Captain Starr of Space
From Out of the Future
"From out of the future comes Captain Starr of Space-Space-Space-ace-ace-ace..." That echoing announcement, delivered by Lou Cook, opened each installment of ABC's twice-weekly juvenile science fiction serial, which ran from June 2, 1953 to May 27, 1954. Episodes aired Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7:30 and ran 25 minutes apiece — slotted into the same 1950s space-mania cycle that produced Tom Corbett Space Cadet and Space Patrol, though Captain Starr never reached the audience those programs commanded.
John Larch played Captain Rocky Starr of Nova City Space Station, leading his Space Rangers across the galaxy aboard the Shooting Star and tangling with interplanetary criminals. Jane Harlan played Gail Archer, Starr's comrade — a working partner rather than a sidekick. Tom Hubbard filled out the regular cast as Cadet Sergeant Stripes, and Hubbard also created and wrote the series, so the man shaping the characters each week was also voicing one of them on the air.
The Episodes That Survive
Roughly 75 episodes are estimated to have been produced, though the exact count isn't certain. Only about eight are thought to exist in any form today, and just four circulate publicly — most of them preserved as Armed Forces Radio and Television Services rebroadcasts rather than from ABC's original transcriptions.
The surviving titles give a fair sense of the show's range. "The Mystery of Mars" went out as episode 2 on June 4, 1953. "The Queen Nilo Incident" — also known as "The Ray Machine" — followed on July 14 as episode 13. "The Carnumian Return" involves a visit from a Neptunian scientist who has been dead for fifty years; "The Mericus Plague" turns on a Venusian native chief holding the secret to saving Earth colonists from a deadly disease. Other known scripts include "Pool of Intelligence," in which Martian colonists from Polar City disappear into a secret intelligence operation, and "Scientist Henry Pitman Missing," set among prisoners of the Syrenians in an underground city of invisible people. One listener commentary called the show "very creative and well written," with praise reserved for Hubbard's imagination.
John Larch After Captain Starr
For Larch, the lead role turned out to be a launching point. Born Harold Aronin in Salem, Massachusetts in 1914, he'd tried professional baseball in the minor leagues before the war, served four years in the Army, and come out of that experience troubled for years afterward. While Captain Starr was on the air he also held a semi-regular role as Captain Smith on Space Patrol. He entered films in 1954 with an uncredited part in Bitter Creek and went on to accumulate over a hundred screen credits, settling into character work as authority figures — chiefs, generals, sergeants. He played General Patton in Disney's Miracle of the White Stallions (1963), and in 1971 he appeared in two Clint Eastwood pictures: as Harry Callahan's Chief of Police in Dirty Harry and as a sergeant in Play Misty for Me. Television viewers may remember him best as the father of the dangerous child Anthony Fremont in the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life." Larch died in Woodland Hills in 2005 at 91.