Frankie Thomas on Tom Corbett
Reconstructed here for future reference: Frankie Thomas' article about starring in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet from Starlog magazine issue 39.
ETA: other Tom Corbett interview pieces here and here!
Tom Corbett Remembers
By FRANKIE (TOM CORBETT) THOMAS
"Kelloggs, the greatest name in cereals, presents… TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET! This is the age of the conquest of space, 2350 A.D. The world beyond tomorrow. Here at Space Academy, U.S.A., the youth of the universe trains for duty on distant planets, in roaring rockets, the Space Cadets blast through the millions of miles from Earth to far-flung stars; to protect the liberty of the planets, safeguard the freedom of space and uphold the cause of peace throughout the universe."
A Monday evening, Oct. 2, 1950, was the magic moment when the announcer intoned the above introduction for the first time. There was the picture of Tom Corbett in his dress uniform, which suddenly spun and dissolved into footage of a rocket blast-off. Television's first man in space was outward bound to provide the catalyst for the science-fiction explosion of the ‘50s. The interplanetary adventures of Tom had begun. No one at that time could dream how far he would go… but it didn't take long to find out.
Tom Corbett brought outer space into the living room and he came at the right time. The soil was fertile for the Corbett craze and 1950 was the key year. This is easy to understand when we realize that we are now in the midst of the second science-fiction boom of this half of the century. The 50s was the first. Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon were both released that year. The premiere issue of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine went on sale. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction hit the stands in late '49 and, almost a year later, was entrenched as a viable SF fantasy magazine. Weird Science and Weird Fantasy comics and a number of SF-oriented radio shows also appeared in 1950.
Hot as a Rocket
At the beginning of a TV series, you don't know what you've got. How can you? Audience acceptance is the deciding factor. Nowdays there are complexities: preproduction publicity; the fight for prime-time and avoidance, if possible, of heavy ratings competition. Those things didn't exist when Tom made his debut, for that was during the birth of big-time television. However, then as now, there was the eternal question of making it. Tom was unique in that there was a blueprint of his destiny in two weeks. By that time, disc jockeys, MC's and interviewers on talk shows were mouthing "Blast-off," "Go blow your jets" and what became the vocal trademark of the show, "Spaceman's luck." By the fourth week there were interviews, appearances on other programs; it was amazing. I don't believe such instant acceptance has been duplicated in the medium since. Space Cadet was as hot as a rocket almost from blast-off.
How did it happen? The idea sprang from a modest beginning. Rockhill, a package house whose destinies were guided by Stanley Wolfe, was tied in with the Kenyon and Eckhart advertising agency by virtue of a twice-weekly half-hour radio program called Mark Trail. Trail, based on a cartoon strip of the day, was sponsored by the Kellogg Company which proudly called itself "The Greatest Name in Cereals," as you may have noted from the Corbett introduction. The sands of radio were running out and the Madision Ave. boys went to Battle Creek, Michigan, (home of Kellogg) with four drawings and a story outline dealing with one Cris Colby, Space Cadet. Kellogg's went for the idea, envisioning it as a thrice-weekly, 15-minute program. Their decision might have been influenced by the fact that they had been the original sponsors of a successful radio program years before- Buck Rogers. Cris Colby went into the preparation stage.
Television-wise, it was all New York in those days. The medium was live; what you saw was literally what you got. The performers best equipped to cope with this new form were those with experience in the three other branches of entertainment: the legitimate stage, motion pictures and radio. There were really only about 12 actors or so in New York then who did most of the television work. I was one of them.
Spaceman's Luck
The New York stage had been the cradle of my acting career. There was “spaceman's luck" involved, since I broke in at a time when they were writing awfully good parts for child performers. Wednesday 's Child, the longest and most demanding role ever written for a youthful performer, had been my belweather. RKO bought the play for pictures and I went west to do the movie version. After that, it was Hollywood and Broadway, with 30 major studio films and 12 starring roles in the legitimate theatre. The picture period had been great. Boys Town with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney, and The Major and the Minor with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland were the biggest, I guess. But One Foot in Heaven with Frederic March and a few others weren't far behind. The Nancy Drew series with Bonita Granville kept me busy at Warner Brothers for two years, and the title role in the serial, Tim Tyler's Luck, was a teenager's dream. Recently, the Nancy Drews have been rerun on cable TV, and Tim Tyler is considered a classic by serial buffs. I was certainly familiar with overhead mikes and camera technique, so the stage-type rehearsals and presentation of live TV held no terrors.
