[The Australian Panther]

Prof wrote,

FIREBALL XL5 was my introduction to science-fiction

Mine was via Radio - the BBC's Journey into Space serial. Superb Radio. We used to sit around the Radio and listen to that. Scared the $%_#@ out of 7 or 8 year old me.
It's still stands up, was superbly written and dramatised.
You can find all three serials here.
http://otrrlibrary.org/j.html
Listen to them in the dark, alone, and with headphones for full effect.
Later the BBC Television serial, A for Andromeda - had a similar effect on me.     
I also read newspaper strips from an early age, so Flash Gordon [Mac Raboy at the time - and wonderfully coloured.] And Mandrake in the 50's was exploring SF themes. And even the Phantom was tested by aliens.
Memory is shifting into gear now, how could I forget the Classics Illustrated Jules Verne and HG Wells adaptations. And the movies  of 2000 leagues and the Time Machine. Oh God! McMurray in the Flubber and Absent-minded Professor movies! Cringe! Come to think about it there was quite a lot!     
Im primary school, we had a Maths Teacher who was a Widgee [OZ for  RocknRoll girl] she would explain a maths concept - write a number of exercises on the board - chalk - no photocopiers then. Then she would say, When you get them all right you can read comics for the rest of the period. Great Motivator, and she bought a box of comics.The other teachers hated her - nothing causes hate more than being innovative and successful. 
So there I was introduced to Kirby's Green Arrow - somewhat space themed at times, and the DC Space Anthologies - which were extremely weird and not really hard science fiction at all. No Atlas - books, possibly banned at the time.
Never really a fan of Gerry Anderson's stuff - the ideas were alright, but the puppets and the dialogue were too stiff and corny. And yes, I could never get into Space 1999 in any shape or form.

I actually have NO intention of buying "SPACE: 1999", as I just dislike it that much. 

Including the Charlton comic. Pity because I do like Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. Lou Grade apparently made it hell for those who did the show.
So, Whats' your story?   

[gregjh]

I'm an 80s kid, so for me it was Star Wars.

[crashryan]

When I was about six years old my dad was stationed in the Philippines. Dad bought the Sunday edition of the English language newspaper The Manila Times, which carried Paul Norris' Brick Bradford. I imagine that was my first exposure to science fiction, but the strip didn't really stick in my mind. What hooked me was a couple of library copies of the Winston science-fiction juveniles. The Alex Schomburg endpapers blew my little mind. Immediately I started copying his spaceships, robots, and spacesuits. Looking back I think I was a bit young to have read them, but after Dad's tour in the P.I. ended we were exiled to Alabama, where the town library had a dozen or more Winston titles. I ploughed through them all, as well as Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series and some Tom Swift, Jr, books (strange bedfellows).

[SuperScrounge]

I suspect it was as a baby/toddler watching whatever my parents were watching. My dad was a fan of The Avengers, which sometimes had SF eps. Apparently my grandmother told my mom about great new show called Star Trek, which surprised my mom as grandma hadn't been much of an SF fan so they gave the show a try. My earliest TV memory is a clip of a Star Trek episode, but I don't know which one as it was just crewmembers on a planet. (I hope it wasn't Spock's Brain.    ) And as I got older and started making choices about what to watch/listen/read SF was a big part of it.

[Drahken]

Topics like this always confound me, I always think "You weren't exposed to {X} until late enough in your lives to be able to remember A) a time when {X} wasn't in your life and B) what first brought {X} into your life??"

For me, it's impossible to say, as scifi had just always been around. I know I watched reruns of trek when I was little & the muppet show had the pigs in space spoof of it, there was star wars, there was ascifi in a lot of cartoons in the late 70s/early 80s, I was sometimes read 20,000 leagues under the sea when I was little, I had issues of superman comics with spaceships & androids. All this (and no doubt countless more) by the age of 3.

[Andrew999]

An interesting topic. In terms of television, I think it was watching Stingray and Fireball XL5.

For comics, it was picking up The Spider, Steel Claw, Kelly's Eye and then buying my first Superman comic (though actually I think it was a Legion of Super Heroes - always had a soft spot for them ever since)

In terms of books, I vividly remember being given a bag full of about twenty cheap paperbacks - Asimov, Bradbury and such - from a schoolfriend to borrow. I was hooked and would stay up all night (literally) reading them.

[paw broon]

As with Panther, listening to Journey into Space.  Even nowadays, I listen to the 3 serials and still find them entertaining and spooky. 
I remember seeing Quatermass and The Pit  - the BBC serial - and it frightened the life out of me.  It still makes the hairs on the back of my neck go up.
But I had been reading comics well before that and in the mid '50's I swapped some comics for a Super Thriller with Ace Hart. Never looked back after that.  Hooked on superheroes.  It wasn't long - the next year perhaps - that I saw a Frew Phantom in a shop in Crail. How could you get more hooked?  Well I did.

[misappear]

I remember One Step Beyond, a wonderful TV series with stories that in retrospect seem like those in ACG comics. John Newland, the host, was creepier than the stories! 

A more pure form of science fiction caught me up with seeing a late night TV presentation of one of the Frankenstein movies. I couldn?t have been more than 6 or so on these

I can?t even remember which was the first sci-fi book I read.  My parents thought having books around the house was frivolous clutter.  Scarred me for life.

