1950s ‘Rocketman’ TV Series and Their Fans: Cadets, Rangers, and Junior Space Men ed. by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (review)

It is rare to find a book that is at the same time both scholarly rigorous and fun to read. The most striking thing about this collection is that the editors and contributors have not lost sight of the fact that the artefacts they are analysing were produced as juvenile entertainments intended for what Variety referred to as ‘the smallfry’ and the ‘kidvid mart’. The 1950s were the heyday of children’s space adventure television series in the United States, including Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949–55), Space Patrol (1950–5), Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950–5), Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953) and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954). These series, and others of their ilk, have hitherto been regarded as beyond the pale of academic criticism on account of their bargain-basement production values and their association with juvenile popular culture. However, in the early 1950s especially, such juvenile fare was often among the top ten-rated television shows in the United States. As such they are of more than passing interest for television scholars as well as for sf enthusiasts.

A potential danger for a book such as this is the risk of wallowing in adult nostalgia for the days of ray guns, jetpacks and devices such as the ‘Opticon Scillometer’. In fact only one of the essays – the concluding ‘Confessions of a Commando Cody Addict (or, How the Flying Suit Changed My Life)’ by amateur film-maker Gary Hughes – is in the adult-nostalgia mode. And in any event this seems perfectly appropriate, as it provides first-hand testimony of how fans actually engaged with the objects of their fandom – something that is all-too-easily overlooked in academic studies of fandom that overlay all sorts of theoretical interpretations onto fan activities. In Hughes’s case, it led him to a productive side-career producing no-budget home-movie homages to his favourite 1950s Rocketman. Elsewhere, however, the tone is academic while recognising that ‘serious’ analysis does not have to mean ‘dry’. The book is divided into four sections focusing on the content and ideologies of the series themselves, particularly their promotion of morally upright all-American values (‘Learning to be Rocketmen’), how the series represented the future (‘Reaching for Tomorrow’), the relationship between television and the wider consumer culture in the form of toys and merchandising (‘As Seen on TV’) and what the Rocketmen series have to say about the world in which they were produced and consumed (‘Looking at the Earth’). Here the book demonstrates very well that juvenile sf of the 1950s was as much a product of Cold War culture as its more adult cousins in literature and cinema. Hence Wheeler Winston Dixon shows how Rocky Jones promotes an optimistic view of peace and security that is generally achieved through negotiation rather than violence (‘Making the Universe Safe for Democracy: Rocky Jones, Space Ranger’) and Mick Broderick demonstrates that Captain Midnight (1954–6) rehearses Pentagon doctrines of military and scientific progress (‘Justice through Strength and Courage: Captain Midnight and the Military–Industrial Complex’). Editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper provide a fascinating jointly authored chapter on how the time-travel series Captain Z-Ro (1951–6) offers viewers an ideologically approved version of the past in order to better understand the ‘now’ of the Cold War (‘“To Learn from the Past…”: Becoming Cold War Citizens with Captain Z-Ro’). While there is little or no evidence to suggest that juvenile audiences understood their favourite programmes in this way, the evidence marshalled by all these authors based on the narrative content of the series and their promotional discourses makes a persuasive case that such meanings were wholly intentional.

A particular strength of this collection is that it considers not just the programmes themselves...