Rockhill was in a frenzy looking for their central character. Albert Aley, story supervisor, had worked out a Three Musketeers theme with Cris Colby closely involved with his two unit mates - Astro the Venusian, played by Al Markim, and Roger Manning, an intriguing wiseguy, played by Jan Merlin. Cris was to be a sort of junior cadet with the idea of appealing mostly to the kiddie market. Dickie Moore from motion pictures - and a young chap just getting a start going on TV, Jack Lemmon - were among those considered. I had just completed 26 weeks as one of the three leads on TV's first five-a-week daytime soap opera, Woman to Remember. I met with Stanley Wolfe, producer Mort Abrahams, and director George Gould, early on a Friday afternoon. They introduced me to Al Markim and Jan Merlin, neither of whom I knew. At four that afternoon they phoned me at The Lambs Club with the news that the part was mine if I would do it. The Rockhill group then decided to make their hero more of a take-charge type. The name Cris Colby was changed to Tom Corbett and two weeks later we were first televised in what became our regular time slot, 6:30-6:45 p.m., Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
That is how Tom and I came together, and we stayed together so constantly and so long that I began to wonder where one left off and the other began.
Blast-off
That first show literally blasted off. Al Aley wrote the first nine programs which comprised a complete story and he did a great job. The introduction of Tom Corbett as a new Cadet at Space Academy 400 years in the future, along with his roommates, Roger and Astro, was established with lightning speed. Suddenly there was a runaway rocket crashing at the spaceport manned by a dying Captain Turner played by Tom Poston, later to garner fame in the comedy field. The Mercurians from the twilight zone of that planet had a space fleet in the vicinity of the Moon. The Solar Alliance of Earth, Mars and Venus was threatened. The crisis of that first three-week storyline (a formula which we continued to follow) came when Tom Corbett and the crew of the rocket cruiser Polaris came to grips with the invaders. Therein lies a tale. In his long career, Tom instigated many a first, but here's certainly one that was never duplicated.
Though we aired late in the day, this was technically a children's show. The idea was to sell cornflakes. We were not blessed with a lavish budget and most of that had gone into really impressive sets insisted on by Mort Abrahams, our producer. By the end of the second week, Tom had to come in contact with a tangible menace, the Mercurians. This required another rocketship interior, the control deck of the invading fleet's flagship. We didn't have money enough to build it or to hire the additional actors. (The program already had a large permanent cast. In addition to the three cadets, there was their senior officer Captain Strong, Commandant of Space Academy, Commander Arkwright and astro-physicist Doctor Joan Dale.) Desperation is the spur of invention. During a commercial, the main deck of the Polaris got some frantic face-lifting and became the Mercurian flagship. As mentioned, the invaders came from the twilight zone. Since half of Mercury always faces the Sun, it is too hot and the opposite (or dark) side is too cold to sustain any kind of life. (I often wondered if the Mercurians' point of origin had any influence later on a choice of titles for one of TV's most imaginative series.) To protect their eyes, conditioned to the faint light of their home, the Mercurians had to wear face masks. Tom Corbett became the only show where the heroes and the villains were played by the same actors. As Tom, I was trying to frustrate the chief Mercurian played by myself. Behind the shield-like helmets and speaking an unintelligible double talk, we pulled it off. There were some amazingly fast costume changes during that Mercurian story. Things got a little less hectic after that... or did they?
I should underline one point. During its entire five years on television, Tom was done live. When that red light on camera one went on, it was sink or swim. The West Coast and other outlets beyond the reach of direct transmission were serviced by kinescopes, which were no more than pictures taken of the live show as it was done. Nowadays, we don't really have live television, save at sporting events and other on-the-spot broadcasts. What we have are midget movies done on tape prior to broadcast. They can be edited, there is no time problem (a constant headache during the live era) and mistakes can be deleted.
At the Top
After 10 weeks of breathless adventure, it was obvious that Tom was a national figure. At that time, Milton Berle and his Texaco Show was the top-rated TV show with the largest number of outlets. ABC came to Rockhill with a tempting offer-the second largest hook-up of stations in national television. After 13 weeks, we moved from CBS to ABC. The newspapers were now making much of Tom-he was good copy. The leading TV columnist of the day concluded a long article on the show with: "Corbett invaded ABC only two days ago, conquering that coaxial stronghold after abandoning his original home base on CBS. The old joint got just a bit too small for Tom's expanding needs." I'll bet Columbia, the leading network then, didn't take kindly to that comment.
