It was the time of Sputnik, the middle of the cold war, and the Soviets were ahead of us in the space race. It was the time before Telstar, in a day when most newsrooms had mechanical teletype machines, and if you wanted the news from overseas quickly, you tuned in via shortwave radio. You could still buy artist renditions of the planet Mars, showing its many canals. Saturn only had seven rings back then, Pluto was still a planet, and the best images of our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, were breathtakingly beautiful, but still a bit fuzzy. There were no black holes, no neutron stars, the term “quasar” had not yet been coined. The best telescope in the world was the amazing 200-inch Hale Telescope on Mount Palomar.

I was six years old, going on seven, and the stars entranced me. And sitting in front of our black and white TV, one odd little cartoon series utterly captured my imagination. It was called The Space Explorers, and you only saw it in serialized form on the morning kid TV shows. While I was growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs, I watched every episode of it raptly on the Ranger Hal show, whenever they showed it.

I say it was “odd” because it wasn’t entirely animation as I was used to it back then…or even now. There was instead, traditional animation sandwiched between special effect photography of the most beautiful art deco rocketship I’d ever seen, then or since. And interspersed with that, the most thrilling space art you’d ever want to see, set to a recurring bit of very evocative, very beautiful space music. For years I searched in vain for a copy of that music. To this day I hear it whenever I look up at the stars.

The plot was simple. Commander Perry, space explorer, is flying the first rocketship to Mars, the Polaris I, when suddenly there is a malfunction and the rocketship goes off course. His last radio transmission indicates he is about to crash land on one of Mars’ moons. But before he can say which one, the transmission is abruptly cut off. A rescue mission is quickly organized, and the designer of the rocket, Professor Nordheim is joined by navigator “Smitty” on the sister ship of the one Commander Perry was flying, the Polaris II. Unbeknownst to them, Perry’s young son Jimmy has stowed away on the Polaris II. He’s discovered only after the rocketship takes off.

In the episodes that followed, Jim Perry learned about the planets of the solar system, as they were known at the time. Each episode showcased some aspect of the solar system that Jimmy finds puzzling, and which Professor Nordheim patiently explains to him. The animation was, as I said, interspersed with some of the most breathtaking space art you ever saw, then or now, of the various planets, set among dazzling starry backgrounds. I couldn’t take my eyes away, even though all I had at the time to watch it on was a black and white TV set.

In later years, I thought the creators of the cartoon had been creatively brilliant to mix traditional animation with model photography and that stunning space artwork. What I later discovered was that the cartoon had different visual styles, because it had been sewn together from three different films by William Cayton and Fred Ladd for Radio & Television Packagers, Inc. Fred Ladd would later bring Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Sailor Moon to the U.S. They did a fantastic job, but the copyright issues of the various individual films that make up The Space Explorers, is probably why we don’t have the DVD today. The traditionally animated cartoon hailed from eastern Europe and was originally less then a half hour long. The model photography came from fragments of a German Kulturfilme produced during WWII, titled Weltraumschiff 1 startet (Spaceship 1 Launches), and the stunning space art of the various planets and stars came from a Czech educational film titled, Universe.

It all seems very dated now…and yet stumbling across clips from it, as I did just a few moments ago (which is why I’m blogging this now), can still evoke that sense of childhood awe in me. One thing I don’t like about space travel in TV and the movies these days, is that they make it all seem so routine, and in the process, make space seem like a small world after all. Nowadays when I want to experience that sense I had when I was a kid, of the vastness of space, I have to retreat to my collection of Hubble pictures…or drive to some lonely spot in the southwestern desert at night, and look up.

Here’s a clip…from a time when the universe was still vast, and a voyage to Mars was still an adventure.

The Space Explorers appreciation site is Here.

[Update…] Here’s a “trailor” for the series, made from various stills and short clips on The Space Explorers appreciation site. Yes…that’s a steering wheel the good professor is using to pilot his spaceship with. Like I said…this was all done in a time before the general public had any real understanding of how space travel would work. When I was a kid, I used to hear folks argue that rockets wouldn’t even work in space, because in a vacuum they’d have nothing to push against. It was a while before Newton’s Third Law sank in generally…

But I was only seven…and the technical details didn’t matter. I’d hardly have understood them anyway. What mattered was how amazing it all seemed…and how vast and beautiful space was…