SCI-FI TV PILOT OF STRANGE NEW WORLD WITH JOHN SAXON

John Saxon, Kathleen Miller & Reb Brown YEAR: 1975

STRANGE NEW WORLD is a lot like Gene Roddenberry's PLANET EARTH also starring John Saxon but a bit more creative, bizarre and twisty: The crew of a floating space station takes a cryogenic freeze nap and, like Saxon on the other show, wakes up 200-years later, only this time on purpose, sort of...

Turns out the Earth had been destroyed and altered by a meteor storm, so the threesome were preserved up there and now must find the Earthlings, called-upon from a random distress signal, who hid in the mountains and hibernated on their own. Here's where the first of two adventures begins, having to do with a colony of survivors that don't seem like they've survived anything at all...

Daisy Duke in the future

Wearing Roman togas and frolicking like the oblivious herd of twenty-something Adam & Eve beauties in THE TIME MACHINE, it turns out there's something special and unique about this race led by forty-year-old elder James Olson as a brooding mad scientist who has planned to manipulate the team's veteran doctor (Keene Curtis) to keep his people, and himself, alive forever: The village is fitfully named Eterna, hosted by future DUKES OF HAZZARD actress, Catherine Bach...

Kathleen and Catherine in a STRANGE NEW WORLD

Also unlike PLANET EARTH, this seems like a Roddenberry pilot but he was left out...

The STAR TREK creator's absence shows when the story veers from an intriguing science-driven false Utopia escape thriller into a sort of backwoods DELIVERANCE only in the future, and as irony would have it... or maybe not so ironically...

"Squeal like a pig" icon Bill McKinney plays one of several bearded tribesman who leads our heroes down a long and proverbial mountainous rabbit-hole. But, as already mentioned, the story has been long-fulfilled at Eterna, which also harbored cult favorite Reb Brown as a bodyguard who, muscular as he is, can't seem to defend himself from Saxon, showing-off his lazy white man's karate (reminder he co-starred in ENTER THE DRAGON) during sporadic action sequences as the trio — rounded out by ingenue Kathleen Miller (the hippie-party girl who said "Oh wow" to Otis Young in THE LAST DETAIL) — go from a nifty frying pan into a dead-end bonfire.

Keene Curtis, Kathleen Miller, John Saxon in a pre Damnation Alley style ride

Reb Brown looks up to master James Olson

Another shot of Catherine Bach from STRANGE NEW WORLD