Captain Video - Production

Production

Even for its time, the quality of the show is often considered crude or low-budget, owing much to the fact that the show was done live and DuMont had a meager budget to work with. A laudatory review by Dave Barry referenced the Captain Video Rocket Ring, a promotional tie-in piece of merchandise that was distributed via Power House candy bars, saying that the ring "seemed to have a higher production value than the actual TV show."

In the early days of the series, scripts tended to be somewhat incoherent, and often were derided by critics of the day, but many of the scripts after 1952 were written by major science fiction writers active at the time, including Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke. These late scripts displayed more intelligence, discipline and imagination than most of the other children's sci-fi series scripts of the era. Other well-known authors who occasionally wrote for the program included Isaac Asimov, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Milt Lesser, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Robert Sheckley, J. T. McIntosh and Dr. Robert S. Richardson. One of the more prolific writers for the show was Maurice C. Brachhausen, who wrote under the name M.C. Brock, and later had his own production company, Brock Video Productions.

Few special effects were seen on the series until the team of Russell and Haberstroh was hired in September 1952. For the rest of the program's episodes, they provided surprisingly effective model and effects work, prefilmed in 16 mm format and cut into the live broadcast as needed.

The show's theme song was Richard Wagner's Overture to The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Hollaender).

The TV series is mentioned in the first of the 39 independent episodes of The Honeymooners, "TV or Not TV". Honeymooners character Ed Norton was supposedly a fan of the show.

The TV series is also prominently mentioned in Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna (2009). After the protagonist, author Harrison William Shepherd, is persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, his stenographer and friend, Violet Brown, observes: "After the hearing he'd stopped writing, for good he said. Instead he bought a television set and let its nonsense rule his days. Mook the Moon Man comes on at four, and so on." She adds: "He was so changed by then, even his looks. Whatever used to show up for its workaday there inside him, it had shut off the lights and gone on home. He was fagged out in the chair as usual, in his old gray flannels, smoking, never taking his eyes off the set. Captain Video was on, some underwater band of thieves fighting. They had Al Hodge by the neck, fixing to drown him." The scene Violet describes portends later developments in the novel.