The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series (1979-1981) has come out on DVD and is also being rerun on the SciFi Channel, which is how I came to see the classic "Planet of the Slave Girls" two-part episode.

The episode is a classic in the sense that it is one of the most complete examples of "missing cheese" ever created in a medium famous for missing the cheese.

"Planet of the Slavegirls" is noticeable for its complete lack of slavegirl imagery. There is some bondage imagery -- Colonel Wilma Deering and a native leader are cuffed for a time after being captured. And there are some identifiable slavegirls. But there's no one who looks like a slavegirl (i.e., half-naked, in bondage or both) or who is treated like a slave girl -- ordered about, whipped, dominated, used sexually in a nonconsensual manner (on TV, this would be something as innocuous as kissing.)

There were women identified as slavegirls who pretty much behaved like and were treated like waitresses in a nice restaurant, and who were dressed in skirt and blouse thingies that would pass muster at most suburban American high schools, malls, parties, etc.

In short they were slavegirls in name only and it's hard to imagine why, based on "Planet of the Slavegirls," anyone would find being a slavegirl any less appealing than waiting table at Applebee's or Houlihan's.

Here's a slavegirl from the Planet of the Slave Girls serving some food. Note the lack of chains and ropes on her as she does so. Note the lack of nudity as she does so. She's wearing a nice pair of matching slacks under that blouse. We have women like this on Earth, who serve people food while fully clothed. We call them"waitresses." We use a different word for them because ... they're not slavegirls.

Click on this link to find out what a REAL slavegirl serving food looks like.

To understand why this is so bad, let's explore the concept of cheese within the realm of entertainment. Cheese is that part of any entertainment which makes people want to watch it/read it/hear it/whatever. Cheese is the bait which brings the mouse through the maze. Cheese is the payoff for an entertainment. In comedies, it's the chance to laugh your ass off. In action movies, it's fighting and shooting people and blowing people up, hopefully bad people. In horror movies, it's getting the bejezus scared out of you. And in porn, it's getting turned on watching people be naked and/or have sex.

As I pointed out in my essay on the failure of the Birds of Prey TV series, when you advertise that you are going to have a particular kind of cheese on your show, you must follow through. If people come to your show or movie or whatever expecting a particular kind of cheese and they don't get it -- whatever the reason or rationale might be -- they quickly figure out that they've been hosed and they stop watching your show. As occurred with Bird of Prey, which advertised sexy fighting babes as their cheese and then almost entirely backed out on the sexy, leading to its cancellation in less than half a season.

OK, this is all the cheese you get in these two hours. Wilma and a slavegirl in cuffs (hand in front, natch) moments before they beat up the goons escorting them and escape. Well, Wilma does. The slavegirl gets caught. So they put her in a room of bubbly liquid, but not before removing her cuffs. 'Cause it would inconvenience her to be all cuffed in there. Result: It's about as exciting as your average Law and Order courtroom cuff scene.

Buck Rogers lasted two seasons (one of which was truncated by a strike) but it clearly had trouble delivering the cheese it promised, and the "Planet of the Slavegirls" episode is symptomatic of its problems.

If you have an episode of ANYTHING entitled "Planet of the Slavegirls" and you do not deliver so much as a single image of hot women being dominated while in ropes, chains, etc., then you have failed to deliver the cheese. You are in fact a cheese tease, promising rich helpings of ripe cheese, and delivering none.

I would say "Shame on you!" except that I've never seen any evidence that TV or movie creators understand the concept of shame, and besides, the punishment for being a cheese tease isn't a waggling finger or a scolding, but a sudden and precipitous decline in interest in your entertainment among your audience -- something TV and movie creators most definitely fear and hate, or "understand" as they put it. Especially after it happens to them.

Just ask the folks who made Birds of Prey.

Now, the cheese that the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century series as a whole promised was not slavegirl cheese (except in that one episode). Buck Rogers' cheese could best be described as "Thrilling Wonder Science Stories!" by which we mean harebrained melodramas which use futuristic science as a taking-off point for flights of fantasy that would embarrass a 10-year-old.

Buck Rogers didn't deliver on THIS cheese either, and that's what sealed its fate.

Basically Buck Rogers delivered two kinds of cheese, neither of which worked demographically. First and foremost, it delivered kiddie fare cheese. The kiddies got Twikki, a childlike robot that pretty much worshipped Buck. They got Hawk, a heroic birdman character who had feathers on his head instead of hair. And they got lots of episodes featuring "cute" characters -- munchkinlike aliens and such. A lot of viewers who were kids when Buck Rogers aired have fond memories of it, as well they might. Unfortunately, prime time is not the place to be pandering exclusively to the kiddies.

