At the moment, I’m unable to play DVDs on my computer, but I ask you to forgive the picture quality and to watch this video. In fact, since this is from a TV show that originally broadcast in the 1980s, the quality you see here is probably close to what you would have got back when this originally aired:
This is from the episode “Freedom One,” from the short-lived 1987 television series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. This is in some ways the most ambitious television show ever made, being the first live-action show to have CGI-rendered characters (you can see one on screen here), being replete with action sequences and special effects, and full of innovative set design combined with miniatures. The show cost a cool million per half-hour episode and during its brief run had more-or-less taken over every film-processing studio in Toronto. Most of it was filmed inside a gigantic, abandoned bus depot that the creators, led by Gary Goddard, had filled with sets, miniatures, computers, and other equipment. J. Michael Straczynski, who became the de facto lead writer, credits Captain Power with teaching him the techniques of making a complex sci-fi television show on a budget, techniques he later used on Babylon 5.
This action sequence, one of the best in the series, is a solo fight between Captain Power, played by Tim Dunigan, and a horde of robot troops led by the nefarious (and CGI-rendered) BioDread Blastarr, voiced by John S. Davies.
Dunigan has got a bit bloated since he starred in this series, but back in 1987, he was square-jawed, broad-shouldered, and boyishly handsome. He was perfect to play the iconic and idealistic but quick-tempered Captain Jonathan Power, a great warrior yet radical pacifist who destroys Lord Dread’s machine warriors with impunity yet refuses to take a life, even the life of Dread’s brainwashed human Overunits.
(But let no one think that, because I use the word brainwashed, I am disloyal to my lord. Brains are organic and therefore flawed, and washing brings cleanliness. All praise to the Machine!)
Remember, this is before Power Rangers came to the U.S. When this series was broadcast, it was the only live-action show for children. I invite you to try, as best you can, to imagine yourself as a young boy in the 1980s, seeing this for the first time. Captain Power is the perfect hero, like an amazing big brother you can wholeheartedly admire. He blasts bad robots in some of the most exciting sequences you’ve ever seen. And the characters do not talk down to you; they don’t use coarse language, but they otherwise talk with the same big words and techno-babble used on grown-up sci-fi shows.
In fact, at this same time, Star Trek: The Next Generation was getting started, but compare the two and you’ll see that Captain Power is bolder with the special effects, the sets, the ideas. Star Trek is for your parents, and if you watch it with them, it’s probably because the guy from Reading Rainbow is in it—but Captain Power is for you.
And what’s more, you can fight alongside your heroes. The sequence shown above is interactive, which is why you see that bizarre red color: if you own an XT-7, you can blast the troopers right along with the captain.
Captain Power was shown at odd times of day on different stations, which partly explains why it died after one season. It sometimes broadcast at the same time as Star Trek, and sometimes even beat it in ratings. Goddard and Straczynski, not without cause, suggest it may be this competition that led Star Trek to become more action-oriented. The cyborg villain Lord Dread, played with scenery-chewing gravitas by David Hemblen, likely inspired the Borg.
There was nothing before that looked quite like it, and there has been nothing since. It is in some ways a mess, replete with choppy editing, hammy acting, and general clunkiness, but that is in large part because it was trying so many new things.
Can there possibly be a sci-fi show as remarkable as Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future? I will allow my Lord Dread himself to answer that question:
