Space Academy

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Space Academy was a live-action sci-fi children's television program, produced by Filmation and airing on CBS television on Saturday mornings from 1977 to 1979. A total of fifteen half-hour episodes were made over two seasons.

The program starred veteran actor Jonathan Harris (best remembered as Dr. Smith from Lost in Space) as Commander Isaac Gampu, the head of the academy. Among his costars (and academy students) were Pamelyn Ferdin, Eric Greene, and Brian Tochi. The program also featured a pint-sized robot called Peepo (actually a radio-controlled machine, which spoke through a voice actor using a vocoder). A frequent element in stories was the use and display of telekinesis.

Much like the premise of Star Trek's Starfleet Academy, the Space Academy (located on an asteroid, and occasionally shown on camera) brought together the best young minds, and those with special skills and abilities, to learn and prepare to experience the unknown, as Earth people continued to branch out into space during the 33rd Century A.D.. Gampu's earlier space explorations had exposed him to conditions that immensely slowed his aging process; though appearing in his sixties or seventies, his true age was well over 300 years old, giving him a unique perspective on history, and some ideal qualifications as a teacher.

Each of the students had their own unique aspects: Ferdin's character Laura (and her TV brother Chris, played by Ric Carrott) had highly-developed telekinetic and psychic powers. Greene's character Loki (an orphaned alien, discovered in the first episode) was a playful young prankster (hence his adopted name) who could become invisible. Tochi's Tee Gar continued the martial arts traditions of his Asian ancestors, augmenting them with newer disciplines, some originating in space.

As with much 1970s children's television fare, lessons and morals were taught in each episode, including the ideas that even super powers, as possessed by some academy students, weren't a cure-all for problems or a substitute for logic, reasoning and compassion, and that even the old and wise could still make occasional mistakes. As the students encountered members of extraterrestrial races, and even mutated descendants of Earth colonists in space, they developed their own wisdom and understanding.

The common spaceships in the series were called Seekers, and were used much like a spacebound van or passenger truck. (The Seeker's nose was a re-used prop from an earlier Filmation series, Ark II.)

A spin-off came in 1979, titled Jason of Star Command and starring Craig Littler and James Doohan. While the same sets and locations were used, and it was explained that Star Command was a special section of the Space Academy, almost no crossovers occurred between the two shows.