Twikki the robot boy. Part of the Pinocchio series, I believe. And kiddie cheese? You bet!

The other cheese it delivered was barely concealed homoerotic fantasy centering on Buck Rogers as the object of its affection. This is definitely a fantasy that would have appeal to some audiences -- women and gay males -- but not to what is generally conceded to be the target demographic of science fiction shows, young males and male teens, and children. Just on demographic grounds, most of the postpubescents are going to be straight, so few of them are going to be inclined to get all dreamy-eyed over Bucky, no matter how enthusiastically Twikki pimps him out.

Although Erin Grey as Wilma Deering was putatively the hottie of the show, and wore a lot of skin-tight Lycra to prove it, the real focus of the sexual ogling of the show was often Buck. For example, we've already established the severe lack of hot babes in chains in both Part I and Part II of "Planet of the Slavegirls." Well, there was another episode, "Planet of the Amazons" in which Buck gets a little damsel in distress action. Buck is captured by Amazons, then auctioned off as a sex slave, stripped down to his shorts. There was plenty of ogling of Buck in THAT episode. If "Planet of the Slavegirls" had been half so attentive to delivering the slavegirl cheese as "Planet of the Amazons" was to delivering the slaveboy cheese, it would have been quite the memorable episode for its older male audience instead of the near-total disappointment it was.

Unfortunately, most children who watched the show were uninterested in both slavegirl and slaveboy cheese, or sexy cheese of any kind, and the older viewers being overwhelmingly male and straight meant that almost all of those who were not indifferent to the Buck-as-hottie theme would have been offended by it.

In any event, the real cheese of science fiction of the Buck Rogers sort is amazing stories, essentially stories of the fantastic set in the "real" world. The goal is to have the audience staring at the screen wide-eyed with wonder at the amazing things they are seeing.

Buck Rogers didn't really show it's audiences a lot of amazing things. The show apparently assumed its audience had a near-infinite interest in seeing the main characters jet around in tiny spaceships in outer space. This probably was great eye candy and pretty amazing the first five times it happened -- i.e., the first five episodes. But by the fifteenth episode, it was dullsville. What's more, the dullness was unrelieved by any other kind of amazing wonder science stuff.

As The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone and the original Star Trek have proven pretty much beyond dispute, it is entirely possible to come up with amazing wonder science stuff without spending a lot of money on special effects. All you have to do is mine the huge vistas of written SF for ideas.

Here's an Orion slave girl from Star Trek, The Next Generation. Although not bound, note her hot body barely held in check by her extremely skimpy costume. HUGE improvement over Buck Rogers' slave girls.

For example, Star Trek came up with a story about a race of beings who live at a rate of speed that is vastly higher than ours, moving so fast they are invisible to humans, and their prolonged conversations are just the buzzing of a gnat to the crew of the Enterprise, a theme that had been explored thoroughly in various SF stories and even in comics (perhaps you've heard of "The Flash"). This required virtually nothing in the way of special effects and what was required was old hat by the 1920s (i.e., having formerly invisible characters suddenly appear in the middle of a scene).

Or there's the famous Twilight Zone episode "It's A Good Life" about a boy born with telekinetic and mind-reading powers which give him absolute powers over the unfortunates in the town he lives in, allowing him to kill and maim others on a whim -- based on a story by Jerome Bixby. Once again, virtually no special effects required. And the classic Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand" was written by SF author Harlan Ellison, as was the classic Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever." Both required some special effects and props, but nothing to strain the budget of a TV series.

The success of these series depended on the brilliant imaginative visions that were embedded in their stories, not special effects. (Caveat: I personally love good special effects, especially CGI, but I also love a good story.)

Buck Rogers completely ignored this source of super amazing science wonder in favor of a long succession of tired stories that provided nothing to distract viewers from the show's general dullness. The first season consisted almost entirely of Cold War-like battling between the Earth forces and various factions that want to destroy them, generally in unimaginative ways. When the space battle stuff got old, they had nothing but kiddie cheese.

The series' creators seemed to have realized that they'd screwed up terribly in the first season, and in the second season the series was entirely redone. Buck, Wilma and the two robots are now part of the crew of the Searcher, a ship that looks for humanities' lost tribes, groups that were scattered among the stars when a nuclear war devastated Earth.

