
interpretations into our episode discussions. Our diverse discussions
have been quite fascinating but I am not willing to place a bet on any
of our deep reasonings. The Dorcon hierarchy is no more a comment on the
British royal family as THE LAST ENEMY is a sex comedy.

It'll be strange not having some theme to discuss next week.

David Acheson



From: Brian Dowling (hellion@easy44net.co.uk)
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 23:18:01 -0000
Subject: Re: Space1999: Intellectualizing 1999

Hi folks,

David wrote:

> Clear as mud? I'm even confusing myself. 1999 did cover some
> philosophical issues but it was never only a deep thinking TV series.

If it's confusion you want, try going for an in-depth debate on The
Prisoner! :-)

> The Dorcon hierarchy is no more a comment on the
> British royal family as THE LAST ENEMY is a sex comedy.  

I don't think it was a comment on the Royal Family - Archon didn't go 
around insulting, upsetting or shooting things! :-)

> It'll be strange not having some theme to discuss next week.

Are we decided on what will be the first post ExE discussion?  I would tend 
to go for the fan fiction idea as worth exploring - there's plenty of it 
around, most of it available from websites.  I will have missed some of 
what has been said on list recently thanks to Win95 not getting on well 
with the high end AMD K6 2 series CPUs...  bloody Microsoft...

Brian Dowling - Birmingham, England
Online Alphan #144



From: Petter Ogland (petter.ogland@dnmi4tag.no)
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 07:36:06 +0000
Subject: Re: Space1999: Intellectualizing 1999

> I happen to agree with Simon and Brian that intellectuallizing anything
> beyond a certain point brings any joy out of it and usually makes one
> misses the point of the whole subject in the first place. No one person
> can read the writer's mind when he or she  writes a screenplay but
> everyone will have a somewhat slightly different interpretation of the
> presentation. Thats fine but usually most screenplays are up front about
> what they are trying to get across so going beyond the obvious gets into
> the interpreter's personal style and not the originators'. This is the
> point where one has to be careful about what the writer was trying to
> say.

Fine thoughts, David.  You make valid points about reading things into
the series that was never put there by the writers, but, on the other
hand if we were not allowed to speculate how would we then find anything
of interest.

Personally I've had many nice experiences about vague ideas about
writers such as Byrne, Penfold and Weir that have been verified over
time as more and more information has been available.  The most recent
aha-experience on my account was the reading of Martin's digitalised
version of THE BLACK SUN which really put new lights on Weir's input
to the series, and perhaps more than saying significantly more about
BLACK SUN really helped understanding THE GUARDIAN OF PIRI better,
thinking of the computer subtheme in the original script for BLACK SUN
that was instead matured as a central theme in THE GUARDIAN OF PIRI.

In the case of intellectual writers such as Byrne, Penfold, Weir and di
Lorenzo I believe some kind of analysis is more or less vital to
really get what the episode is all about.  With the less intellectual
writers, such as Fred Freiberger, I'm not really sure what help
intellectual analysis can to do make sense out of things like RULES OF
LUTON.  Nevertheless, I remeber we had a jolly good time on the list
trying to make sense out of the script in terms of reading the
Maya/Koenig dialogue as Freiberger writing about his early life in
Brooklyn and early days as a writer.

This makes some kind of sense, I believe, as I assume it is close to
impossible for a writer to produce something that has nothing to do
with personal values and experience.  The most popular way of reading
Freiberger, it appears to me, is to extrapolate from his pre-SPACE:1999
work for Hanna Barbera.  This explains many of his strange ideas about
"real" emotions and "natural" behaviour, i.e. "real" and "natural"
according to Hanna Barbera cartoon behaviour as Gerry Anderson and
the rest must have understood after production was well under way.

Well, to me at least, many of the facts and speculations about Freiberger
has helped me a lot in understanding why Y2 ended up the way it did.
Quite interesting.

A parallell to the Freiberger speculations that have been seldom
brought up, is how the marriage relations of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson
is refelcted in their output.  Pierre Fageolle makes some absolutely
superb comments about this in his magnificent "L'epopee dans le
blancheur" (1996).  The way he sees it, UFO was a statement about
the desperate situation Gerry and Sylvia felt to be in while SPACE:1999
was a mirror of the ultimate collapse.

> Clear as mud? I'm even confusing myself. 1999 did cover some
> philosophical issues but it was never only a deep thinking TV series.
> Even during year one it was promoted as a big budget high adventure
> series and Gerry Anderson sold it himself as entertainment.

