Any future reboot of Space:1999 is going to have to give serious thought to paring down the number of featured characters on the show, particularly if the modern 8-10 episode structure of television series prevails. There just isn’t enough time to develop more than a few story lines.
One character that I believe the series could afford to lose would be security chief Tony Verdeschi (played by Tony Anholt in the original series).
I do not offer this recommendation lightly: Tony was a favorite of mine as a kid. He was certainly more relatable to a teenager or pre-teen than Koenig (who, by design, had to function as the father figure in the show) and he was more a man of action than just about any of the other characters on the show.
In fact, there’s only one character that could rival Tony for the “man of action” title, and that would of course be Alan Carter, and it’s this overlap between Tony and Alan that makes one of them expendable.
When Tony’s character was introduced, he was a replacement for Paul Morrow, second-in-command on the base and Commander Koenig’s understudy. In practice, Tony’s character was far more like that of Alan Carter, the hot shot “shoot-first-ask-questions-later” lovable rogue of a character. Carter’s direct replacement, Bill Frazer, seemed destined to be more of a minor character, just the Eagle driver and maybe not much else.
What happened in practice was that Alan Carter did not exit the show in season 2. According to lore, new producer Fred Freiberg was ready to jettison Carter along with most other supporting characters until his children insisted on him keeping the character.
According to Robert Wood’s excellent “Destination: Moonbase Alpha”, Actor Nick Tate (who played Carter) said Freiberg told him “My kids love you. My kids love the show and I went to them and asked who I should have back. They said I’ve got to have Nick Tate.“ (The Gerry Anderson version of the story was that ITC realized that Carter received more fan mail than any other cast member). Whatever the reason, Alan Carter returned to the show, and left Tony (and Bill Frazer) with a whole lot less to do.
The Paul Morrow character did exit the show, so there was some space in the ensemble for Tony to fill that role, but again, with Carter staying, the show simply didn’t need two character’s with the same perspective and approach.
Regarding any other unique qualities of Tony’s character, the biggest one certain was that he was the love interest of Maya, the alien. I’ll talk more about this when I get to that character, but suffice to say here that if Maya were to stay, it would not be difficult to romantically link her to Alan (or some other character). The same could be said for Tony’s beer-making running gag, which I’ll address in a future post.
In short, Tony’s character really didn’t add anything that wasn’t already there with Carter, and he just isn’t a character that needs much screen time.
Now that have recommended dropping Tony’s character from a potential reboot, I have to address that all-important question:
Who will make the beer?
Fans of the original show may cringe at the thought of more scenes of Tony’s beer making, and I will agree that a lot of it was awkward and often in contrast to the tone of the other stories in their respective episodes. Nevertheless, I think that Tony’s beer making was quite important because it highlights one of the things that was never given enough attention in the show: how the Alphans coped with being cut off from Earth. According to Dr. Russell’s medical log, some episodes of the original show were set years after “breakaway”, and even as a kid I wondered how not only did they never seem to run other of paper for the computer, but they also seemed generally nonchalant about things like paper an other consumables. Except when it was made a specific plot point, resource shortages seemed to be nonexistent. Tony’s beer was one of the only things in the show that acknowledged that Alpha was self-contained and that we’d hope that the Alphans would not only survive there, but find a way to adapt to the environment.
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