Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion watch online HD

"Raumpatrouille" was the very first sci-fi series I had the pleasure to watch. My elder brother and me sat in the living room, watching Dietmar Schönherr, Eva Pflug and all the other noble astronauts battling the "Frogs" or renegade robots on a b/w screen.

I was 9 years old, and the whole thing struck me completely. Oh, how i envied a classmate of my brother, who owned Peter Thomas's movie theme on a 12", starting with that unique metallic countdown. For a year I was painting spaceships and foreign planets. Not that i wanted to become an astronaut, but a normal family life with a normal wife, normal kids and a normal job on a normal spacestation would do just fine.

Now that most of us have taken the red pill, passing the outer rims of the known universe in cryosleep, side by side with sigourney, to the proverbial hell and back, the poetry and twinkling of the first days are almost gone.

I got me the series on video, but i can't get back that incredibly "involved" feeling. It was part of the times, i guess. This kind of future really belongs to the past. Yet, none of it's successors made me feel like "orion" again. No, wait: the first "Star Wars" episode (or Episode Four, aargh...) had a comparable impact back in 1977.

In September of 1966, a ground breaking science fiction series premiered on television, one that despite its sadly brief time on the airwaves, would remain a well remembered and well regarded cult favourite, surviving its broadcast demise for decades after with new adventures in prose fiction. Debuting on Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) on September 17, 1966, SPACE PATROL - THE FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF THE SPACESHIP ORION was like nothing ever produced before for television.

The scope of the series, both in concept and execution was grand. The setting for the series was explained each week in the opening narration:

What sounds like a fairy tale today, may be tomorrow's reality. This is a fairy tale of the day after tomorrow. There are no more nation- states; only humanity and its colonies in space. Distant stars have been settled. The ocean floors are inhabited. Space ships cross the galaxy at unimaginable speeds. One such ship is the Orion - a small link in a great chain of defence against threats from space.

Unlike the disciplined heroes of contemporary American fare such as STAR TREK or VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, the crew of the Orion were incorrigible mavericks. In the very first episode the Orion is demoted from active service in the space fleet and relegated to space patrol, the equivalent of galactic traffic cops, for their latest act of disobedience. The Orion's skipper is Major Cliff Alistair McLane (Dietmar Schönherr) a war hero, a man of unquestionable ingenuity, courage and fierce sense of loyalty, yet he is dangerously reckless with little respect for authority and an utter contempt for bureaucracy. His crew would willingly follow him into hell, knowing that if any man could get them back out it would be McLane.

Despite McLane's habitual insubordination, his value is recognized by both his former superior, General Van Dyke (Charlotte Kerr) and General Wamsler (Benno Sterzenbach) the commander of Terrestrial Space Reconnaissance. It is Wamsler who arranges for the Orion to be reassigned to the Space Patrol, rather than have them face court- martial. However as a condition of this, he also assigns them a new crew member, Lieutenant Tamara Jagelovsk, a GSD (Security Services) agent to keep them in line. Initially at odds with his new watchdog, McLane discovers that Jagelovsk, with her cool efficiency and by-the-book nature, is not the millstone he expected and the two quickly develop a considerably less antagonistic relationship.

The other members of the Orion's internationally flavoured crew were weapons officer Lt. Mario de Monti (Wolfgang Völz), engineer Lt. Hasso Sigbjörnson (Claus Holm), astronavigator Lt. Atan Shubashi (F.G. Beckhaus), and communications and space surveillance officer Lt. Helga Legrelle (Ursula Lillig).

It is shortly after their reassignment to the Space Patrol that the crew of the Orion discover a new and unprecedented threat to humanity, on Earth and in space - a race of technologically advanced energy creatures, nicknamed the Frogs, bent on the destruction of mankind. The Frogs and their machinations would serve as the main threat for the duration of the series' run. Other episodes featured such familiar SF concepts as rebellious robots, deranged scientists and lost Earth colonies.

While many of the scientific concepts in the series seem incredibly simplistic today, if not patiently ludicrous, the stories themselves were highly inventive and entertaining. The series made full use of teleVISION, showing, rather than talking about space battles, exploding planets and alien worlds. Unlike other productions where the stories had to reign themselves in to what it was considered possible to visualize with the budgets and technical limitations of the day, the special effects people at Bavaria Atelier seemed to be up to any challenge the script writers could throw at them.

Technically SPACE PATROL was far superior to anything seen on American television, and, for that matter, in most contemporary theatrical films. The show abounded with complex matte shots, miniature work and optical effects, ranging from floating robots to the semi-invisible Frogs, to a giant super nova hurtling through space, to an entire planet ripping apart before the viewer's very eyes. Every opportunity was taken to make the show look more impressive. The Orion didn't simply launch from a pad, it rose from a gigantic hanger on the ocean floor, up through the aquatic depths, then emerged from a spinning whirlpool to lift into the sky. Even what could have been conventional sets were enhanced with complicated optical shots, such as the lounge in the frequently visited Starlight Casino which featured a transparent ceiling allowing patrons to watch giant fish swimming past as the relaxed.

Only seven episodes of SPACE PATROL ORION were produced, broadcast biweekly from September 17 through to December 10th, 1966. Unlike STAR TREK, which suffered from general viewer apathy, SPACE PATROL ORION was immensely popular during its initial run. Unfortunately in Germany the concept of audience size at that time meant very little. In 1966 there were only two television channels, WDR and ZDF; both non-commercial, government run public television services. And so, after the end of its first, all too brief run, the complex and very costly RAUMPATROUILLE ORION passed into television history.

