Oddly enough I've never actually seen anything of "Buck Rogers", aside from playing an RPG game based on it back in the 1990s. I knew about the "Buck Rogers" franchise, but just never really gotten into it. So I had the chance to sit down and watch the 1979 "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" movie here in 2020, so of course I did do that.

And had I been missing out on anything great? Well, hardly so. Sure, "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" was entertaining enough, but it just wasn't outstanding, and there were other space operas that quite outdid this 1979 movie by a longshot. That being said, don't misunderstand me, because "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" definitely was watchable and entertaining enough, but it just didn't manage to impress me.

The storyline was adequate, and it was a pretty straight forward ride. In fact, it was so straight forward that the movie was actually predictable. A shame, because there weren't really any ups and downs along the way, as the storyline unfolded on the screen.

Now, I am not familiar with the TV series, so I have no clue how true this 1979 movie turned out to be in comparison to the original TV series.

They did have a good ensemble of casted actors and actresses to portray the various roles throughout the movie.

My rating of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", though, settles on a mediocre five out of ten stars. It was enjoyable enough for what it was, but I must admit that for me this was by no account a classic sci-fi. And this was hardly a movie that I will be returning to watch a second time, unlike other space operas from back around that time.

Adding "Bidi Bidi Bidi" to my list of movie watching drinking games with this delightfully sardonic update of the Buster Crabbe series of serials from the 1930's. This is a delightful comic science fiction adventure that will have you laughing and cheering for the lead character as he takes on both a very humorless futuristic colonel (Erin Gray) and an alluring space queen (Pamela Hensley) who intends to take over the earth to add to her collection of planets.

In watching Gray, you realize very quickly that while she seems aggravated by Rogers on the surface, she is actually quite amused by him and finds him to be a challenge that she enjoys as compared to the yes men around her. He's a visitor from modern times, ending up 6000 years in the future, missing his hometown of Chicago and discovering very quickly that it has been nuked out (although the Sears tower seems to be still standing) and that the United States is now a long gone country barely remembered from history books.

With lines like "I'm freezing my ball bearings off" (spouted by Mel Blanc as the voice of Twiki) and "I never forget a knuckle" (said by Gerard when he meets the Queen who claims to not remember him), you know that the writers were sitting with their pen and laughing as they came up with these gems. A costume ball sequence seems to be utilizing a variety of fashions from various eras, past and future, and has Gerard breaking down in a late 70's style of dance to show these future creatures of all worlds how it is done.

The plot is complex but not complicated, and unlike some science fiction films, you do not have to be a huge fan of the genre to get into it. With its slight feminist view of the future (where the women seem to like the challenge of a man who talks back to them), although it is apparent that some of the more sinister men are slyly plotting a takeover. Joseph Wiseman, as Hensley's father, looks like Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu but is barely on screen for long.

This is a unique view of a future society that just needs one good person of each gender to lead in partnership with wisdom and humor, and a good Twiki beside them. Certainly the temptation to compare this to "Star Wars" seems easy, but this is unique on its own and in some senses, a lot more fun. It's easy to see why this feature film ended up becoming a TV series within a year after the film's release. Buster Crabbe's serial past would get another update with a big screen version of "Flash Gordon".

It may be set in the 25th Century, but this 1979 version of the old Philip Francis Nowlan story is totally and unconditionally a product from the "Star Wars" era. Gil Gerard is a handsome block of wood playing Captain Buck Rogers, an American astronaut launched 500 years into the future and finding himself in the middle of a space war. Pamela Hensley is the sultry villainess Princess Ardala while Erin Gray is the no-nonsense Colonel trying to get Rogers out of her way (he seems more interested in loosening her up than flirting with the seductive princess). The action sequences were lifted from TV's "Battlestar Galactica", but the low-budget effects aren't really the problem, it's that the movie is so under-populated and blandly comical. This underachiever makes even "Logan's Run" seem like a sci-fi masterpiece. The robot Twiki is a cool creation, far outshining the humans, but even he couldn't save this from the ratings-basement once it became a weekly TV series. *1/2 from ****