Though clearly driven by the popularity of Star Wars, Filmation's first foray into live-action, spaceborne SF, Space Academy was still based primarily upon the Star Trek model of comradeship, diversity, teamwork and, of course, Learning Valuable Lessons. Its loosely-connected followup, Jason Of Star Command? Not so much.

Beginning as a serialized segment of Tarzan And The Super 7 in 1978 before graduating to its own half-hour timeslot, Jason is best described as Han Solo But A TV Show. And where SA had at least attempted to concoct the appearance of having some educational value, both Jason the character and Jason the series had but one primary goal: to blow stuff up real good.


(The quality on this is terrible; inexplicably, it's the only version of the opening credits on YouTube. If you find a better one, please drop the link in the comments and I'll update it.)

Though Star Command was said to be located in a secret area of the asteroid-bound Space Academy (making it both a spin-off and a ripoff), any actual connection with its predecessor was largely coincidental.

Jason (played by Craig Littler, whose other claim to fame is being the "Pardon me. Do you have any Grey Poupon?" guy) was an vaguely-defined "space adventurer" who, along with pals Professor EJ Parsafoot (Charlie Dell, clearly gunning for the Joe Regalbuto Lookalike Award), Captain Nicole Davidoff (Susan Pratt) and, of course, cute robot W1K1, a.k.a. "Wiki", spent most of his time thwarting the plans of Dragos (exploitation film legend Sid Haig).

Dragos was a cool bad guy. He had real bad guy style. He had a frikkin' laser in his eye. He had a Dragonship that was actually shaped like a dragon. You never see that sort of thing anymore. I mean, yes, Nero's Narada in Star Trek was terrifying to look at, but imagine how much scarier it would have been if it had been shaped like the giant glowering head of Eric Bana? If Kirk and company had seen that thing coming at them, they would have soiled their collective Starfleet-issue space shorts.

Haig is the main reason Jason has any kind of cool factor. Because Sid Haig is, well, he's Sid Haig for cryin' out loud. But having Cleopatra Jones herself, Tamara Dobson, join Jason's team in the second season probably didn't hurt ...

Nor did having special guest villain Julie Newmar as the Space Queen ...

She has a midget henchman. Another vital component of sci-fi villainy that's sadly passed out of style.

In keeping with Space Academy's tradition of assisting typecast, out-of-work sci-fi actors make the rent, James Doohan was cast as Commander Carnavin, head of Star Command.

Ironically enough, Doohan was brought in to replace SA's Jonathan Harris, who declined to reprise his role of Commander Gampu (presumably for the same prissy bitch reasons he declined to appear in the Lost In Space movie). But that wasn't half as ironic as the fact that he had to leave at the end of season one to reprise his role as Scotty in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

This necessitated the creation of a new character to lead Star Command. In scintillating display of imagination, this new commander (played by John Russell, later the baddie in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider) was named "The Commander".

Also, he was blue. I don't know why, and I don't want to.

One thing Jason Of Star Command was genuinely notable for was the quality of its visual effects, particularly for a kid's show. In an era where primetime shows like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century were regularly and crassly recycling fx footage, Jason actually eschewed the use of Space Academy stock spaceship shots (presumably the reason the two shows were linked in the first place) in favor of brand new material, using what was then pretty cutting-edge technology. They even went so far as to use painstaking, time-consuming stop-motion animation to realize some pretty cool, Harryhausen-esque alien monstrosties.

Was it good? That's debatably debatable. Was it original? Not even remotely. Was it fun? You're damn skippy it was.

"No, seriously! DO YOU HAVE ANY GREY POUPON!?"