"UFO" is a pretty good show for 1970, though I am sure younger viewers will laugh at the special effects and strange kitschy 1970 sensibilities--such as the purple haired ladies, the weird underwater rocket plane, the clothing, the cars and the wild music. Despite all this silliness, the acting isn't bad and the episodes were mostly pretty interesting. In fact, I am watching the show again along with another famous Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series "Space: 1999" and think "UFO", despite more dated special effects, is a more enjoyable and better series. Plus, in a crazy way, the show seemed more plausible than "Space: 1999"--or at least they made it seem that way.Despite being a decent show, I wasn't particularly impressed with the DVD set I recently purchased. The episodes are all in no particular order!! This exact same problem occurs in the Anderson's next series, "Space: 1999"--the DVDs are all mixed up for no apparent reason! Additionally, the special features are quite sparse--with only some DVD commentary tracks and nothing more. One final complaint is that not many episodes are on each DVD and the boxes are full-sized, so just one season results in a HUGE box set! Decent show--lousy packaging. For shame. With packaging like this, I could actually see people avoiding the set or feeling entitled to download it. I am not excusing this, but there should be a lot more concern about the folks who buy this--they deserve better.

This series is about another invasion of UFOs from space (Well, where else, eh!?) SHADO, (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation)is set up to protect Earth from a race bent on destroying us, intelligently, it should be said with a plot involving using human body parts to replenish their own. Basically, the 'spacemen' as it were, were humanoid with a small amount of variation (They had green liquid inside their space helmets). SHADO uses a film studio as 'cover' for its operation.This was a fantastic series, with the 'Commander' Ed Straker (Played by Ed Bishop) aided by British actors, Michael Billington as Colonel Paul Foster, George Sewell as Colonel Alec Freeman and the beautiful Wanda Ventham as Colonel Virginia Lake.As with all Gerry Anderson productions, a fantastic array of craft, not least the UFOs themselves provided the action and excitement and was very well handled, even in spite of today's CGI generation.Particular favourites, were the Interceptors - the name speaks for themselves, which were guided from SHADO's 'Moonbase' to intercept the UFOs before they hit Earth. These had a bulbous 'one shot and forget' missile mounted in the front of the craft and there were three of them that emerged from craters on the moon/Moonbase. Although of course, many attacks were engaged against SHADO's Moonbase. The Moonbase itself was staffed by sexy looking girls (Gabrielle Drake, Antonia Ellis and Dolores Mantez) in skimpy outfits with purple-metallic wigs! Some uniform! But in spite of this, the scenes involving the girls were serious, with them monitoring and co-ordinating counter-attacks against UFO activity.Although the UFOs DID look like they were twirling around on a string, the 'flying' was done quite well. Another craft was the 'Skydiver' - a submarine basically with a submersible aircraft at its front end (Bow?!) which of course would launch from beneath the water into the atmosphere to take on the UFOs. Land-based 'Mobiles', tank-like APCs that had a machine gun turret and missiles took them on at times also.The fashions by Sylvia Anderson, shows she definitely had an eye for style. The men tended to wear many one-piece outfits, with suits that had buttons all the way up to a stub collar (It's been forgotten, but a style of suits like this appeared in Britain in the early 1990's). Why go on about fashions? It seemed to be an integral sub-conscious part of the show. On the Earth base, the women went around in - you guessed it -skimpy tight outfits (apart from Colonel Lake unfortunately!).Although a British series, obviously Ed Bishop was employed to catch an American audience, where the series was very well received. He was sometimes at odds with the gruff 'General Henderson' who acted as the UFO operations sceptic constantly at loggerheads with him.Interesting to note that, Michael Billington, now sadly departed in just 2005 was a handsome actor, and was added to give the series just that bit of sex appeal for the ladies, as most Sci-Fi would be seen as a more 'boys' own' adventure - unless of course you had 'reality Sci-Fi' TV shows in some form! He actually died within a couple of days of Ed Bishop in that same year.Episodes took a strange turn at times. One was where Ed Straker's son was seriously ill following a road accident, showing the angst between him and his missus. But this tied in with Straker desperately searching for a quick way to have vital drugs flown in from America for his son's aid using SHADO's craft - only to have to let his son die when he needed the craft for SHADO operations at the last minute. My favourite episode, I'm unsure of the name, was when 500 UFOs attacked the over-stretched SHADO defences at once.Currently in the UK, the series is being re-run on ITV4. Though the repeats are only a few of the run's episodes and the fact my favourite episode hasn't made it into these re-runs shows they are only running select or minimal ones to keep the sale of the DVD box set firmly on the cards. A lot of British talent appeared, strangely the likes of George Cole, Windsor Davies and Derren Nesbitt along with Canadian Alexis Kanner and even playwright Steven Berkoff appeared as one of the interceptor pilots.

