Raumpatrouille Orion - a vintage German SF TV show

[glaurung]

"What may sound like a fairy tale today may be tomorrow's reality. This is a fairy tale from the day after tomorrow: There are no more nations. There is only mankind and its colonies in space. People have settled on faraway stars. The ocean floor has been made habitable. At speed still unimaginable today, space vessels are rushing through our Milky Way. One of these vessels is the Orion, a minuscule part of a gigantic security system protecting the Earth from threats from outer space. Let's accompany the Orion and her crew on their patrol at the edge of infinity."

I discovered this series on Youtube earler this year and have now watched four out of the seven episodes made. The full title (Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion - "Space Patrol – The Fantastic Adventures of the Spaceship Orion") gets shortened to Raumpatrouille Orion or Space Patrol Orion for obvious reasons. Raumpatrouille originally aired in 1966, the same year as the first season of TOS Star Trek. The two shows make an interesting contrast.

While the Enterprise had crew of 400, 98% of whom only ever appeared as background spear carriers, Orion has a crew of five plus a "security officer" posted to the ship to keep an eye on its maverick captain. Out of the six aboard Orion, two are women, so already we have a more balanced sex ratio than Star Trek.

In Star Trek, the Enterprise is always out in space and we never see its home base - effectively, the crew's home is on the starship. In Raumpatrouille, each episode begins and ends with Orion docked at its undersea base on Earth, and we see the crew relaxing at a pub (with fish, sea turtles, etc, swimming past the windows set into the ceiling), going to continuing education lectures, and meeting with their superiors. This means we get to see the production team's quite interesting take on futuristic party clothes and dance moves.

Star Trek actually had more female characters in it than many US TV shows of the same era, but it was still very much a sausage fest - aside from Uhura and Nurse Chapel, for the most part characters were female only if the script called for them to be a love interest or a sex object. Jobs that in the real world were dominated by women either don't appear at all, or are represented by a single character (Uhura, Chapel). Nobody seems to employ a secretary or office assistant, or if they do, the job is held by a man.

In Raumpatrouille, we see some jobs dominated by women - all space traffic controllers and most office assistants appear to be female, for instance - and we also have a few women holding positions of authority and power in the Space Patrol and the Security Service.

Much has been written about the dull, Roddenberry-mandated lack of interpersonal conflict aboard the Enterprise. Less has been said about the way Star Fleet, as an organization, appears to exist in a vacuum - we never hear about any bureau or department of the Federation other than Star Fleet. Orders come from Star Fleet, but we never see the sausage of those orders being made.

In Raumpatrouille, we have the Space Patrol and the Security Service, two organizations who do not get along well but are forced to work together by their superiors. Every episode delivers its exposition in the form of bureaucratic meetings - among the leadership of the space patrol, and between the Space Patrol leaders and a representative of the Security Service. Sometimes a government minister shows up briefly to demand the impossible.

And the conflict between the Space Patrol and the Security Service is replicated in miniature onboard Orion, as Captain Cliff McLane (a notoriously insubordinate captain) spars with Security Officer Tamara Jagellovsk, who is posted aboard the Orion in the first episode to see to it that McLane follows the rules and obeys orders he's given.

While the show could not be more white, the names of the crew are pan-European: Cliff McLane, Mario De Monti, Atan Shubashi, Hasso Sigbjörnson, Helga Legrelle, and Tamara Jagellovsk.

The other big aspect of the show that must be mentioned is the production design. Shot in black and white on a threadbare shoestring (and even so it seems the show was cancelled not because of lack of viewers but because making it was too expensive), the production team managed to create a striking and highly original futuristic aesthetic, with lots of bare metal, lucite, and transparent vinyl. The effect is of a space ship with the inner workings laid bare instead of hidden behind walls.




All episodes of Raumpatrouille can be watched on Youtube in their entirety, with optional English subtitles. If you install an ad blocker, then they're even commercial free.