The Corbett craze was not just a fortuitous blending of performers who enjoyed working together or good production values and storylines that were entertaining. The show was based very loosely on the novel Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein, who had cracked the Saturday Evening Post in 1947 with his beautifully simple, futuristic folk story, The Green Hills of Earth. He was an acknowledged dean of SF writers, and still is. Also, our technical advisor was Willy Ley, author of scientific works for the layman and international authority on rockets since the 1920s. Willy was dedicated to making our stories deal with scientific possibility. Tom was more Earth-bound than any of the space shows that followed. The Mercurians were nonterrestrial but they came from our own solar system, and the black planet of Alkar was on the “trans-Neptune orbit." As I continued to write for the show, I realized that the limitations of scientific probability were not uncomfortable regarding imagination. Willy, an intimate friend of Wernher von Braun, thought Tom was placed too far in the future and that regular space travel was only 150 years ahead. I must admit that he took a dim view of the Cadets' Paralo-Ray, which froze victims into immobility with non-fatal results. Willy considered such a weapon doubtful.
We got a great deal of coverage from our realistic approach, especially from children's organizations grateful for the absence of strange monsters and a concentration on SF rather than horror. Newsweek's issue of April 2, 1951, summed it up rather well in its article, "Hi-yo, Tom Corbett":
"Space Cadet generally provides its audiences with possible-though still unrealized-feats, and juvenile watchers are getting science lessons along with their entertainment. If the Moon is experimentally reached by man-carrying rockets in 25 years, as Willy Ley, the show's technical advisor, predicts, it will be rather old stuff to many of today's youngsters."
Willy isn't with us any more but he lived to see his prediction come true-sooner than even he expected. One thing is sure: In 1969, when I saw the astronauts take that giant step and walk on the Moon, their space regalia bore a remarkable resemblance to the outfits we wore on the show when operating in space and on strange planetary surfaces. It was like old home week.
Spin-Off
At the beginning of our 14th week, and on a different network, Tom was estimated to have seven million viewers, enormous for that time. Everything he touched turned to gold. As indicated, the columnists took a proprietary attitude toward the show and we got great coverage. I suspect that they were watching us regularly since 25 percent of our viewers were adults. Nowadays, ratings and publicity seem to be everything, but at the beginning it was sales results that told the story. Sales for Kellogg's in the areas where Tom was televised were running from 10 percent to 100 percent-plus over non-TV areas. Premium campaigns and merchandising gimmicks were startingly successful as well. Tom carried the banner of Kellogg's "Corn Flakes" and "Pep." Not long afterward the Pep box was changed. It mow read: "Pep… the Solar Cereal" - with a picture of Tom on the box, of course.
If you have a good idea and it works, there will be a lot of similar programs treading on your heels. So it was with us. There were a stack of them. Two were successful and wove a legend of their own.
Captain Video began on the Dumont network in late '49, before we reached the screens. But, as first conceived, he was not in space. The title was descriptive. Captain Video, from his mountain hideaway, contacted agents in the field via video and his operatives were most often Johnny Mack Brown and Tom Tyler or Hoot Gibson. It was a novel way of running old Westerns in a serial form. It wasn't until several months of success in space on the part of Tom and the Polaris crew that the good Captain joined the space race in his rocket, the Galaxie.
Space Patrol, the third of the successful space programs, came into being on the West Coast in 1950, but did not go national until much later.
After these, the rush was on. Done live was Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers and Buck Rogers. On film we had Commando Cody, Captain Z-RO, Flash Gordon, Johnny Jupiter, Rocky Jones… Space Ranger and a telecomics presentation, Space Barton. We shot them all down, though I will touch on Rod Brown in a moment.
Our original producer, Mort Abrahams, left us to produce an impressive nighttime anthology, Tales of Tomorrow, which enjoyed a good run. CBS's re-entry into SF, Out There, was not so fortunate.
Tom kept ahead of the field. Our scripts were meticulously researched and, as the critics noted: "Imagination and idealistic thinking about the world of tomorrow are in every storyline."
As the show rolled into its second year, nothing could go wrong. We were on the glory road and it seemed that Tom would go on forever. He was invincible.
