Captain Video and His Video Rangers

Captain Vide o and His Video Rangers is the first science - fiction series on television. The children’s show has a props budget of $25 per episode. It was 1949 when it started. Set in the distant future, the series followed the adventures of a group of fighters for truth and justice. The Rangers operated from a secret base on a mountain top. Their uniforms looked like Unit ed States Army surplus with lightning bolts sewn on. The C aptain had a teen - age companion, the Video Ranger. Captain Video received his orders from the Commissioner of Public Safety. The y were responsib le for the entire solar system as well as the human c olonies on planets around other stars. Captain Video was the first adventure hero explicitly designed for early live television. "I TOBOR" the robot was an important, semi - regular character on the program, and represents the first appearance of a robot in live televised science fiction; the character's name was actually supposed to be "ROBOT I", but the stencil with its name was backwards. The show was broadcast live five to six days a week and was popular with both children and adults. Because of the larg e adult audience, the usual network broadcast time of the daily series was 7 to 7:30 p.m. EST * , leading off the "prime evening" time - block. For the last two seasons , the show still aired at 7 p.m. , but was 15 minutes long. The production had a very low bu dget, and the Captain did not originally have a space ship of his own. Until 1953, Captain Video's live adventures occupied 20 minutes of each day's 30 - minute program time. About 10 minutes into each episode, a Video Ranger communications officer showed ab out 7 minutes of old cowboy movies. T he commun ications officer, Ranger Rogers, described them as the adventures of Captain Video's "undercover agents" on Earth. *EST: estimated