Yeah, I know the acting was a bit cheesy and some of the episodes were inconsistent with each other, but overall, UFO was the most realistic (or the least far-fetched) sci-fi series I can recall. UFO uses ideas that are at least remotely possible for our time in defense of our planet from the mysterious, sinister, silent aliens. The interceptors, skydivers, and mobiles are technologically possible when compared to the distant future gizmos of Star Trek or Star Wars. Factual details of the alien spacecraft, such as their need to slow down to speeds of 1500 miles per hour when entering Earth's atmosphere or needing to be submerged under water to avoid deteriorating in our atmosphere are much more believable than the Enterprise traveling at warp speed. My favorite character: Commander Straker. One cold dude, dedicated to his job. A close second was Lt. Ellis, who appeared quite often in my dreams as a 12-13 year old! Sweet indeed. Favorite episode: "Computer Affair." Wish we could have made that alien talk before overdosing him with that experimental truth serum. Second: "A Question of Priorities." We had an defecting alien that was ready to talk or at least help us. Favorite hardware: The interceptors. Second: Skydiver. Favorite line: Straker in "Computer Affair"..."Don't give me that crud Masden. If you need more aircraft appropriate them!" (Who was Masden anyway?) I would like to see a new version of this series done with the same story line, obviously with new actors set in the year 2020 or thereabouts. Someone could continue and eventually put the finishing touches on a series that had a premature end, a series that was intriguing and most importantly, believable.

It's alway's surprised me that this series never took off during it's originally transmission. It was (and is) incredibly, dark, menacing and atmospheric and it's budget allowed it to look brilliant. It was ahead of it's time and should have been one of the most popular adult science fiction series of the era. But it wasn't! However now it has become a cult and is recognised as one of the finest sci-fi series ever made. And so it should be! The images of Alien's are horrific (even today) and the writing and choice of cast were just spot on. The late Ed Bishop was just phenomenal really, a truly marvellous actor who played Ed Straker to perfection. George Sewell and later Wanda Ventham were also wonderful. It also has to be one of the scariest science fiction series of the 1970's just look at The Long Sleep - now that really is a scary episode, and it's also damn good! Confined to peoples memories for over 15 years the series was finally brought to us in 1986 (if you miss out Precision Video's release of the confusingly edited Invasion: UFO) when Channel 5 video released many unedited episodes of the series (including Invasion: UFO). From this point the show's popularity suddenly rose and an ITV repeat followed later in the year running into 1987. Interestingly even a 'UFO' convention was held in London in 1988 because of the show's increased popularity in the 1980's. UFO was again repeated this time on BBC2 in 1996, but it took them 3 years to show the entire series! The BBC have never been very good at scheduling. Nowadays the show's popularity is still thriving what with recent DVD and Video releases still available. The series was in short superb and I think grossly underrated. UFO didn't even appear in the 2001 Channel 4 programme 'Top Ten Sci-fi' but Space: 1999 did. Space: 1999 is a great series but sometimes the writing and UFO is just better! Getting back to UFO, it is a popular cult which will stay in peoples memories for many years to come.