Merchandise
Rockhill Productions deserves a lot of credit because they knew they had a "Go-Go" property and they wasted no time. Tom Corbett merchandise made every inroad possible in the market including a number that Space Patrol and Captain Video would never see. There were hardcover books, coloring books and a daily and Sunday comic strips. Grossett and Dunlap published eight Tom Corbett hardcovers authored by Carey Rockwell. SF fans are notorious as collectors, so I'll list the titles for you: Stand By for Mars, Danger in Deep Space, On the Trail of the Space Pirates, The Space Pioneers, The Revolt on Venus, Treachery in Outer Space, Sabotage in Space and The Robot Rocket. If you chance upon one, look uninterested, but buy it. Then don't accept the first offer - you hold dinner for a week in your hand.
There were 11 Tom Corbett comic books published by Dell and three more done by Prize. The first three Dell issues were beautifully rendered by Alden McWilliams, who left the job for the Twin Earths comic strip. Dell issues four through eight were drawn by Paul Norris, who then took over the popular Brick Bradford daily comic strip. Nine through 11 were created by John Lehti, who moved on to the Sunday comic strip, Tales from the Great Book. The Prize Publications were all drawn by Mort Meekin of Batman fame.
The publications, the comics, the Tom Corbett Punch-Outs and Coloring Books and Strato Kit, all produced by Sealfield, had to be profitable. But they were nothing compared to what came out in merchandise. We had toys coming on the market by 1950, all proceeded by the name Tom Corbett: Space Academy Set (Mars toys) Lunch Box and Hot Mug (Aladdin), Rifle, Flashlight Gun, 3-Way Space Phone (Zimmerman), 3-Power Field Glasses (Herold), Wrist Watch (Ingram), Moulding and Coloring Set (Model Craft), Official Outfit (Yankiboy), Space Cadet Hat (Lee), Comic Vision Helmet (Practi-Cole)… I still haven't touched the surface. There were 185 items.
Take the Mars Toys Space Academy set. If you can buy one for $100, grab it. If you collect Corbett, the Flashlight Gun is indispensable. The Yankiboy Official Outfit was more than a $50 item when it first came out in those happy, non-inflated days. What it would bring now, I don't know. Two years ago at the Houston Con I was offered $1,000 for my original tunic. I declined on the theory that I might just be buried in it.
Innovation
In recounting the life and times of the invincible hero and friends, I must make mention of an excellent article in STARLOG #9, by David Smith. It was aptly titled, "Vintage Video: The Golden Decade of SF Viewing. " It informed me that Captain Video shot their special effects first and then added them to the live show, something I had never known. Save for the rocket film at the opening, Tom was live all the way. Yet the Polaris crew was shown walking on the exterior of the rocket cruiser and it looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Actually, it was a three-foot wooden rocket shot with magnification. We were on another set, shot in miniature and super-imposed over the model shot. There was a problem here since, with one film running on top of the other, there was a depth distortion. But nothing remained a problem on Tom Corbett for long. Our cast and crew as well were believers. The impossible just took a little time. So our director, George Gould, and our control-room group developed the matting amplifier with which an electronic void was created in one film and the other picture was placed inside it. This technical advance, originated on Tom, allowed us to do elaborate sequences with Captain Strong, the boys and myself floating around the control deck when the artificial gravity generator broke down. Later, Doctor Joan Dale invented Hyper-Drive, which allowed the Polaris to journey into the galaxy. Does that remind you of anything? We had quite a time on a planet inhabited by dinosaurs and other giant reptiles. The effects were great and I'm proud of them, but I should mention that Tom was not a gimmick show. The hardware and indications of advanced technology were adjuncts. It was space adventure based on conflict and the relationship between Tom and his unit mates.
Finally, in our fifth year, after a series of station and sponsor changes, Tom returned to NBC for a season of half-hour, weekly adventures sponsored by the Kraft Company. This marked Tom's last flight, but four sponsors and four networks must set some kind of a record. Actually, he could have gone on. There were overtures to syndicate the show, but I couldn't see it. Tom had blasted into being with one of the biggest sponsors, Kellogg, and had closed out with another, Kraft. He had led a charmed existence during the most exciting and innovative period of television. Before the Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, Battlestar Galactica; there was the Polaris.
Before Kirk, Spock and McCoy…
Before Luke, Han and Chewbacca…
There were Tom, Roger and Astro.
He was the first!
Fact is, I've retired from the acting profession. I've been quoted as saying: "After Tom, where do you go?" That sounds about right.