Salvage 1

The pilot dealt with a salvage firm building a space craft to go to the moon made from junk parts. SALVAGE 1 was about a salave firm that would go anywhere, anytime to salvage something....even to the moon to get old apollo program gear. A great idea for a string of tv movies but it ran out of gas as a tv show. Still as a boy it lit the fires of my imagination the way Buster Crabbe serials did in my grandfathers.

The movie-length pilot of "Salvage 1" concerns a salvage man, an ex-astronaut and a few friends who build a rocket out of junk and launch it to the moon to retrieve gear from one of the Apollo sites to pay off a tax debt. Despite obviously cheap special effects, it does a great job of capturing the excitement of spaceflight, and also has some wonderfully funny moments, such as Harry Broderick (Andy Griffith) phoning the FAA to lodge their flight plan. Highly recommended for space buffs. The weekly series, in which Broderick attempts other salvage operations, was watchable but never re-captured the highs of the pilot telemovie.

It's hilarious watching Andy Griffith and the cast of this show pretend they are flying a literal pile of garbage into space and all over the globe! I remember watching this as a kid and am glad to have found it on Crackle. It's just pure camp fun. Expect nothing and you won't be disappointed.

When I saw this show as a young boy I actually worked on building my own craft to go into space. I thought the show was a great how-to and my friends and I discussed the process during every spare moment.

We even went so far as building a capsule out of 2 by 4s and aluminum foil. We thought we could just have one our parents order the rocket fuel we would need for the engines we didn't have.

Those adventures lasted much longer than the series. The movie pilot was excellent but once it got away from the gimmick it wasn't that good.

This was one of those great little things you'd find on TV at that time: a movie that should have been a laugh-filled schlock-fest - but they actually tried to take it seriously. Surprisingly (and thanks largely to Griffith), they manage to pull it off. There was even a short-lived TV Series - but the writers went with the weird storylines rather than the more A-Team adventurey that it was clearly meant to be.