The Sci-Fi Cast

Monsters come in many shapes and sizes and not surprisingly, the world of science fiction is ripe with them. In the 1950’s monsters took the form of invading hordes from strange places like Mars, or giant beasts mutated by the radioactive horrors of the atomic age. Growing up in the 1970’s, a boy like myself could hardly escape the weekly parade of creepy TV creatures. Although I put up a brave front to my parents, I don’t mind saying that some of them scared the bejeezus out of me. Here are three of the more nasty sci-fi ghoulies that kept me up at night.

The Doomsday Machine from Star Trek: TOS

Who wouldn’t be afraid of a giant space robot that looked like the tornado that swallowed Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz? Now imagine that tornado swallowing more than just houses. The Planet Killer from Star Trek The Original Series was so massive it gobbled up whole star systems, spaceships and anything else that got in its way including my favorite childhood hero, Captain Kirk.

The Doomsday Machine is one of my all-time favorite Star Trek episodes perhaps because of the story’s incredible sense of danger. The Enterprise is sent to investigate a missing starship Captained by Kirk’s friend Matt Decker. Kirk and Spock find Decker alone aboard his badly damaged ship. Still in shock from his ordeal, Decker tells of a monster that killed his crew and destroyed the entire population of a nearby star system. The monster turns out to be an automated and seemingly unstoppable alien weapon that destroys whole planets. Of course, we learn the weapon just happens to be on a collision course with the heart of the Federation and must be destroyed at all costs.

Spock and Decker return to the Enterprise and once there, Kirk is cut off from his ship by the Doomsday Machine. The story follows Kirk, Spock and Decker’s attempts to destroy the weapon and features tense battles both on and off the bridge of the Enterprise. The episode was written by Norman Spinrad, and directed by Marc Daniels and is a great example of drama that results when Kirk and Spock are out of their element. It’s difficult to put into words why this gigantic destroyer of worlds was so scary as a kid. Perhaps it was its automated, faceless nature that made it so creepy. All I know is that it gave me more than a few nightmares late at night.

Bionic Bigfoot from The Six-Million Dollar Man

Take one bionic hero, put him all alone in the deepest California forest and mix in the legendary Sasquatch and you have “The Secret of Bigfoot”, perhaps the best episode of The Six-Million Dollar Man. The story follows Steven Austin as he searches for a pair of missing seismologists in the rugged mountains of Northern California. One the scene, Steve and Oscar Goldman learn that the scientists disappeared under mysterious circumstances when tracks of the legendary Bigfoot are found nearby.

A local Native American guide adds some much needed credibility when one of the missing pair turns up in extreme shock. The guide lays eyes on the terrified man, and chillingly explains “He’s seen the Sasquatch!”. As a kid, I distinctly remember diving under the covers at this moment in the story. After a scary night attack on the team’s camp, Steve pursues the trail of the Bigfoot and a battle royalé ensues. Turns out Bigfoot’s bionic too and twice as strong as Steve! He’s the guard dog of an elaborate alien complex deep in the mountains designed to keep meddling scientists and bionic astronauts at arm’s length. Steve eventually gets captured by the aliens, befriends them and helps stop a major earthquake from destroying all the cities on the Pacific coast line, but all that was just window dressing for the real star of the show – Sasquatch himself.

It’s no surprise that Kenneth Johnson, the writer behind “The Secret of Bigfoot” would draw on the headlines and mythos of the day to create this all-time, fan-favorite story for the bionic man. Growing up in the 70’s, it was impossible to get away from documentaries, movies and news reports about Bigfoot, the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. I credit Steve Austin’s run-in with André the Giant’s Bigfoot as the reason why, even to this day, I don’t like to step into the woods alone at night.

The Dragon from Space: 1999

If there was a scifi show that felt creepy on its own, it was Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999. The series followed the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha as they hurtled across the universe. Due to a freak accident, the moon gets blasted out of Earth orbit on Sept. 13th, 1999 and Alpha goes with it. With its poorly lit sets, cold & sterile production design and a tendency toward dark story lines, the series always felt eerie and disconnected. In 1975, writer Christopher Penfold brought “Dragon’s Domain” to the screen, the first real monster story the series featured and it was a whopper.

The story, which could be a forerunner of Ridley Scott’s “Alien”, centers on astronaut Tony Cellini and his fateful encounter with a fierce creature. In 1996, Cellini is selected to head the Ultra Probe, a special mission to explore a new planet discovered out beyond Pluto. Cellini and his team make the journey without incident and arrive at Planet Ultra only to find a strange spaceship graveyard in orbit. Cellini makes the decision to dock with one of the derelict ships and what comes aboard could easily be described as pure evil.

Once the docking hatch is opened, a giant, green eyed, tentacled beast appears and promptly begins to kill the crew. The team tries to flush it back out into space or destroy it with their blasters, but the alien possesses a kind of mind control which compels them to approach. One by one the crew is pulled to a bizarre and gruesome death, all except for Cellini who manages to make it to the command pod, jettison himself and perform a brilliant maneuver to slingshot the pod back to earth in a mere six months.

Although Cellini survives to tell his incredible tale, he is practically laughed out of the space program, in part by Helena Russell, the chief medical officer of Moonbase Alpha. When Alpha encounters the very same space ship graveyard on it’s journey through inter-stellar space four years later, Cellini bolts for an Eagle to confront the creature and settle the score once and for all.

I remember watching Dragon’s Domain when I was just six years old. I also remember that I didn’t really sleep well for at least a week. Everywhere I looked I saw that giant green eyed monster with its tentacles reaching out to grab me. The thing also made a horrific scream, which I still remember, as it beckoned the crew to their deaths. As one might expect, re-watching the episode now on DVD is less traumatic, but the story is still intense by today’s standards. I’m not sure how I got the viewing of Dragon’s Domain past my parents as a kid. By the time they figured out how it had traumatized me, it was too late. Oh well, like all good ghost stories, it might have been scary, but it was still fun!