This was an improvement over the first season, but not much of one, because the writers were not much better than most comic book artists at coming up with thrilling science wonder stories. In one episode, for example, the Searcher encounters a group of seven self-important aliens in a ship loaded with unstable weapons, who look and act a lot like munchkins. The aliens have semi-magical powers but have never seen a woman. They find Wilma Deering very interesting for this reason.

Even though season two was a move in the right direction, it had probably lost its audience pretty thoroughly in season one, because it was canceled at the end of the season, its only mourners the children who were young enough to go for stuff like munchkin aliens, and the cast, writers and crew who were drawing paychecks from the show.

No cheese, no show.

The show could have done a LOT better than it did.

The thing about the 1920s-1930s era super amazing science wonder stories of the pulps is, it was pretty powerful stuff even though much of it was basically unreadable dreck by modern standards. The stories had their peculiar power because the authors and most especially their audience were almost completely unaware of the limits of science and technology, or for that matter of the physical limits of the universe. Basically they were squeezing stuff out from the id and using any half-mad concept of science and technology they could come up with to justify it.

How else to explain stories like 'The Girl in the Golden Atom" a classic from the 1930s? A scientist invents a super microscope, looks at a scratch in his wedding band with it, and discovers that it is inhabited by a tiny little hottie who spends her time singing and dancing in a little dress made of 'opaque glass." He visits her tiny world and discovers that not everybody there is a hottie, and since in the author's tiny little moral world, physical deformity equals moral decay, you can imagine there are some adventures to be had.

Amazing stuff. Tiny hotties in your wedding band! People living and struggling inside the very atoms that we are made of, their lives unseen and unknown to us for so long!

This is clearly brain-damaged swill by modern standards, but it's CLASSIC brain-damaged swill, so you can imagine the wild-eyed yammerings characteristic of lesser works that were contemporaneous with it, though you would probably be better off if you didn't. That said, the lack of knowledge permitted all sorts of really imaginative, amazing riffs on science and technology, riffs which laid the groundwork for the Golden Age of science fiction in the 50s and 60s and every comic book ever produced right up to the present. The childlike ignorance of much of science was in some cases accompanied by an ignorant delight in the possibilities offered by a universe expanded by the knowledge of science and technology. Buck Rogers and his contemporaries were just hobbyhorses to get the young readers to the amazing super wonder science stuff that was the cheese they craved.

Now, if Buck Rogers' creators had realized this and mined the pulps and all of written SF hard for thrilling super science wonder story ideas, they mighta had a contender on their hands. They did not.

The people who figured out that if you want to remake old genre pieces successfully, you have to bring a new approach to providing the cheese have been ENORMOUSLY successful. The most notable among them are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Yeah, THOSE guys, and the particular movies they did this in were their most successful: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Star Wars was a revised version of the old science fiction serials like ... Buck Rogers ... and Radar Men from the Moon. Lucas figured out that with state-of-the-art special effects and a full two-hour span, he could take those old serials and make something that would wow modern audiences just as the old Buck Rogers serials wowed audiences in the 1930s. The audience would get the same breakneck stories full of derring-do and strange adventure, but with special effect you could actually enjoy, rather than laugh at. And there is every indication that Lucas was right.

Spielberg pulled the same trick with Indiana Jones, using modern special effects, camerawork and stunts to muscle up the old foreign/exotic adventure format (anyone remember the Perils of Nyoka?) to modern standards, and darned if THAT didn't succeed as well.

People call Lucas and Spielberg geniuses for creating these movies, and perhaps they are, because making a film involves a lot more than figuring out the cheese (though you're unlikely to be a success unless you manage that).

Figuring out the cheese is a lot like chess, which is to say, it's a lot simpler and more direct than it looks.

Figuring out winning combinations in chess, as any top player and most books on the topic will tell you, is not a matter of examining obscure moves involving pawns on the side of the board and seeing where they might lead. Instead, you look at the simplest, most brutal, powerful moves you can make -- putting the king in check, capturing the queen, forking a rook and a bishop, that sort of thing -- and working backwards from there, examine how your opponent might counter those moves, and how you can overcome your opponents' counters -- to arrive eventually at a combination that your opponent cannot overcome, which might begin with an obscure pawn move.

In the same way, when you plot a movie, you look at the most powerful dramatic elements it contains -- the horror, the comedy, the sense of wonder --and plot how to deliver them, working backward to overcome an audience's inability to suspend disbelief or a character's lack of motive. It's always a lot easier if you work backward in that way.

