by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards the next Rocky Jones, Space Ranger episode was — fortunately — a one-off, “Escape Into
Space,” in which the baddies were just common Earth criminals and not
interplanetary stand-ins for the Soviet Union. It was originally aired May 1,
1954, and though once again Hollingsworth Morse was the director and Warren
Wilson the writer, this time they eschewed Cold War parallels and told a simple
story of crook Truck Harmon (Frank Wilcox), who’s just held up something or
other (we’re never told just what). He and his sidekick, Lawson (played by Sheb
Wooley, four years before he recorded a novelty song called “The Purple People
Eater,” a spoof of “B” science-fiction movies, and had a surprise hit which
gave him his 15 minutes of fame), are carrying the loot in four suitcases and
Harmon tells Lawson and us that if he can just get away from Earth to a planet
that has no extradition treaty with the Space Rangers’ federation, he’ll be set
for life. To make their escape, they steal a spacecraft (inexplicably already
on the launching pad, ready to go — incidentally the producers of Rocky
Jones, Space Ranger did the location work
for what was supposed to represent their spaceport at an electrical power
station, complete with giant Tesla coils that were supposed to warm up the
spacecraft so it could launch — all those Tesla fans out there, at least those
who know he was a Hungarian-born electrical physicist before he was an electric
car, should be pleased!) and head off towards a local planet.
Rocky Jones and
his crew fire up their own spacecraft and give chase, eventually running into
Truck on a nearby planet whose ruler, Zoravac (Walter Coy), is smart enough to
tell Truck he’s persona non grata
and order him to leave. Unfortunately, under the laws of space Truck can seek
asylum and Rocky can’t do anything about it unless he can definitively prove
Truck committed a crime in space.
Truck did just that — on the way up to the planet he locked his partner Lawson
in an airlock and let all the air out, suffocating him — but the trick is to
prove it. Bobby works out a way: he rigs up a white handkerchief over a
remote-controlled flying ball and scares the shit out of Vena Ray with it (she
may be a capable navigator and interpreter, but under all those skills she’s
just a scaredy-pants girl!), and, since Wilson has already told us that Truck
is deeply superstitious, Rocky hits on the idea of using Bobby’s ghost-drone
toy to frighten Truck into confessing, and all this will happen in a room Rocky
has bugged so there’ll be a recording of it. Of course, the plan works (though
I wasn’t sure Wilson wrote Truck enough of a confession to be usable in court
against him — a halfway decent defense attorney could have argued that Rocky
asked so many leading questions Truck’s confession wasn’t truly voluntary) and
the universe is saved for niceness once again.
