Favorite part of the show

The second season was not good. They changed Erin Gray's costume from a spandex catsuit to what looks like a waitress uniform. Trying to copy the formula of Star Trek, they put them on an exploration starship. It was pretty bad, but you know, in all honesty, the first season wasn't all that great either. I enjoyed it as a kid when it came out, because I was starved for any science fiction on televison. But I could watch Star Trek reruns and see how vastly superior that show was to Buck Rogers. The problem with Buck Rogers is that it was a Glen Larson show, and scifi really wasn't his thing. He started out great with Battlestar Galactica, but couldn't sustain it, and that show quickly degenerated to copying old movie plots (e.g. "The Lost Warrior" -- "Shane" in space; "Gun on Ice Planet Zero" -- "The Guns of Navarone" in space; "The Magnificent Warriors" -- "The Magnifcent Seven" in space; "Fire in Space" -- "The Towering Inferno" in space, et al., as you can see, they weren't even original in ripping off the episode titles let alone the plots). Buck Rogers just wasn't much of a scifi show; it was an action/adventure show with scifi trappings. Even back when it was in production, I quickly realized that very few episodes -- and I mean, like two or three, could not have been made as, say "The A Team" episodes, or "Magnum P.I." episodes, or "Knight Rider" episodes with actually pretty minimal rewriting.

Hell, even some of the Buck Rogers episodes that couldn't have been made to work outside a scifi setting, that Glen Larson lack of originality reared its head again. One of those episodes was the season 2 ep., "Mark of the Saurian," and it was a straight up ripoff of the season 2 "Space: 1999" 2-part episode "The Bringers of Wonder." Harlan Ellison didn't refer to Glen A. Larson as "Glen Larceny" for nothing.