Let's look at how this chesslike approach to planning a story might have worked in the case of "Planet of the Slavegirls," with the writers looking for the cheese from the outset, and working backward:

First writer: "Let's do a 'Planet of the Slavegirls' episode!"

Second writer: "Great idea! It's real pulp stuff!"

Third writer: "I agree, great stuff! Now, what's our cheese here?"

FW: "Naked slavegirls in chains!"

SW: Naked slavegirls in chains having sex!"

TW: "OK, that's the cheese alrighty, but as you will recall Buck Rogers is a TV show with a large underage audience. There will be no naked women in chains having sex, however cheesy that might be."

SW: "Well of course not. But we have the next best things to nudity: lycra and spandex!"

TW: "True enough. So we'll have lycra and/or spandex clad cuties in chains. But not having sex."

FW: "Maybe not full on doggie style humpa-humpa, but I don't see why Buck can't at least kiss or hug a chained-up cutie. She could be grateful for being rescued by him, or desperate to make him want to rescue her from her chains, and unaware that he's such a nice guy that he'll rescue her on general principles."

TW: "OK, as long as the clinches don't go too long. So, we got lycra and/or spandex clad women in chains, one or more of them kissing and and/or hugging Buck. That's our cheese. Now, how do we get to it?"

FW: "Well, given the fact that it's called "Planet of the Slavegirls" I think we gotta go with a story about a planet where women are enslaved. And given that Buck is a hero, he'll have to rescue them."

SW: "Could be the evil Draconians up to their usual tricks."

TW: "I'm thinking if we went with Princess Ardala being involved, we could slip in a little female domination and submission stuff. She could go around treating the poor female slaves terribly."

FW: "Maybe she could have a slavegirl who got out of line chained to a post and then have her whipped while Wilma and the other slavegirls watch in horror."

TW: "That'd be great, and we could keep the standards and practices people happy by never showing her actually getting whipped, just cutting away right after the whip guy raises his whip, to Wilma and the slavegirls wincing in horror."

SW: "With a big, nasty whip sound and a scream of pain while they wince."

FW: "On the other hand, if we had the slavegirl gagged before she's whipped, we get extra slavegirl cheese, and her muffled screams might be as dramatic as loud ones."

Here's that whipping idea illustrated by a panel from the original Flash Gordon comic strip ... drawn sometime between 1934 and 1944. Note that Dale is pretty much naked and bound. If they could get away with that in a comic strip, why couldn't the 1980s Buck Rogers do ... anything?

TW: "I've got it! ALL the slavegirls are gagged ALL the time. Why? Because they're WITCHES, and if they talk, they can cast spells on their captors."

FW: "'Planet of the Slave Witches!' Oh, we're talking major cheese here!"

TW: "And the best part is, it ties in with the main Buck Rogers super science cheese. The witches are actually the women of an advanced race who've discovered how to project their will onto another using their voices, making that person do what they wish so long as they are within the sound of their voices. They use it to control their planet in a benevolent sort of way, but then Princess Ardala get wind of their power and decide to take over and use the witches as part of a plot to take over Earth by having the witches make Earth council leaders disable Earth's defenses."

SW: "And of course, Ardala will dispatch at least one witch to make Buck do HER bidding."

TW: "Goes without saying."

FW: "And Wilma isn't going to sit still for THAT, so she'll do something, probably something foolish, and get caught by the Draconians and enslaved along with the witches."

TW: "Goes without saying, but I'm glad you said it."

SW: "So how are the Draconians going to take over a planet run by people who can make you do their bidding just by using their voices?"

TW: "Hmm, that does present a problem."

SW: "Nah, we'll just have the Draconians sneak in and drop sleep gas on the witch planet from space, then swoop down and gag and bind the witches while they're out cold."

FW: "Sleep gas?"

SW: "It's super wonder science, man."

And so on and so on. The point is, they STARTED with the cheese, and built the story around it, which is the right way to do it -- make sure your audience gets the reward the story offers. If you do that, you might avoid doing really stupid things -- like creating an episode of a TV show called "Planet of the Slavegirls" that features no hot chicks in chains.

Take it from a master, folks. Here's George Lucas' take on a slave girl, i.e., Slavegirl Leia. Hot chick, i.e., drug-addled Carrie Fisher, check. Skimpy outfit, check. Bondage gear, check. The really smart guys always get things right. This is NOT someone who could be called Waitress Leia!