Custer's Last Stand


The Robinson's launched in the Jupiter II on October 16, 1997, and so the first season episodes probably happen in 1997 and 1998.

In the first season episode "The Sky Pirate", 26 January 1966, Alonzo P. Tucker said that he was a hobo kidnapped from Earth (from some place in Pennsylvania if I remember right) by aliens in the year of Custer's Last stand (and so presumably between hearing the news about July 4, 1876 and December 31, 1876).

And I wonder if they said that Custer's Last Stand was on June 25, 1876, or was in 1876, or if they said it was 121 years earlier.

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I saw "the Sky Pirate" again.

There was a scene where Tucker was talking with the Robinsons. He was told that the year was 1992. And he told them how he was abducted from Earth by aliens while crossing the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, famous for Groundhog Day celebrations with Punxsutawney Phil, and the setting for the famous movie Groundhog Day.

Tucker said he was abducted by the aliens in the year that Custer was massacred, & must have been abducted sometime after the news of the Little Big Horn was received in the East about July 5, 1876. And I am pretty certain I remember that after Tucker said the year that Custer was massacred, someone, probably Major West, said that was in 1876.

Tucker said that he was born in 1858, which would make him 17 or 18 when he was abducted, and he said that he was the town nuisance in Punxsutawney.

The name he called the aliens who abducted him sounded like "Tellurians" which is funny because tellurian is an adjective being "of or belonging to the earth (or the Earth)". He said the alien pursuing him was from Cygnet X, which sounds a lot like the planet Cygnet XIV mentioned in the Star Trek episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday" a year later.

The Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh Railway did serve Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. So writer Carey Wilber got that bit of local color correct. However, the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh was founded in October 1885, more or less as a reorganization of the bankrupt Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad Company, which was founded in January, 1881 from the remains of The Rochester and State Line Railroad, which was founded in 1869 and began laying track in 1872. The Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad Company laid down tracks into western Pennsylvania in 1882. So Punxsutawny, Pennsylvania probably didn't have a railroad line until 1882, and the railroad wasn't named the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh Railway until 1885, nine years after 1876.

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