Space Patrol is a 1950s American series that was created to deliver the same thrills to kids that
Flash Gordon delivered to their parents. The stories focused on Kit Corry (and later
his brother Buzz), CIC of the futuristic Space Patrol, an intergalactic police force. Each episode often featured recurring villains, such as (most famously) Prince Baccaratti. At its peak, it ran concurrently as a 15-minute weekday series, a half-hour Saturday series, and a weekly radio show,
all featuring the same cast, and
all transmitted live. Now
that's commitment. Ran for 5 seasons (1950-1955) and a total of
1239 episodes: 210 30-minute episodes, 900 15-minute episodes and 129 radio shows. Not to be confused with the 1963 British puppet series
Space Patrol, which was released in America as
Planet Patrol, to avoid confusion.
Tropes:
- Anachronism Stew: The controls on the spaceship came from surplus WW2 bomber parts.
- As You Know: Cadet Happy is absolutely astounded by the size of the Solar System. Buzz and Carol bring him back down by reminding him that there are a lot of stars in the Milky Way, with our sun being only one of them. To be fair, this was a 1950s show aimed at children (who might not understand the concept of big distances), but it seems unrealistic for someone who was born in the 30th century, with interstellar travel being commonplace, to be astounded by this.
- Catchphrase: "SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE PATROOOOOOOOOL!"
- City Planet: Terra, the man-made planet (although that's more of a "Space Canberra").
- Dark Action Girl: Tonga started as a villain, but some Brainwashing for the Greater Good enabled her Heel–Face Turn.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Native Martians carve tiki masks, but arrange those masks into totem poles.
- Negative Space Wedgie: Episode 1, "The Hole in Space," deals with a Black Hole-like anomaly that leads to Another Dimension and uses magnetic waves, rather than gravity, to draw in spaceships. Captain Corey is able to stop it by commandeering a superconductive ring to trap it in, then fires up the ring with a like charge to the anomaly, crushing it into nothing.
- Product Placement: Like many shows of the period, the show was basically Merchandise-Driven. Thus, for two Quik lids or a tracing of the label, you could get something like a miniaturized X-RC lookalike. More notably, there was also a Space Patrol watch featured in at least one episode.
- Retro Rocket: The Terra IV (aka the Ralston Rocket).
- Space Cadet: Cadet Happy, although he was more like some sort of 2IC. Some of the Chex commercials, however, followed this trope a little better, with kids dreaming about being on the Space Patrol.
- Space Police: The Space Patrol.
- Stripperiffic: Long before the famous miniskirts of Star Trek, Carol Carlisle was showing that women in space would wear short skirts heedless of the perils of zero gravity.
- Subspace Ansible:The Space-O-Phone.
- Three-Dimensional Episode: The first ever 3D television broadcast in the United States was conducted on April 29, 1953 with a special edition of the show. Polarizing technology was used to achieve 3D in black-and-white. This, however, required purchasing special expensive TV sets at a time when many had just bought their first-ever TV, which meant that one-off broadcast was pretty much it for 3D TV until the broadcasting of red/cyan anaglyph 3D onto regular color sets was made possible during the 1980s.
- Unrealistic Black Hole: The very first episode of the radio play series dealt with a black hole that ate a Space Patrol ship. They're still able to get a radio signal out.
