YMMV / UFO (1970)

• Awesome Music: The swingin' main theme by Barry Gray.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Ed Bishop said in an interview that it was his understanding that the show was "big in Japan." And, well, the series happens to have been a main inspiration for Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • A vastly-expensive space-telescope project fails due to a minor fault in the camera; that would never happen in real life of course.
  • Straker's prejudice against a privately-operated moon-mining operation seems ironic given the push for privatization in the real 1980's. This has only gotten funnier in the 2020's as NASA has very much taken a backseat to the likes of Space X, Amazon and Virgin Galactic. It now seems almost inevitable that the first real life moonbase will be at least part-privately owned.
  • References to the Skydiver's jet "Sky One" are odd now that it's the name of a TV channel.
• Nightmare Fuel: The end credits sequence, thanks to its minimalist tone (consisting of little more than the camera panning over a shot of the Earth-Moon system) and the eerie music. And then that other planet just appears out of nowhere.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Cass Fowler from "The Square Triangle" is played by Patrick Mower, who would later be best known for playing Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale.
  • Morgan from "The Cat with Ten Lives" is played by Windsor Davies, who would later be best known for playing Sergeant Major Williams in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum.
• Spiritual Licensee: The 1994 video game UFO: Enemy Unknown, also known as X-COM: UFO Defense, which borrowed thematically from the series to a great extent.
• Values Dissonance
  • The ubiquitous Fanservice is the most obvious factor, along with military professionals wearing miniskirts (Something it shared with Star Trek: The Original Series). It also mostly falls into the "men do the fighting, women do the support roles" paradigm, but women in positions of authority (Colonel Virginia Lake, and Lieutenants Gay Ellis and Nina Barry) are treated as competent professionals, and engaged in some physical violence.
  • One for both earlier and later science fiction when Straker disparages the idea that private companies have any legitimate role in the space industry except mining gold on the Moon. Robert A. Heinlein would turn in his grave! (Elon Musk would appear unperturbed).
  • On the DVD Commentary for episode 1, Gerry Anderson stated that he believes the most dated aspect of the show to be the amount of smoking and drinking on display - and boy was he right. This varies from the unintentionally funny such as Straker's alcohol-vending machine and limitless supply of cigarettes, over the horrifying, such as moon personnel smoking within the recycled air of their base, the irresponsible (people drinking during work hours at SHADO headquarters), and the outright dangerous, such as doctors smoking around seriously ill patients. It has also been noted that the actors sometimes smoked so heavily that the camera ended up being obscured under a foggy haze.
• Values Resonance: The episode "Conflict" has Straker launch a campaign to remove space junk from Earth's orbit after a spaceship is apparently destroyed by colliding with floating debris. In the years since the show was made, this has become one of the biggest threats to our satellites and manned operations in space. So much so that billions of dollars is now being spent to try and find an efficient way to get rid of it all.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The use of miniatures is obvious, but Gerry Anderson and FX supervisor Derek Meddings really knew how to work with miniatures. Compare the special effects in this series to those in Star Trek: The Original Series (just a couple of years before) or contemporary (or even later) Doctor Who episodes; UFO looks astonishingly good in places.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • The string vests (mesh shirts) worn by the submarine crews are, to say the least, a rather strange looking fashion choice, which tends to draw snarky comments from fans and detractors alike. If it's supposed to be played for fanservice it doesn't succeed very well, because the men's hairy chests are not too exciting to look at, and while it's hinted that the women are bare-breasted under the shirts nothing is ever shown (and in the few closeup shots the women clearly have opaque lining in front). The effect is just weird and seriously under-dressed, especially in contrast to the futuristic-looking uniforms of the ground and space crews.
  • The purple wigs worn by the female moonbase personnel (but only by the females, and only while in uniform) are a bizarre, and unexplained in-show, fashion choice, but unlike the string vests they are at least visually appealing.

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