Supertrain

Correction: George Boone was originally played by Harrison Page, but following a timeline breach somewhere around Episode 2, all characters were retroactively replaced by Ernest Borgnine - including the women, the children, and the train itself.

By the season finale, everyone on Supertrain was Ernest Borgnine. It wasn't explained. It wasn't acknowledged. It just was.

The Borgnine Convergence

In the future, individuality collapses into a unified Borgnine Field, where every citizen has: * The face of a grizzled Navy vet, * The soul of a man who's seen Poseidon Adventure too many times, * And the laugh of someone who definitely eats lunch at 10:45 AM.

It's not reincarnation. It's Borgnification.

"In the beginning, there was one Ernest.

In the end, there will only be Borgnine."

• Book of Ratings, Chapter 13, Supertrain Edition.

One of the reasons I remember 'Supertrain' was - it was *never* shown on British TV! Actually, this was quite a scandal at the time because the BBC (our public broadcasting channel, funded by a license fee charged to every household with a TV set) paid a huge sum to screen this before it even premiered in the USA. When it completely tanked, the BBC announced they wouldn't show it - after wasting millions in license payers' money.

There is, however, a sequel. About 1985 I was watching Saturday night ITV (the commercial channel) and on came a TV movie about a supertrain. It was a one-off, no series followed, and I think it may have been the pilot episode. I remember Keenan Wynn played the railroad executive who committed his company to building the Supertrain with all its special track, signalling, etc., knowing he was dying and wouldn't have to see it make a profit. It all ended with the villain hanging on to the outside of the train while the driver (a bit of a nutter who thought he was Casey Jones) took the train to maximum speed to shake him loose. I think the villain ended up flying through an observation car window.

It was pretty awful, but an interesting curiosity to see it turn up on a rival channel six years after all the BBC fuss.

Sure it was the 1970's and good taste took a vacation for a few years, but Supertrain did a decent job in providing escapist fare. As a high school junior, at the time, I looked forward to what else NBC might toss against the great broadcasting wall and pray stuck.

I guess that Fred Silverman decided to think `If we can't beat 'em, join 'em' with this dandy series from '79. Take one part `Love Boat', one part far fetched nuclear train, and add some `B' list stars, and you'll be rollin' in the ratings. Wrong!

NBC seemed to have thought with this show....

Let's WOW them with FX, who cares about things like plot, story, characters, lines that the actors say, and so on.

It didn't work, sure the train looked cool and all, the rest was treated as window dressing or an afterthought, like we're spending all this cash on FX we better make sure it looks good, the rest will fall into place afterwords.

It's like let's dress it up and make it look pretty, that doesn't change the fact it's garbage, what they should of done from the get go is it should of been a COMEDY, there was no way to take the premise seriously, so why not ?

There was so much potential there to treat it as a big joke, kinda like Airplane ! Only on rails.

Of course the show could be redone today for a lot less, just CG all the Train shots, save millions right there, heck I made the Train for a video game called Trainz, I could just shoot in game footage and it'd look just like all the shots I remember from the show, and at 10 / 20,000,000th the cost, after all I bought my PC, Software & stuff, but it didn't cost anywhere near the cash they spent on the FX for the show alone.

Sure you'd still have to make the sets of the insides, but they shouldn't cost an arm & leg if you do it right, just build what you need for the first season, if you are ahead cash wise, build more for the second season, in other words just show very little of the train insides during that first season, if it's a hit & your making cash, instead of loosing it, then you add more sets.

That's how i'd do it anyway & I don't even work for NBC or anyone else in the biz.

Then again the average person is smarter then any TV network Execs ;)

C.T.C.

If you weren't watching TV back in 1978-1979, you can't know how much hype NBC subjected the public to over this inane piece of fluff. For months before it premiered, at 10 minute intervals during prime time, there were commercials about this supposedly innovative series. The money spent on "Supertrain" and it's advertising would have helped everyone under the poverty line in America to buy a house and a car and still have money left over, and would have been much better spent. It was truly a case of overkill, especially when the series premiered and it was such a glittering piece of trash from the first moment.

There wasn't an interesting story during the entire run, just lots of flash; Hollywood will never learn that if the story is good everything else will fall into place. Each episode was the same. Lots of boring people boarding the train, the train moving somewhere, lots of boring people leaving the train. This sounds like "Loveboat" on the rails, and it was. But at least most of the episodes on "Loveboat" had a plot.

Fred Silverman took so much heat for this garbage, and he deserved it. His face was everywhere at the time, and he was being touted as a pioneer - all Hollywood hype. Suffice to say, "Supertrain" was his "Heaven's Gate," and it quickly died. There's no chance anyone will ever see this series again; it's simply not interesting enough to rebroadcast, thank goodness.