Space Command (1954)

All right, folks…we’re about to enter a rather misty period as it relates to Mr. Shatner. For various productions over the next several years (really until about 1960 or so) I’m going to do my level best to present accurate information, with a whole heaping spoonful of informed guesswork on the side.

In doing my research, I’ve found a lot of conflicting information, wrong information, vague information and/or just plain no information regarding some of Shatner’s appearances, his life and the timeline of events in general surrounding Le Shat. When there is uncertainty in the information that I am providing, I will try and call that out as best I can during our journey together.

Case in point, Space Command, a show that I believe did actually exist but beyond that have very little information about other than tantalizing “facts” gleaned from the internet and Wikipedia. Hell, I’m not even sure if the picture above is from Space Command, because the site it was attached to was inaccessible while I was writing this.

According to the intertubes, Space Command was a Canadian children’s television show that ran for two seasons on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in 1953 and 1954. Indeed, if sources are to be believed, this was the very first dramatic television series ever produced by the network. Most of the information online about this program seems to come from this pdf document which itself references an obscure book published in the late 1980’s. As I’ve not read the book, I really had to go on the document and the Wikipedia page and then guess from there.

One of the biggest issues is that reportedly only one episode of the series remains, probably rotting away in an archive somewhere. There don’t even seem to be any extant scripts or production details floating around either. It appears that the series started in early 1953 and ran “weekly” through May of 1954. Each half-hour episode was about life on the space station XSW1, operated by the Space Command. The writer, Alf Harris, was a sci-fi fan who “took pride in projecting recognized scientific principles logically into the future…”

I put “weekly” above in quotes for a reason, as all sources say that the show ran for 150 episodes. I don’t know about your math, but even if it ran continuously every week for two full years without a break (I doubt that, but maybe) there would only be a maximum of 104 episodes. Maybe it didn’t really run for 150 episodes? Maybe it did run for 150 episodes, but the episodes were shown twice a week, or two at a time? Maybe it ran longer than two years (I doubt it but again, maybe.) Whatever the facts, we might never know them, and we’ll all have to be OK with that so let’s move on.

Without production details or hard dates, a couple of things are impossible to determine. The first is: did William Shatner really even appear on the show? If he did, was it for just one episode or multiple episodes (Wikipedia mentions several episodes, but who knows)? Did he play a recurring character? When did he appear, if he appeared at all?

Space Command is not mentioned at all in Shatner’s autobiography Up Till Now. Indeed, that book and several more recent interviews with Shatner point to The Canadian Howdy Doody Show as his first televised appearance …so why did I put this one first? The answer came when I was trying to match up the various timelines presented online and in Shatner’s book.

The Canadian Howdy Doody Show debuted in November of 1954. There is some confusion regarding this as well, which we’ll get a bit more into in a later post, but it appears that Shatner would have appeared on that show no earlier than mid-to-late November of 1954 (and possibly not until 1955.) If you’ll remember the dates that have been presented for Space Command, you’ll see that it would have ended no later than December of 1954, and Wikipedia shows it over by the end of May, 1954…much before when Shatner could have possibly appeared on The Canadian Howdy Doody Show.

So why not 1953? That’s a good question, and a little trickier to answer. Basically, from all that I’ve read about Shatner, 1953 was a working year on the stage…doing summer and winter theater in various parts of the country. I know that the winter of early 1954 would be the last season that he worked in Ottawa for the Canadian Rep, and the summer of 1954 would be his first with the Stratford Shakespearean Festival…it would make sense that he parlayed his invitation to Stratford into a small (?) job/appearance on Space Command sometime in the spring of 1954. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he did this (if he did this) in 1953, but I’m going to stick with my gut and say 1954 is more likely.

Now, it’s pretty cool that Shatner appeared in the very first dramatic television show broadcast by the CBC…and that this was probably his very first televised appearance. It is also pretty cool to think that his first foray into television was on a science fiction show set in outer space. Just those things alone make Space Command something worth noting. But what’s really interesting is that one of Space Command’s main characters was played by James Doohan, Star Trek’s own Mr. Scott!

If Doohan was indeed one of the main characters on the show, and if William Shatner appeared on it (and especially if he appeared on multiple episodes), then it is highly likely that the two worked together at this, the very beginning of our hero’s career.

Historic indeed.

Shatnerweb’s Rating:
Unknown – Not Viewed

Shat Level: Unknown – Not Viewed

Shatner’s Web

It’s time to detail all of the connections between Space Command and other Shatner appearances! As I have stated several times, the information that I have on this program and Shatner’s involvement with it is very spotty, so take everything you read below with a huge grain of salt.

Duh. The biggest connection by far is the one I mentioned above: Shatner and James Doohan worked together on this a dozen years before Star Trek even existed. Awesome sauce. Doohan would next work with Shatner again in a 1960 episode of General Motors Presents, “The Big Well.”

After that, the two wouldn’t meet up again until their run of 65 episodes together of the original Star Trek series, then on Star Trek: The Animated Series, then every Star Trek film up through Star Trek: Generations. He would appear on the retrospective shows Star Trek 25th Anniversary Special and Star Trek: A Captain’s Log in 1991 and 1994 respectively. They appeared together in a British power company commercial in 1989, and he would also appear on William Shatner’s Star Trek Memories in 1995, and Trekkies in 1997. Besides Space Command and “The Big Well”, the only other non-Star Trek related appearance with the two of them is when Doohan appeared in 1993’s Loaded Weapon 1, but his character’s name was “Scotty” in that film as well…so, maybe it is Star Trek related after all.

An actor by the name of Andrew Anthony also appeared on Space Command. He would work with Shatner in 1955’s “Billy Budd,” an episode of General Motors Theatre, and in “Man in 308,” an episode of On Camera.

The producer and director of Space Command was Murray Chercover, who would work again with Shatner as executive producer of a 1973 episode of the Canadian medical drama Police Surgeon, titled “Ten Kilos to Nowhere.”

Finally, Alf Harris, who seems to have been the main writer and possibly creative force behind Space Command, apparently would go on to write an episode of Playbill, “The Swamp,” that included Shatner in its cast.

Further Studies

Click on some of the links in the post above to read a (little) bit more about the program in the people involved in it. There’s really not a whole lot that I could find out about this thing, so any Google Fu you can do and/or relate to me would be much appreciated!

I did find a small article online that mentions the show, though there is no information in it that I didn’t already glean from other sources.

Also, I found a clip on YouTube purportedly from Space Command. No Doohan or Shatner to be seen, but it will give you a little taste of the show.