THE STARLOST: THE BEGINNING (1980)
TV-Movie made up of episodes from “The Starlost”
Article 3820 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-19-2012
Posting Date: 1-29-2012
Directed by Harvey Hart
Featuring Keir Dullea, Robin Ward, Gay Rowan
Country: Canada
What it is: Episodes from a low-budget SF series

A rebel from an agrarian community discovers that his world is one of many aboard a giant space ark.. and the ark is in danger.

Despite the title, this marks the end for me… which is to say, it’s the last time I’ll be covering a movie cobbled together from episodes of the TV series “The Starlost”. I’ve been pretty harsh on this series in my other reviews, but this one has the pilot episode, “Voyage of Discovery”, which showed a bit of promise. The other episode pillaged for this was “The Goddess Calabra” which also seems to be the one of the better episodes, but you can already see the deterioration of the main characters into nonentities and the turgid pace that would plague most of the series. You know, it’s a shame this show never worked out; the central concept would have made for a decent series had the cheapness and lack of care in the production not crippled it. Still, of all of the movies I’ve seen edited from the series, this is the one that most gives me a sense of what it could have been. Well, maybe someday someone will take this idea and run with it.