Yes, and so was Mozart wasn't he?  Just another servant of the
church and aristochrasy writing music for creating background mood.
Shakespeare was basically an entertainer too, I suppose, hardly a
word about his background and what he might have thought by this and
that was written until generations after his death I believe.  I
expect that same could be said about Aischylos, Sofocles and Evripides
too.

Interesting though, even while being "just entertainment" people
seem to by notes or cd's of Mozart sonatas and play and listen
again and again and again, comparing, analysing, just like we are
analysing, enjoying, watching and commenting on SPACE:1999.  Personally
I can't see all the difference.  Take an episode like RING AROUND THE
MOON, an intellectual masterpiece, I would say, a typical episode than
can be watched, commented upon, analysed, rewatched, adding comments,
speculating about what the writer might have though, watch it again,
make new comments, watch it yet again, new comments etc. ad infinitum.
An endless well of insight into the human soul I would say, within the
restrictions of a TV programme such as SPACE:1999 of course.

> There is
> nothing wrong with one person proposing a possible reason for a certain
> scene or set of actions in a story but to come out and actually say that
> the writer was commenting on such and such a thing is very daring.
> Unless the writer actually said such a thing these comments can
> backfire. I am not aiming this at any one person as I have put my own
> interpretations into our episode discussions. Our diverse discussions
> have been quite fascinating but I am not willing to place a bet on any
> of our deep reasonings. The Dorcon hierarchy is no more a comment on the
> British royal family as THE LAST ENEMY is a sex comedy.

Oh, I thought the idea of reading THE DORCONS as Johnny Byrne's comment
on the British royal family was a rather novel and insightful interpretation,
not at least thinking of Byrne growing up in Dublin and considering the
strained relationship between the UK and Ireland at times.  Wonderful
interpretation, and if Byrne was not conciously making the assosiation,
although perhaps he did, who knows, he may quite possibly have had it
in the back of his mind, fascinated as he is with the history of the
Irish people.

Reading THE LAST ENEMY as a sex comedy is also quite a natural thing
to do, I believe, remembering that this was the kind of thing that Bob
Kellett appears to have been making during most of the sixties and
seventies.  It also makes quite vividly clear why he and Barbara Bain
did not communicate all that well on this script, she apparently
wanting something along the lines of Edward Albee's WHO'S AFRAID
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF sort of matrimonial crisis play while he, on the
other hand, would rather have nice young ladies running around topless
in bikinies.

Rather than saying that we are intellectualising SPACE:1999, I prefer
to think of it as just enjoying and discussing the show, sometimes trying
to find out about various aspects of it just like one would do on any other
list of this type.

Petter



From: "Petter Ogland"  The difference is that Gerry Anderson called his own creation
> "entertrainment"  As far as I can recall,  Mozart never referred to his
> own work in that way.  I'm sure that while he he wanted his audience
> entertainned , he also wanted them to peel thru the various layers that
> are there.

I agree there must be various layers here, but still, my impression of
Mozart is that much of his output was not always intended to be all
that celebral.  Some of the divertimentos and serenadas, "Eine kleine
Nachtmusik" for instance, were ment just to be "muzak" for out-door
entertainment I seem to remember having read somewhere.

I'm not all that sure that Mozart wanted his audiences to peel through
layers.  Brian Johnson was asked something similarily about his SFX work
for SPACE:1999, and he responded that he didn't really care all that
much about the audience.  What ment anything to him was what other people
in the SFX business thought of it.

For Mozart, I suppose, it was much more important what the Haydns,
the Bachs, Salieri, the musicians and music experts in Vienna, Paris,
Prague, Rome, Naples and so on thought about his music than the random
audience to his performances who probably knew next to nothing about music
anyway.

> As I write this,  I realise that you already know this, and that in
> truth I'm helping make your point.  Many people have told me that they
> listen to music to "relax"   I hate that.  Listenning is an active
> process that can happen in a myriad of ways.  Obviously, this is how you
> view Space 1999.

I don't think writers like Johnny Byrne, Chris Penfold, Edward di Lorenzo
nor directors like Crichton, Austin and Tomblin really thought all that
much about the audience.  I would be much more likely one writer just
thought about what the others writers would think and so on.  For instance
there seems to be a flux of ideas between Weir, di Lorenzo and Penfold
during Year One, Penfold summing it nicely up in his final Y1 episode
SPACE:1999 which have obvious references to both BLACK SUN and RING AROUND
THE MOON.

In Year Two the climate was very different, though.  Freiberger had a
much more audience oriented way of working, I believe, thinking more
in lines of what would work and what would not than writing for fun.
This reflects the season, I think, making it more into a sausage
factory while, on the other hand, Year One seems more like an artists
studio like, say, Rembrandt.

