Alien Attack
I was rummaging around preparing for our annual month of Halloween and this popped up, it’s an awesome sell sheet for the Syndicated TV movie “Alien Attack” which actually was just two episodes of “Space:1999” glued together and sold as a feature film.
I cannot tell you how addicted to these things I was as a kid, I watched every single “film” that ITC cranked out in the early 1980s including stuff like “Cosmic Princess” (two more episodes of 1999), “Invasion UFO” (a real jumbled mess of “UFO” episodes stapled together) and really rare stuff like “The Champions”.
Note how they try to sell this as a new concept, there is no mention of the series. I think Alien Attack even added newly filmed scenes (that stick out like a sore thumb) to try to frame it differently, it’s not even set in 1999. After all that work I doubt a single person who watched this didn’t know it was just two episodes of a show that had been cancelled five years before.
These types of things were a late night staple and I’ve got the bags under my eyes to prove it baby….
If you want a real mess of this sort, check out Universal's Backtrack. It is two episodes of the Virginian and one of them served as the pilot for a spin-off show called Laredo. In the end, you're not show which characters to follow.
Cool find! I always loved those syndicated tv movies. I remember lots of the "Sandy Frank" japanese imports as a kid (they showed a few on MST3K, like "Time of Apes")
I also remember the Kolchak tv movies that edited together episodes. I think one was called "Crackle of Death". Those were fun and basically Kolchak running himself ragged chasing down 2 monsters at once 🙂
-Matt
The trailer…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9ZAIJo11tg
Tex
(who remembers this from back in 83)