Logan's Run

Good Lord! Another poster had a go at this series and he was bombarded with nine "not useful" votes. Should I be careful what I say here? When this series appeared it was gold. Every cast member, every costume, every turn in the story was gold. Logan's Run was hot stuff to my 12 year old eyes...even on my black and white television set!

Then, in Australia at least, the series vanished from the face of the earth for decades.

Last year, I finally found it again on YouTube and discovered that time has not been good to Logan's Run. It looks too low budget and, since 1977 or 1978, I have seen a few "manhunt" television shows/movies and Logan's Run does not measure up to the others. If you enjoyed this series in 1977, just keep the memories, don't track down the series in this century...you might not like what you get!

The one thing this show had going for it was that it predated the Star Wars craze that wracked TV and movies alike. Similarly it was missing a certain something to make it a complete TV rendition of the feature film.

The foibles with this show are sundry, but more technical than truly artistic. The props and sets were tweaked and manipulated about as far as the budget would take them to create an imaginary dystopic future, complete with gun wielding bandits and robots gone haywire.

Shot on a shoe string budget the shots and stories look like they were cranked out in record time. Ditto with some of the plots. But the actual stories, however oddly executed, seemed to have a real heart to them. Which is all the more shameful, for had this series just waited perhaps another eight months, then the powers that brought it into being could've drawn some very good lessons from Star Wars, and infuse some real production values into a series coasting off the diminishing wave of its feature film predecessor.

Instead we have a TV translation of a major motion picture, that, like a lot of TV series based off of major theatrical releases, really doesn't hold up to well. And this is from a man who saw the 1980s revamp of Buck Rogers, and liked it.

TV's "Logan's Run" is what it is; an attempt to bring some G-rated adventure from source material is firmly in R-territory. As such the anti-debauchery message is lost, and we have a sort of fugitive sci-fi theme running amok on the screen. I purchased and DL'd the season premier from Amazon, and the only real height I could take away from this effort was Donald Moffat's thesping. Otherwise I'm sorry to say the series hasn't aged too well.

Still, it's light hearted adventure that actually does entertain, though does become a bit pondersome at segments. I enjoyed it, and perhaps that's all that really matters.

If you've got a hankering for retro-TV, then scope out the nearly forgotten "Logan's Run" TV series.

A show I recall enjoying in my teen years, it was nice to track down the feature length pilot episode. I hadn't then but have since seen the parent film and obviously to make a multi-episode series, numerous changes have to be made to allow the show to develop. That was the case here as two on the run on the big screen became three on the run on the small screen with the addition of android Rem as Logan and Jessica start out their no doubt extended search for a place called Sanctuary, pursued all the while by Logan's former friend, fellow Sandman, Francis.

I have to confess a youthful crush way back then for Heather Menzies which it was pleasant to recollect with this viewing but better yet was the story itself which seemed to condense two strands into one, the first being Logan and Jessica's escape from the City Of Domes and the second their strange encounter with a bunch of androids determined to pamper them to death in a neat inversion on the hoary old lunatics taking over the asylum plot-line, along the way bumping into their soon-to-be new ally Rem.

Viewed critically today, from over 40 years since its first broadcast, I can now see the budget restraints manifested in the locations, costumes, machinery and special effects deployed and sure the acting isn't of the highest standard either but overall I still enjoyed the storyline for this extended introductory episode and will try to catch the rest of the series to see if it matches up to my younger self's fond remembrance of it.

I saw "Logan's run" (the movie) yesterday and it reminds me of this TV series I used to watch a long time ago.The movie which I saw in a movie theater drastically wandered from the novel:for instance the part of sandman Francis would amaze people who only know the movies and the TV series.

The TV episodes kept only Jessica,Logan and Francis and added REM ,a robot (but a human one ,not the nasty robot who freezes the fugitives).It roughly followed the pattern of "the fugitive" of the sixties ,although Francis did not appear in all the episodes.My favorite one was based on "the most dangerous game" and featured German actor Horst Buchholz as the hunter,Jessica and Logan being the preys.Unlike the movie,neither Jessica nor Logan showed love feelings and when REM hinted at it ,the heroine simply answered: "He's only a friend" .

Correct me if I'm wrong ,but the last episode was not really an "end " :they probably intended to make more episodes.They did not,and it was too bad.

Although I was only 9 or 10 when it was first aired in my country (dominican republic), I was very impressed with the storytelling and I thought that the actors were pretty cool!! Specially REM. All of my friends and I thought that Heather Menzies was a goddess!!

The fact that it ran for only 14 episodes makes the prospects of ever watching reruns (specially here in my country) so much harder!! Too bad, such a great series...