Petter



From: Petter Ogland (petter.ogland@dnmi4tag.no)
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 11:19:15 +0000
Subject: Re: Space1999: Intellectualizing 1999

Hi Ina,

> I don't know if anyone else on the list will care about this discussion-
> it's pretty off topic, but you are totally free to post it if you like.

Thanks for saying this, and, actually, I don't think it is all that
off topic.  Mozart is frequently discussed on this list, I think, Emma
has made some very interesting comparisons between Maya and Susanna in
"Le Nozze di Figaro" for instance, which certainly I enjoyed very much.

> Perhaps we are using the same terms to discribe very different things.
> Muzak refers to commercially produced music, that is used to fill air
> space-even if one would bother to really pay attention to it,  one would
> seldom find anything of depth there.
> To refer to any work of Mozarts in this way is hard to imagine.  Even
> "Eine Kliene Nackt Musik" a simple to listen to piece- can take a lot of
> time to analyze.  (Both harmonically and melodically)  While Mozart
> might not have expected  his audience to analyze it- that doesn't mean
> that more wasn't written into it.

It is difficult to disagree with this, but, on the other hand, I cannot
see why the music of Barry Gray could not be analysed in a similar manner,
come to think of it, Gray said in a interview, avaible somewhere on the
net, that his favourite composers were Mozart and Beethoven, although
most of his musical influence came through Debussy and Ravel.  The
influence of Ravel in particular is rather pregnant, I think, just like
it is with many British composers prior to Gray's generation, such as
Holst, Vaughan-Williams, Walton and Tippett.

My point about bringing "muzak" into the discussion was, however, only
to paraphrase the point Gerry Anderson made about producing "entertainment".
This is exactly what the composers of the mid- to late eighteenth century
were commisioned to do, I believe, Joseph Haydn perhaps being a better
example than Mozart, although music made for entertainment rather than
music as philosophy, as with Wagner for instance, does not prohibit it
from being of high quality and well worth analysing in any number of
ways.  This is how I see it anyway.

More interestingly, perhaps, even though Gerry Anderson expressed his
views on the show in terms of entertainment, similar views that were
expressed by Freiberger, I'm not certain the creative artists that
were part of his scheme, such as Johnny Byrne, Christopher Penfold and
Edward di Lorenzo, were having an equally simplistic view on things.
From what I've heard di Lorenzo decided to leave because he did not
get enough creative freedom, being forced to rewrite his scripts due
to ITC demands or demands put forward by Gerry Anderson.  A similar
creative argument finally made Penfold leave production, I think.

If not directly comparable with Mozart, the people who wrote for SPACE:1999
were still creative people, not computers, and from what I've understood
they wrote poetry and novels of higher ambition than SPACE:1999 when not
commissioned for the show.

> I could get into a long music history discussion here, but simply said,
> Mozart considered himself one of the common people.  His operas we're
> written for them (ok financially for the royals- but plot wise he was
> revolutionary in writting complex operas about common themes) Also if
> you read his letters, you can see he had very little care what anyone
> thought of him.

Reading his letter I get the impression that he was well aware of his
own genius and expected this to be recognised by everybody he met.  My
impression is also that he had a rather wicked sense of humour and did
not think to highly of other composers and musicans, although, as
commented on by some biographers, some of the nastiness may have been
written to please his father into believing that there were vast
opportunities for making money as a composer and musician in places
like Mannheim, Paris, Vienna and Prague.

One of the best text I've read on Mozart was one by a German professor
of sociology whose name slips me at the moment.  He had been a student
or contemporary of Adorno, however, and had a fabulous way of speculating
about the life and times of Mozart, much in similar style as Pierre
Fageolle's wonderful comments on SPACE:1999 in his "L'Epopee dans les
blancheur" (1992).

> One of my history proffessors once said that he believed Mozart was an
> alien from space.  That was the only explanantion he could come to ,
> which could explain the level of genius that Mozart exibited.

Yes, I've heard many people say similar things.  The greatest paradox
of all, as many see it, is how this person who was capable of writing
music of such incredible depth was at the same to be so much of a child.
My impression from reading part of his vast output of letters is along
the same lines as the picture presented in Peter Schaffer's play that
was later filmed by Milos Forman, a genius that was trapped in his
music and used it more or less as the only way to communicate with the
world.

Returning to SPACE:1999, however, some of the finest works of Mozart,
such as his Sonata Facile KV475, written as a practising piece for
children, only show, I think, that even though a series like SPACE:1999
was primarily ment as family entertainment, this does not conflict with
having content that is well worth discussing.

Petter