A Look Back at 'SALVAGE 1' - 1979

With the passing of the Great Andy Griffith last week, it reminded me of one of his other series from the late 70's, SALVAGE 1. This series started out so strong, but faded so quickly.

About SALVAGE 1:

Harry Broderick (Andy Griffith) owns the a scrap and salvage company. His dream is to recover equipment left on the moon during Apollo Program missions. He invites former astronaut Addison "Skip" Carmichael (Joel Higgins) and NASA fuel expert Melanie "Mel" Slozar (Trish Stewart) to assist him in this effort. He builds a spaceship dubbed Vulture completely made of reclaimed salvage and powered by a chemical called monohydrazine. The main body of Vulture is composed of a gasoline Semi-trailer with cement mixer as the capsule. This is augmented with three shorter rocket boosters placed 120 degrees around the main tank. Estes Rockets made a prototype of a model rocket version of the Vulture. It was never brought to market. Broderick and his ragtag crew complete their mission and go on to further adventures in the subsequent series.

Each subsequent episode had the team going on a extraordinary salvage runs using their unique skills to accomplish the task. None of the regular episodes equaled the exciting pilot. They gave us a great story of going into space, then follow that up with trips around the country or other parts of the world.

Like so many series of this time, each episode was very formulaic. Sometimes that works for series like DUKES OF HAZZARD, but it did not work for SALVAGE 1.

The series only produced 20 hours. The two hour pilot and 12 episodes for season one. Season two only produced six episodes before the series was cancelled. Four of those last six episodes were not aired by ABC.