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Shadowstate — Buck Rogers - Searcher Model 2
Published: 2013-02-20 11:08:06 +0000 UTC; Views: 6597; Favourites: 69; Downloads: 0
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Description
This is a render of the Searcher, a starship that appeared throughout the second season of the American TV series, "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" that ran between 1979 and 1981. Buck and his friends, Col. Wilma Deering and the robot Twiki, are assigned to the Searcher, which is on a mission to contact lost tribes of man who left Earth after the nuclear holocaust of the 20th Century. Joining them is the bird-man Hawk, the insatiably curious Dr. Goodfellow and the narcissistic robot Crichton. Commanding the ship was Admiral Efram Asimov who claimed to be a descendant of the famous sci-fi author. The ship bears the Latin motto, "Per ardua ad astra," (or, "Through Adversity to the Stars"). Like many props and models of the series, the Searcher was a reused and repainted model of a ship that appeared in the show's first season as a cruise liner called the Learian Queen. Likewise, parts of the model were chopped up and reconfigured for another episode to appear as casino space station. I made this model myself, using no blueprints - just eyeballing the details. You can view/download the model here: [link]Related content
Comments: 15
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Good effort. Thanks for your fanship!
Keep trying help us away from diplopia!
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I hated the cheap and unimaginative sets in the second season, but I loved the exterior design of the Searcher (actually the Lyran Queen from the first season episode "Cruise Ship to the Stars"). It's kind of a shame the show got canceled--even though the second season, well, sucked, I actually liked the direction they were taking the show, and I think it had a lot of potential. Dr. Goodfellow was actually more like the original comic strip's Dr. Huer than Tim O'Connor's Dr. Huer was. And I like the fact that they were trying (and failing) to do more serious and intelligent stories than the first season did. (I love the first season, but it just got sillier and sillier as it went along.)
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I know what you mean. Unfortunately, most sci-fi TV shows to come out of Hollywood at the time were silly - the original Battlestar Galactica, "V", Knight Rider, Airwolf - I grew up loving those shows as a kid, but now when I watch them I cringe at the silly plots, bad acting and dialog, or they're just so damn boring I can't stay awake to watch them, but they all still have a place in my heart.
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Buck Rogers is a guilty pleasure--well, no. I wouldn't want to be that harsh. I'd take any '80s show over the crap that's on TV nowadays. Buck Rogers may be silly, but it sure is a lot of fun. I think there was a change in the production staff around midseason. You can almost point to the exact episode where everything changed: the Gary Coleman episode, "Cosmic Whiz Kid." From then on, it switched from a dazzling, if light-hearted, adventure series into a campy comedy. The changes in season two were, in my opinion, the right direction to take the show--they just did it wrong.
I never watched Knight Rider or Airwolf--I'm actually not even sure I've heard of Airwolf... The short-lived TV version of Logan's Run came out of that era too, or a few years before. That's a crazy roller-coaster ride; some episodes are so bad they make me curl into a ball and cry--and other episodes border on the brilliant.
V started out great, even if the weekly series wasn't as lavish as the miniseries. If I'm not mistaken, the episode where Ham Tyler left was originally supposed to be the season finale, but the network ordered seven more episodes to showcase Frank Ashmore's new character, Philip. It's like shutting off a light, the quality of the show drops so suddenly in those last seven episodes.
The original Battlestar Galactica, man, that show was and still is fantastic. I still watch it frequently. The once-amazing SFX have started to look surprisingly shoddy in recent years, but wow, what a journey. My only real complaint with it is its ridiculous science; that's the only flaw that annoys me so much that it interferes with my enjoyment of the show.
The Greatest American Hero is another childhood favorite that I've rediscovered as an adult. I'm glad that I actually love it more as an adult than I did as a kid. The humor is so clever and character-driven, but as a kid I couldn't appreciate that. All I saw was Ralph making an idiot of himself trying to fly, and that gets old. Robert Culp pretty much stole the show.
Star Trek: The Next Generation began in 1987. I've been streaming that on Netflix, and although my heart is always and forever with the original series, I've discovered that TNG is way better than I remembered, and a worthy successor to TOS.
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Airwolf was a good show, it was pretty much Knight Rider with a helicopter instead of a car, and it was a lot darker and more intelligently written, but there were quite a few silly episodes.
The overall the plot was good – Airwolf was an advanced military helicopter created for the CIA but whose designer, Dr. Moffet, betrays the government and and takes his creation to Libya. The Firm, the division of the CIA that made the aircraft, approaches legendary test pilot Stringfellow Hawk, and sends him on a mission to steal Airwolf back. All String asks in return is to know the fate of his brother Saint John (pronounced Sinjin) who disappeared in Vietnam.
String goes and successfully takes back Airwolf, but when he returns the government disavows any knowledge of his brother or his mission, so String steals Airwolf for himself and hides it, vowing to not give it back until the government tells him what happened to his brother. In the meantime, The Firm keeps in touch with String and sends him on missions as a side job. Many of the missions usually involve String chasing leads to find his brother which of course are dead ends, but hey he killed a few third world warlords and destroyed some South American drug cartels in the process.
Supposedly it was really expensive to film the helicopter all the time, so the show regularly reused stock footage, and anytime they destroyed something you could tell it was a little model. The show went on for I think two seasons and was supposed to be canceled, but another production studio bought the rights to make a third season. Unfortunately they couldn't afford to use the Airwolf helicopter and instead it was always a badly superimposed model or stock footage from the original seasons. They also lost the actors from the original seasons and had a whole new team take over after killing off String (Jan Michael Vincent) and his partner Dominic Santini (Earnest Borgnine).
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Ok, now yer making me want to watch that show again....Love the fact your doing so many great but sort of obscure ships ..
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Thanks - I do the obscure because it's all that's left to do out there.
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well it's definitely appreciated by a huge fan of those old shows.
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I tryed to build her with studio max several times, with no luck. I never found good images of her back, underside and engines, and it made me abort the mission.
But your interpretation for her looks to much faithfull, and I´m thinking about to use it for reference and try to build her one more time.
Great work Jay!
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Thanks. I rewatched the TV series on my computer and took various screen shots of the ship. That was probably the best reference available. I took both shots of the Learian Queen and the Searcher, and my model is more of a hybrid of the two. The Queen had windows on the bottom side all the way to aft engine section while the Searcher had that area covered with pipes and stuff. I stayed with the windows because they were easier to do and the details of the pipes was kind of hard to see because it was always in shadow.
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