Of course they said the same thing about owning records and playing an instrument.

No worries, tho. I spent my life righting the wrong!

[paw broon]

"No worries, tho. I spent my life righting the wrong!"
That's so good!

[Robb_K]

What was your introduction to Science Fiction and themes?

I was old enough to read cartoon-based funny-animal comics in the newspapers and comic books during the late 1940s, but not to understand, and so, enjoy, science fiction that early.  So, my introduction to science fiction was reading the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon newspaper strips, and watching old, 1930s and 1940s films, such as Things To Come, Frankenstein, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Invisible Man, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Forbidden World, Forbidden Planet, Journey To The Centre of The Earth, and others, mainly based on H.G. Wells' and Jules Verne's classic novels, and comic books containing those stories, and the like, in Classic Illustrated Comics, and other early 1950s classic novel comic book publications. 

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of what was shown on TV, in both Canada and USA, was old films from the late 1920s to roughly five years before the current time.

Starting in 1953, I was reading Turok, Son of Stone comic books, and by the mid 1950s, I was reading my cousins' stash of science fiction comic books from various series, and also reading classic science fiction novels and short story books, checked out from the public library, or library at my school.  I also watched partly sci-fi-based science fiction TV shows during the late 1950s, such as The Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond.

[profh0011]

"the puppets and the dialogue were too stiff and corny"

I was 4 at the time.  Looking back, even decades later, my attitude has not changed.  As long as the writing and the acting was good, puppets are as legit as animated cartoons or live-action.

And I've said many times, even the goofiest-looking aliens on SPACE PRECINCT seemed more real, more alive, and more human, than any of the humans on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, which then and now seems to me like stiff, amatuerish psuedo-Shakespearean in style.

Ironically, the more "cartoony" puppets of FIREBALL XL5 and TERRAHAWKS had more life and personality than the more "realistic" puppets on CAPTAIN SCARLET. Or the LIVE actors on "SPACE: 1999". (I always said that show would have worked better with puppets.)

Including the Charlton comic.

I have one issue of the B&W magazine.  Even GRAY MORROW art couldn't save that concept.

Pity because I do like Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. Lou Grade apparently made it hell for those who did the show.

I've been reading recently that Landau & Bain made it HELL for Gerry & Sylvia. They viewed themselves as big stars  and had massive egos to go with it.

I always thought Barry Morse did the best acting on that show.  You know what's funny?  It wasn't until decades later I learned he was from LONDON.  I had no idea all those years he was ENGLISH!  He certainly did the most convincing American accent ever heard on TV, when he was on THE FUGITIVE for 4 years.

[profh0011]

So after I got hooked on sci-fi with FIREBALL XL5... my mom, a lifelong HORROR fan, introduced me to science-fiction horror with THE OUTER LIMITS.  It had to be during the summer reruns of mid-1964.  That's the only thing that explains why I remember so vividly certain random episodes, but never saw MOST of them. And the show's 1st season was actually on Mondays at 7:30 PM. In the 70s, it would have been UNTHINKABLE for something that scary-as-hell being on early enough for little kids 4-5 years old to see!

And HERE was the 1st episode I ever saw... "THE BORDERLAND" (a "hard science" episode by series creator Leslie Stevens).  For many years after, every time we drove by a power station, I'd remember how this thing scared the hell out of me.

Alfred Ryder may be the only actor to appear on THE OUTER LIMITS, STAR TREK, and BUCK ROGERS.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4jtdpz

[narfstar]

If it had not been mentioned I probably would not have thought of Fireball XL5. But it is actually one of my earliest sci fi memories. Next would be Outer Limits, which was what I thought before I saw Fireball.

[profh0011]

FIREBALL XL5 disappeared from Philly stations at the end of August 1965, and as far as I know, was never seen again.  So after decades, getting that DVD box set was a real nostalgic thrill.

Many times, as a kid, I'd find a show sometime into its run and get hooked.  As it happens... about a month later, I turned on the 6th episode of "LOST IN SPACE" (which, 3 years later, I found out was actually the first "regular" episode, as the first 5 comprised one 5-part serial, expanding wildly on the original one-hour pilot).

For the next 3 years, LOST IN SPACE became one of the most important, influential shows in my young life.  But I always remember, when I first saw it... the episode "Welcome Stranger" with Warren Oates... I looked on it as a "consolation prize".

On FIREBALL, they went to a lot of different planets.  On LIS, they were STUCK on that one planet for all of season 1.  And then, stuck on another planet for all of season 2!

So... when I ran across "STAR TREK", on its 4th week ("The Naked Time"), I felt, now THIS is something else.  This was like "FIREBALL" for GROWN-UPS.  And many times in the 1st season, I felt like I was watching "THE OUTER LIMITS", only in color, with a regular cast.  Turns out, there were a LOT of people behind-the-scenes both shows had in common.


And if you watch "Arena"... well, I've come to view that as a cross-over between STAR TREK and THE OUTER LIMITS.  The ships' crew is FORCED to watch a drama unfold below on the planet, as Kirk has to fight an alien lizard ship captain to the death... and WHO'se in charge of it all?  None other than "The Control Voice" himself-- VIC PERRIN.



"For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear."