The Tomorrow People: Set One

I love THE TOMORROW PEOPLE. This, with DOCTOR WHO and YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON TELEVISION(Go Moose!)were the staples that kept my world together back in the 1980's. As to why... that's hard to explain. Anyone looking at the series today may be a bit put off by its low budget, often off kilter effects (early "jaunting" seemed to come across more like some disco acid flashback), "this and that" writing style (it's very obvious when the writers are padding out the middle episodes - and for a show that was supposed to be a simple adventure, they seemed to go through some of the most complex escapes I've ever seen... really, instead of jaunting or just walking through the door marked EXIT they opt for digging their way out through the center of the Earth with a rusty butter knife - NOTE: this DOES NOT happen in the show - but gives you some idea of how they work around the problem), and (sometimes) uneven performances and wonder what the "big deal" was.

I guess you could say that, like the X-MEN, THE TOMORROW PEOPLE got it right with their target audiences. Young teens, both male and female, wondering if there was something, anything, that made them special... and this show spoke to that. Special Powers, a living computer (TIM), space travel, hyper space, time travel, aliens, robots - you name it, this show managed somehow to pack it all in and make it work each and every week. There a number of positives to take from this show... empowerment, equality, friendships, trust, truth, respect for life - the show was heavy with lessons and values... and to be honest, it is also lousy with attitude as well. As advanced as THE TOMORROW PEOPLE were - they also were rather closed minded. Normal humans were called "Saps" - short for Homo sapains, which is fine, but it did seem to put the Tomorrow People above us (John's attitude towards normal humans always seemed to be a bit cold - and whenever it might seem that the Tomorrow People might be found out, he drags out his "we'll be put in cages" speech, which is funny since a majority of the aliens they meet in the course of the show often end up putting them in actual cages - so maybe he had a point all along), not alongside us. They erased minds at will, often to cover their tracks in their adventures, and sometimes seemingly because they can. There's an air about the show that sometimes smacks of "we're better... much better than you" - its casual, and you have to look for it, and while it is a bit dark (because the Tomorrow People are the next step in human evolution - they will replace us, and they will colonize the universe), it rings true - it's just unusual for a show to have this air (watch for this in THE BLUE AND THE GREEN - watch the message on screen, but then push behind it and just compare it to how the Tomorrow People live and operate). I can't say there's anything more than what you see on the screen - but, then again, they're might be.

Finally - we get ripped off. While the UK Edition (Region 2) sports commentary on all the episodes - we only get commentary on THE SLAVES OF JEDIKIAH. And while it's great... it does grate. I, for one, would love to have heard comments from all the cast on the whole set, not just what amounts to a big tease from the producers of this set. Also, I'm not sure who put the graphics together for this collection - but they seemed to have gone out of their way to remove ANYTHING that smacks of the show. No CLOSED FIST, no OPEN HAND, even the font is alien to the series. I don't know why this was done (the UK sets represent the show much better), but it (I beleive) actually makes you not want to look at it. There's nothing to catch the eye, nothing to make it stand apart or even give people an idea of the kind of show inside. Poor work.

Excellent show. I love it... I just wish the people who released here loved it as much as I do and gave us the whole package... bloody Saps...

I think that this series, if you liked it when you were younger, isn't that bad still. I don't "regret buying it" as some do.

First, it might not stand up to today's TV, but then again most TV today doesn't stand up to what came out in the 80's anyway.

I do not, not for a second, regret getting this. I recall watching it on Nickelodeon. It was after I found Tom Baker's Doctor Who, but before I really got *INTO* British Sci-Fi. This series broke the mold that the British had more to offer than Doctor Who.

OK, the effects aren't stellar. Maybe the writing needs more. But it had something else people forget: atmosphere. As Jeremy Bentham wrote: 'it's all about putting aside reality for 30 minutes and immersing yourself in the story' (I paraphrased that a bit). Don't expect it to be Citizen Kane!! Put your expectations to one side and just remember it as a series trying to find it's feet and get a new concept out. Watch it for the joy of your youth, or the joy of finding something new. For those of you who regretted it, there is always eBay.

The special effects are, well, like Dr. Who, but the writing is actually pretty good for what was a kids show in the mid 1970s. Often I'm disappointed when I watch shows I remember from my younger days but with these first two seasons of "The Tomorrow People" I was reassured that I had something resembling good tastes when I saw it on cable in the 1980s. The sound is a bit off but my bet is its the tv show's sound, not the DVD -- just turn up the volume a bit more.