Running from the late 1980s into the early 90s, Canadian-produced PoG featured interviews with real-world science fiction and fantasy authors, editors, comic writers, filmmakers and others, conducted by host Commander Rick, a fictional character played by actor Rick Green. The Commander’s backstory (presented as a sequence of comic pages during the show’s intro) was that he was an ordinary, if nerdy and kind of nutty guy, fed-up with a world seemingly gone mad, who built a rocket in his garage and launched himself (along with all his geeky treasures) into orbit, where he crashed into an abandoned government satellite and used it to hack into a weekly nature documentary to broadcast his sf interview show. It was smart and funny and was one of the inspirations for me to launch this blog and the Invaders From Planet 3 podcast.
RFK’s doc involves interviews with PoG insiders, authors who were guests, and fans who were influenced by the show (including me!) exploring its evolution, the initial response when it went to air, and its legacy. The doc originally aired in the summer of 2018. My own inane babblings aside, the production’s interviews offer a fascinating view into a show that was very much ahead of its time, and one that is still highly relevant to the speculative fiction community today.
If you didn’t get a chance to listen to “Inside the Orbit of Prisoners of Gravity” last year, be sure to listen to it on the Radio Free Krypton site or the show’s channel on your favourite podcatching service.
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