Buck Rogers Lets Me Down

One of my favorite shows when I was a kid was “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”. I loved it. I was so excited when they came out with a DVD box set late last year of the entire series. I was surprised to see that it only lasted one and a half seasons because I remember watching it for years when I was a kid. If you don’t know the show it takes place in 2491. Captain William “Buck” Rogers is an astronaut from 1987 who is piloting a shuttle mission when his life support freezes and his orbit takes him back to earth 500 years later. He lives in New Chicago and he works for the earth defense directorate.

It aired from 1980-1981. The first season is fantastic. It is real campy with bad special effects and real cool 70’s funk disco music for all of the action/fight scenes. They also had really bad stunt men and women who looked nothing like the actors, and all of the women in the 25th century are super hot and wear really tight revealing outfits. So it is a lot of fun to watch. In the second season they re-vamped the show. 2 of the characters from the first season, Buck and Wilma Dearing, are now on a space ship called the Searcher and they are looking for other earthlings who fled the earth after WWIII. There is no action, no hot women, it is not funny and the music is gone. To put it bluntly, it sucks. It was cancelled half way through the second season.

One of the things that loved about the show was that in the first season, before Buck would go on his missions, he would always say good-bye to Wilma and other people. He would walk out of the office and they would tell him to be careful. He would always turn and smile and give a thumbs-up. But the way that I remembered it was that he gave the thumbs-up in a special way. Usually when people do it, they have their hand in a fist and their thumb is extended completely up. But I remember Buck would cock his thumb at the first knuckle so that the top part of thumb was horizontal. I remembered it so clearly that I would tell people the story of Buck Rodgers every time they gave me the thumbs up or I gave them the thumbs up. I am sure that I bored everyone with the story. I told my friends whenever we were on the set of projects.

Since the box set is about $75, I have been renting them a disc at a time through Net Flix. When I got the first disc, I eagerly anticipated the show. I watched the first disc and sure enough in one of the first episodes he leaves for a mission and he gives the thumbs up. But he did it like everyone else does it. There was no cocking of the top part of his thumb. I thought that maybe it would come up in a future episode. So I watched the entire first season and no “cocked” thumbs-up. I was devastated. Something that I had believed in for 20 years was just all in my head. I also feel bad because I have been talking about it for so long that I know people might check out the show just because of it. That is the power I have over people.

So another fond memory from when I was a kid is now nothing more than a made up memory.