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I grew up watching Star Trek, The Animated Series back in '74-'75. As much as the show is lambasted by people at the time it was my all time favorite cartoon and it still has a special place in my heart. Later I began catching TOS in syndication and I loved the hell out of it.

Sept. 8, 1966. The first airing of a new TV series about Sci-Fy and space travel!

I was 8, soon to be 9 years old. My father was a fan and avid reader of the Perry Rhoden Sci-Fy books, and would tell me stories about them.
I soon was a fan of Isaac Asimov's science essays, as he could explain any science concept so well, that even a shoe could understand them.

And so I, and he, was there, and we watched the "The Man Trap" when it was first shown.

Space travel! Other planets! Starships! Aliens! Ray guns!

I was hooked for life!

Ha, you may be the only other person I've met who's even heard of Perry Rhodan, let alone read any!

I have 'heard' of Perry Rhodan, but beyond the name, sadly, I know almost nothing else.

It's this series of stories that were written as serialised shorts in a sci fi magazine in Germany. The most notable thing about it is the sheer volume - there are more than 2,700 individual 'episodes', with several episodes making up a book-length story, and multiple books forming a larger ongoing story. The total saga spans thousands of years in book time - and all this starring many of the same basic characters, mind, since they become immortal early on!

It's real old fashioned space opera stuff, with giant spaceships and robot armies and X-Men style psionic mutants, and... well, pretty much everything you can imagine has been in it at one time or another. In total more than a billion have been sold. It's the biggest written sci fi franchise in history, yet almost nobody I ever mention it to has ever heard of it!

Not that I'm a great expert or anything, when I was a kid we bought a box of mooks at a jumble sale and it had three or four of the books in it. Perfect stuff for a young teen who loves sci fi. Alas, they are pretty hard to come by in English.

Well then, Graham, that piques my interest. I think I'm gonna take a look around for any of his stuff. Thanks.

Graham, funny you should compare Perry's team to the X-Men, as I also thought of them as such (I wonder if Stan Lee was inspired by them to create the X-Men?) at the time, as I was also reading the comic books at the time.

My favorite on his team was the 'teleport' guy. They'd be on some planet, being attacked by space-fighters from the air..., and he'd stare at the ships for a sec, then suddenly teleport into one of them, right behind the pilot..., look over the pilot's shoulder a bit, then push a few buttons, teleport out, and the ship would crash, or shoot at the other ships, or blow-up or something like that.

I remember thinking "What if one of Kirk's officers was another alien like Spock, who's race had that ability? That'd be so Cool!"

I think I'll try to find that series again.