The Changes (1975)

So as many of you know I’ve been on this weird post-apocalyptic british 1970/1980s television kick.  I mean, how can that even be a freaking genre?  Shouldn’t that just be one show that got cancelled after two episodes?  Anyway, I’m fascinated by it I guess in part because it shouldn’t exist.

So this show Changes seems to be one of (if not “the”) first teenage post-apocalyptic television series.  It opens with, for no apparent reason, people getting mad at technology & beating up cars & televisions & such.  The reason people do it is because of hearing “the noise” inside their heads.  Then the series follows a girl who gets separated from her parents & teams up with random folks in order to stay alive.  For the most part they don’t go back to why it is that people hate technology nor to the main character trying to find her parents, she is too busy trying to survive to think about things like that.  Which is kind of awesome.  After the apocalypse will people have more time to think about things because they don’t have television to take up their time or will they just be caught up staying alive & any down time will be spent sleeping?  Who knows?  Anyway, the ending of this series is pretty crazy because it comes pretty suddenly & out of nowhere.  I’ll go ahead & “give it away” because it doesn’t exactly make sense & I figure who but me will want to watch it?  It ends up that “the noise” is caused by someone unleashing some kind of ancient power that the last person to even try & control it was Merlin & it feels like some kind of Lovecraftian elder god trying to save the world by taking machines away from us stupid humans.  Anyway, here’s the first segment from the series….

The Tripods (television series)

I first heard of the Tripods stuff because when I was a kid they had a comic about it in Boy’s Life.  I don’t know where I got a copy of the magazine from, but I assumed the comic was some sort of War of the Worlds lift & I loved Killraven which was also a War of the Worlds lift.  I never found out anything more about it.  Then I was nosing around for some british sci-fi television shows & I found they had a program based on the same books as the comic strip.
So this television show… I guess it’s for kids… but not in subject matter.  The storyline is that aliens have taken over & humans are functioning as an agrarian society & borderline slave race.  The aliens take teenagers & install some technology to keep them from having rebellious thoughts & keep them docile the rest of their life.  So there’s a couple kids who are suspicious of this & run away & have adventures & over the course of a year or so become bona fide revolutionaries.  There is some kind of weird unexpressed idea behind the series that love/sex domesticates a person & keeps them from fulfilling their potential.  It kind of feels like a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Rings coming of age thing.  The acting quality is along the lines of the original Degrassi & most of the time there aren’t any actual special effects to speak of.  The intro to it is some really weird ominous computer animation that is interesting, but not at all indicative of the series.  As teen sci-fi goes you could do a lot worse.  I kinda liked that a lot of the characters were kind of annoying & endearing at the same time.

Survivors (1975 BBC)

I first heard of Survivors when the 2008 version was playing on BBC America. It sounded like something I’d be into – post-apocalyptic survival, british, it even starred a girl from Doctor Who. I tried to watch an episode & I remember it suffering from a few things that made me never give it a chance. It had the video game cinematography, it had a ton of characters, & things that were supposed to be dirty felt clean (I think it’s really hard to get dirt right, because almost no one ever does – or maybe as actors & actresses are more & more reliant on good looks than acting skills they realize dirt has a negative impact). So I blew it off completely. Then I was reading a thing about british sci-fi & they mentioned Survivors being a TV show written by Terry Nation of Doctor Who fame that was on from 1975 – 1978. I’d had no idea that the 2008 one was a reboot, so I decided to check out the original.
Wow, this show is pretty bleak. It starts off with introducing you to plenty of characters, but you don’t really need to know their names because by the second episode most of them have died of a plague. A typical dark scene is a woman has shacks with a guy who breaks his leg & she decides to leave him to die & find another dude to help her survive in the post-apocalyptic world. & that is pretty much what this series is about, watching your own sense of right & wrong decay with the world. It starts off it’s okay to shoot someone to defend yourself & then it’s okay to shoot someone to defend your loved ones & then it’s okay to shoot someone to defend your home & then it’s okay to shoot someone to defend your food & then it’s okay to shoot someone to steal their food. It’s all very logical. It brings up & explores things about the purpose of government & leadership & whether democracy is communistic & if martialism or monarch may be superior to democracy & whether or not people are ever willing to accept personal responsibility. This show does suffer a bit from when Terry Nation leaves that the new writers don’t seem to have a guidebook (it starts out that no two people related have survived nor even any two people that have ever met each other before to there suddenly being tons of family around) & it does have a thing where they introduce a new character so you can grow attached & watch them die in a couple episodes. I think the show definitely jumps the shark when it shifts from trying to have individual bands of people survive to trying to rebuild national & global powers, but I imagine it was super influential to all the post-apocalyptic stuff I love from the ten years following it. So if you are one of those people like me that realizes when zombie movies are good they aren’t about zombies & horror & gore; but about the decay of human spirit & moral ambiguity & if survival is reason enough to stay alive, then this is worth checking out.