Since its debut in the fall of 1966, “Star Trek” has been ripe for satire, but it took the success of “Star Wars” in 1977 to finally bring a sci-fi spoof to the primetime lineup.
“Quark” was the brainchild of the late Buck Henry, who co-created the spy spoof “Get Smart” in 1965 with Mel Brooks and penned the screenplay for “The Graduate” a few years later. The series starred Richard Benjamin — then best known for “Westworld” and “The Sunshine Boys” — as Adam Quark, captain of a cruiser in the United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol, i.e. an interstellar garbage ship.
“I saw that Buck was doing this science-fiction satire, and so I called and said, ‘How can I get in this?'” Benjamin recalled to the A.V. Club in 2012. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t have the money for someone like you,’ and I said, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. Let’s see about that.’ Because I just wanted to be in good things. I mean, that’s all I want to do anyway. Or what I think are good things. So I said, ‘OK.’ That’s kind of how that happened. I just went and talked my way into that thing, even though initially, they couldn’t pay me what I was supposed to get or whatever. But I didn’t care, because it was Buck.”
Short-lived though it was, Quark owes its existence to the popularity of Star Wars
Among Quark’s crew members are Betty I and Betty II (Cyb and Patricia Barnstable), one a clone of the other (although neither admits to being the clone), who serve as navigator and pilot; engineer Gene/Jean (Tim Thomerson), a so-called “transmute” who has male and female chromosomes and regularly flips between the gender personalities; science officer Ficus (Richard Kelton), who is a sentient humanoid plant; and Andy (Bobby Porter), a robot made from spare parts.
Also in the cast: Conrad Janis, who would later play Mindy’s dad on “Mork and Mindy,” as Quark’s supervisor, Otto Palindrome; and Alan Caillou as Palindrome’s boss, The Head, so named because he appears simply as a disembodied head.
The self-titled pilot episode of “Quark” aired on May 7, 1977, which — as any self-respected sci-fi nerd knows — was a few weeks before “Star Wars” hit theaters. Were it not for that film’s success, it’s likely that viewers never would’ve heard anything more from “Quark” beyond NBC burning off that one episode. Because of the “Star Wars” phenomenon, however, NBC decided to order seven episodes, with the first installment — unabashedly entitled “May the Source Be with You” — debuting on February 24, 1978.
Quark never lived up to the intentions of its creator
Throughout its eight episodes, “Quark” not only parodied “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” it also poked fun at other genre properties, including “2001: A Space Odyssey” as well as “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” and “Flash Gordon,” both of which were still a few years away from being revived for new audiences. (NBC’s “Buck Rogers” series premiered in 1979, while the big-budget “Flash Gordon” movie didn’t hit theaters until 1980.) But while “Quark” fans found the show funny, series creator Buck Henry was disappointed with the way things went with his series.
Between the pilot’s airing and NBC’s decision to pick up “Quark,” Henry was invited to do “Heaven Can Wait” with Warren Beatty, and it was an offer that he couldn’t refuse. “They started doing the show almost immediately when I went, and I left a number of wishes,” Henry told TV Time Machine. “I wanted them not to lapse into parody. I wanted it to be satire. I implored them to read the great Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, which of course they didn’t do. I wouldn’t have if I’d instructed me to! So it turned into a kind of parody of ‘Star Trek,’ which is what I didn’t want it to be.”
Apparently, “Quark” wasn’t what mainstream viewers wanted it to be, either: After those seven episodes, NBC canceled the series. Although it received a DVD release in 2008, it has since gone out of print. “Quark” currently isn’t streaming anywhere.
