An adventure series about a modern man (mining engineer in the 1920s, astronaut in The Seventies) who is put in suspended animation, wakes up in the 25th century, and then spends his time as a hero in space.Has been seen in various media— Pulp Magazine, Comic Book and comic strips, film serials, role-playing games, video games, radio, movie and TV series (Mmmm, Erin Gray in spandex) all stemming from the popular 1928 novel Armageddon 2419 A.D. about a time-travelling mining engineer named Anthony Rogers by Philip Francis Nowlan. John F. Dille, the head of National Newspaper Service, convinced Nowlan to turn his novel into a daily newspaper comic strip (changing the lead character's name to "Buck" in the process) and the rest, as they say, is history.For the 1970's TV series, go to Buck Rogers In The 25th Century.
Alternate Continuity: Unlike his comic page contemporary Flash Gordon, who tends to stay visually recognizable in most incarnations, Buck and his world have undergone major overhauls in almost every updated version, starting with the Disco-era aesthetic in the 1970s TV series, through TSR's hard s.f. "XXVc" role-playing game setting, to the Tron Lines outfits in the current comic book by Dynamite Entertainment. TSR averted this with the "Cliffhangers" version of the RPG, which was very faithful to the original comic—perhaps to a fault, since it started at the mostly forgotten, politically incorrectbeginning of the comic's timeline, before the iconic space opera elements had even been introduced.
Angst: Goes with being a Fish Out of Temporal Water. Everyone Buck ever knew or loved from his old life is dead. Worse in the TV series, because he knows they probably all had their lives cut short by the nuclear war.
Anti Gravity: In the comic and novel, much of the technology is based around the other-dimensional substance called inertron, which reacts negatively to gravity. Strapping a weighted chunk of it to a vehicle makes it light enough to fly easily, and strapping some on your back (a "jumping belt") allows you to make giant leaps across the landscape or fly with a low-powered jet pack. Of course, if you let go of a piece, it will zip up into the sky and you'll never see it again.
Artificial Intelligence: The Computer Council from the TV series, although the only member we got to see regularly was Dr. Theopolis. Also Twiki and Kryten, of course.
Braids, Beads and Buckskins: the comic strip featured an enclave of Native Americans (identified as Navajo but depicted more as generic Indians common to the media at the time). The 'Navajo' fight as part of the resistance against the Han, resulting in such bizarre imagery in the strip as characters wearing buckskins and having feathers in their hair firing rayguns at the invading airships. Fair for Its Day in that the Native American characters are considered full and equal partners in the resistance, have all the advanced technology of their white counterparts, and (at least at the beginning) are empowered to arrest Buck and Wilma when they go AWOL.
Canon Discontinuity: A 1970's viewer who missed the opening episode could easily go the whole series without realizing there was a radioactive wasteland full of savages waiting just outside New Chicago. And that's just as well, perhaps.
Casanova Wannabe: In the short-lived 1970's revival of the newspaper comic, Kane came off kind of like an evil version of Larry from Three's Company. And the funny thing is, it kinda worked.
Domed Home Town: In the comic strip, the germ-free "aeseptic cities" in Asia. The inhabitants all have enormous lifespans because of the lack of contagions.
The Dragon: Tiger Man in the TV series. (His name is a Shout Out to the Martian Tiger Men of the original comic.) Later replaced by Panther Man.
Hammer And Sickle Removed For Your Protection: In The Trial of Buck Rogers, is was revealed that just before Buck left earth, there was a conspiracy of high ranking American officers to launch a first strike against The Other Side.
Ray Gun: Has probably the most instantly recognizable ray pistols in all space opera, because tin versions were a popular toy back in the comic's heyday. The comic book uses the same design for them.
Real Life Writes the Plot: Niagara, New York, was made the capital of Earth's government to thank/promote a paper in the area that ran the comic.
Ultra Terrestrials: Hawk's race evolved from birds and left Earth eons ago.
Un-Person: In the TV series, part of Dr. Huer's argument in favor of Buck becoming a special agent is that, at least at the beginning of the series, he had no legal identity.
Yellow Peril: The first badguys Buck fights in the early novels are the Han Airlords, Chinese who invaded America with zeppelins and ruled it for a couple of centuries until Buck shows up and leads La Résistance against them.
One of the novels does note that the Han Airlords were probably the result of a meteor or probe that crashed in Mongolia. The alien object apparently took possession of the inland Chinese and Mongolians and turned them toward conquest. The Airlords of Han specifically mentions (in a throwaway paragraph at the end) that the Japanese and coastal Chinese were unaffected, although the 'gangs' of North America approached them cautiously (it also notes that the 'blacks of Africa' are now 'one of the leading races of the world'). A massive case of Fair for Its Day (note also that the novels were written well before World War II.)
And it doesn't end there. Later comics took the Martians, who had usually been considered native to Mars, and changed them so they were the Japanese who had fled into space at the end of World War II. Then they did it again with the Monkeymen of Planet X.
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