The Tripods - Series 1

Starring: Jim Baker, John Shackley Director: Bob Blagden, Christopher Barry, Graham Theakston Original UK Premiere: 1984 Dvd Release: 19th March, 2001 Number Of Discs: 2 Format: Box set, PAL, Region 0 Encoding

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The Tripods is series of books written by John Christopher in the late 1960s which were also filmed as a science fiction TV-series, produced in the UK. Humanity has fallen into an age of decadence, with technology in decay & the population living in a society reminescent of the 1700s, or even the Middle Ages, depending on places. The Humans live in total, naïve & ecstatic adoration of the Tripods, huge metalic-looking alien creatures, which they see as their saviours. They are kept under thought control from the age of 15 by brain implants called caps, which leave them with a life of modesty & serenity by preventing curiosity & creativity. The story is seen through the eyes of two young boys from England who are about to be capped. Feeling uncomfortable with the idea of losing their creativity, they follow the advice of a mysterious wanderer who goes by the name of Ozymandias & undertake a long journey to some mysterious White Mountains. After crossing the Channel, they join forces with a young, geniously inventive French boy & proceed to the South.

In 1984 & 1985, The Tripods was the show that the BBC used to fill its traditional Saturday teatime Doctor Who slot. Adapted from the first two books in John Christophers Tripods trilogy, the show frustratingly failed to deliver the final story that winds everything up. This release collects the first series of 13 episodes, which covers the first book . In 2089, the human race lives a peaceful, agrarian existence in post-technological communities under the rule of the Tripods, vast alien machines that look like the Martians from War of the Worlds. In a small English village, teenage cousins Will & Henry are troubled as they near the age at which they will be capped, fitted by the local Tripod with a metallic hairnet which will turn them into docile, uncreative, happy servants of the invaders. A wily vagrant tells the boys that far to the south, a community of uncapped freemen resists the Tripods, & they set off on a 13-episode journey that takes them to the coast, across the English Channel & down through France, with stop-offs in the impressive ruins of Paris, at a medieval-style chateau & on a vineyard in the Jura. Along the way, the lads fall in with Bean Pole , a gangling, bespectacled French rebel who is fascinated with the lost arts of machine-making, but at each of their stopovers there are temptations, mostly in the forms of appealing French girls, to settle down & become happy conformists, but in the end they do join up with the rebels, ready for a mission to the city of the Tripods that comes in Series Two.

With production values significantly higher than Doctor Who at that time, the show conserves its effects & makes them count, with the Tripods only rarely intervening directly. Watched at a sitting, it seems padded & the three lead actors are variable, but taken in single-episode chunks it works quite well, with a subtly unsettling depiction of a backward world where everyone seems happy but actually isnt & actual villainy comes as a relief amidst the overwhelming niceness. The English & French locations are very well used, & the production design & costuming is imaginative without being panto-like.

Jim Baker, trapper, scout & guide was a friend of Jim Bridger & Kit Carson & one of General John C Fremont s favorite scouts. He was one of the most colorful figures of the old west. Born in Belleville, Illinois, at 21 he was recruited by Jim Bridger as a trapper for the American Fur Company & on May 22, 1839 left St. Louis with him heading for the annual rendezvous in the mountains. In August of 1841 he was involved in a desperate fight at the junction of Bitter Creek & the Snake River when 35 trappers beat off a large band of Sioux, Cheyenne & Arapaho. The decline of the fur trade in the early 1840s drove many the trappers to quit, but Baker stayed on. Little is known of his movements after 1844, but in 1855 he was hired as chief scout for General W,S. Harney of Fort Laramie & he was part of the Federal Army sent against the Mormons. He built a cabin with a guard tower near the Colorado Placers of Clear Creek where he raised livestock until his death in 1898. His grave marked with a stone near Savery, Wyoming.

Editors Choice: The Tripods, View DVDology

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