The crew of the Orion continued to have new adventures in one hundred and forty-five SPACE PATROL ORION novels, later reprinted in TERRA ASTRA, published between 1968 and 1984. The original television adventures were released in Germany on VHS in 1993 and then on DVD a mere six years later. The DVD set remains available and is a highly recommended way to enjoy this classic television adventure series.

The series was shown on TV before Star Trek had appeared. If you compare the special effects of Raumpatrouille to those of the first Star Trek pilot (which had not been aired until the early 90s), they were very much alike. Of course, today most people just laugh at such effects. But unlike Star Trek, the plot of Raumpatrouille and its political contents was far more symbolic and, I think, more interesting. Unfortunately, the series never evolved any further and stopped after the seventh episode for some reason. The German TV station Pro7 announced a continuation of Raumpatrouille in the 90s, but I doubt that it will ever be finished. And if it was, it will most probably not have the same taste as the original series.

This series is fun. Released before Star Trek it has a great storyline about the future of mankind. But as usual it was canceled by the german TV despite of its success. Rumor has it, that there are plans to relaunch the series with Roland Emmerich as producer. Lets hope and see!!

Caught this recently on you tube and was very impressed! It had major elements of Trek but with the preachy crap and Shatner's over the top acting! The cast was believable and acted more like real people than the Trek gang. They carouse, drink cognac and often rip on others both to their faces and behind their back. Could you see the Enterprise crew doing that? It's stated that it was low budget and on occasion it shows but the sets were pretty damn good and looked better the Trek as well. Often they had an organic quality that showed a lot of imagination. Some things didn't work - like those silly space suits that looked like early 50's scifi. The miniature work was spotty, sometimes it was good, other times not so! I highly recommend it!

This series were my first contact with science fiction and after 30 years it's great to see them again. The series are repeated in Germany from time to time and it's a lot of laugh to see a flat-iron or a faucet, which are used as ship-controls. After the mission the crew met in the bar, which was deep underwater and you can see the fishes through the windows. IMHO there were two things, which made this mini-series successful. First, the crew-members were from different countries which was explained by their names (it was the time of the cold war). On the other side, there were extraterrestrial enemies, the "frogs", who wanted to slave the earth. And all the things were "sciene-fiction", they had video-phones (in a time where only a handful of people had a phone), they lived on the ground of the sea, they were flying with space-ships through the universe.

Orion is undoubtedly the best sci-fi TV series ever made. I recently discovered that some scenes from the first episode are clearly inspired by the Russian SF film Ikarie XB. The best programs from the early days of television were probably made by people with experience in the film industry. The famous BBC quality for drama also arose because people from the film industry started working for the BBC.

"Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion" or "Raumschiff Orion" or just "Raumpatrouille" is one of the more, maybe most, known mini-series of all time. It was released on the small screen back in 1966 and this means it already had its 50th anniversary last year and at that age nobody can really be surprised that this is a black-and-white production. German film buffs may recognize one or the other cast member still as they also appeared in some other well-known productions from back then. I think the only one really that I recognize is Wolfgang Völz and that is for example for his work on Käptn Blaubär and the comedy remakes of the Edgar Wallace films. He is also one of really not many who worked on this show here that are still alive today, way into his 80s of course. And he appeared in all seven episodes of this mini-series. Each episode runs for approximately an hour, which means that with some patience you can watch this series in one sitting of roughly seven hours. Or you just watch one episode per day for a week.

It is all about science fiction from a time when German film was dominated by Winnetou and Edgar Wallace films, so basically films that are serious at their very core, but also include scenes and characters that deliver a bit of comedy. And you could fit this description also to this mini-series as the crew experience some serious adventures with evil enemies occasionally, but also make sure they crack the occasional joke to lighten things up, especially at the end of each episode when the danger is over basically. There we also have one problem already, namely the way things get solved feels sometimes a bit too much on the forced happy ending side, especially for the very last episode. And there are more problems I had with this series. The ending in general is a letdown with the final kiss scene too and honestly I found the banter between these two annoying throughout the entire show. Or the way the characters somehow make fun of the science-fiction genre in general was not even funny during the very first occasion at the end of the first episode and it stayed that way when they repeated it. And actually, how about an ending where the bad guys (i.e. the Frogs) win and destroy everything and everybody if the series ends anyway. This would have been pretty bold and brave wouldn't it, but courage is nothing really you can attribute to the makers of the series. It all feels painfully generic.

Maybe my dislike for the show also has to do with the fact that I am not a great SciFi fan in general, but then you can also say that supposed quality SciFi (judging from the rating on IMDb here) is something that could get me more interested in the genre, but this one here does not. Still you must say that the effects and sometimes also the plots are not bad for a film from the 1960s. Perhaps this is really the closest (West) Germany has to Star Trek. On another high note, Ursula Lillig is pretty attractive and should have had more screen time. But you see already that if I have to stick to stuff like that, then there really isn't too much quality otherwise here. The Frogs initially sounded like interesting main antagonists, but the ways in which they elaborated on them in the episodes after number 1 took away the appeal more and more from them. The stories about other earthlings (some nice ones, some not so nice ones) weren't much better really unfortunately. Overall, I would say that the only episode I somewhat enjoyed was the one with the writer, but not really because of him but because of the bad guy(s) there. Some solid action and interesting characters there and also a decent kidnapping story. Had the series been on this level (and also with less overacting surely) for its entirety I would certainly recommend it. But I don't think it is anywhere near deserving of the rating it has here on IMDb. I suggest you watch something else instead unless you really really love the genre (like I wrote in the title of my review) and have seen everything else basically (which is pretty impossible though).