Most everybody is familiar with Logan's Run.  Michael York plays a wishy-washy pansy to the best of his very moderate acting ability.   The always fantastically beautiful Jenny Agutter does get naked, as in all of her movies between 1965 and 1995, and kind of outshines Michael York at every turn, even when she's not in the scene.  In fact, I outshine Michael York.

It is the 23^rd Century and humanity survives in self-contained city domes.  Even though the all-knowing all-seeing computer and the populace refer to "pre-catastrophe times," there's no real understanding of why people are living in the domes, what exists outside and, once we get outside, what happened to the ruined civilization.  Nor is it really important because, hey, Jenny Agutter's not wearing underwear. 

The best known part of the plot is that when you turn 30, you die voluntarily.  Classic population control, except the people think that they are being instantly renewed. Reborn into the "breeders" that hold all of the infants.  Thus you get Logan 5 and Jessica 6 and Francis 7, our main characters.  Logan's the fifth reborn Logan, and so on.  It's one of those stories where you really want to see a prequel just to know what happened.  Though I should be careful what I wish for because, then, I end up with Battle for the Planet of the Apes, where the newly formed civilization wonders about the future and the statue of Roddy McDowell cries.  Yeah, that's the way to end a franchise.  Jesus...    

The populace in the domes is, overall, passive.  They're kept in line by the computer, which gives them everything they could possibly desire, as well as the fully licensed to kill squad of Sandmen.  A Sandman's usual task is to track down runners - those who don't want to give up their lives, doubt the computer, or are just freaking out.

It's Logan's bad luck that he kills a runner who was part of a secret society opposed to the computer.  Taking an Ankh necklace from the runner, he tosses it in evidence control and gets called to the magical computer chair where the supercomputer gives him a mission - find the place called Sanctuary and track down over a thousand runners who have gone missing.  Oh, and we have to age you four years.  Sorry.

Logan becomes a runner, infiltrating the secret society, falling in love with Jenny Agutter, pursued by his old best friend and, after a race through abandoned sections of the city, escaping to the pristine, unpopulated outside world.  There, he meets Peter Ustinov in the ruins of Washington, D.C. 

It's always a thrill for a DC native to see those ruins.  The city has reverted to a swamp, the rowhouses overgrown and an ivy-covered Lincoln looks out at the reeds and muck.  It's that sort of attention to historical detail that makes Logan's Run move from a bad movie to an okay movie with extraordinarily bad special effects and giant plot holes and the jaw-grinding presence of Michael York.

In a rushed ending, Logan goes back, destroys the city and frees the populace.  That's all done in about 10 minutes and, mainly, is achieved by telling the supercomputer the truth.  Usually you have to lie to destroy these futuristic computers, but Logan isn't that clever.  He tells it a few facts about the outside (which, since the computer is drawing resources from the outside, it should know) and it freaks out by dramatically blowing up the city. 

You know, when you're making a computer designed to control all of humanity, you'd think you'd set it up to deal with people a little better. 

Too bad the movie took such a heavy-handed and overly-simplified attitude to the finale.  It's what ruined the franchise.  See what Planet of the Apes did?  They all but included the prologue to the next movie there at the end.  If Logan's Run had followed the books, they could have stretched it out.

The books feature the same sort of idea:  Logan is assigned by the computer to find and destroy Sanctuary, falls in love along the way, and turns rogue.  He manages to break some people out and forms a little tribe of goofballs, then sets out to destroy the computer.  What's the problem?  He soon learns that his city is one of thousands spread across the globe and all controlled by a mega-super-duper-computer built under the Crazy Horse Monument in South Dakota.  This computer not only knows how to deal with people, it's also insane.    Logan loses but discovers that, after so many hundreds of years, the computer is starting to lose control of certain sections.  He decides to attack it from the blind spots - city by city.  But then the books spin off to weird stories of exploring the outside, dealing with mutated people who had been living on a space ark, and so on.  Also, the books had you die at 18 instead of 30, so you get the whole growing up together thing.

One nod the movie did make was the decay within in the cities.  Places where the computer had lost control.  For the urban explorer in you, Logan's Run has fine moments of crawling around sets that are supposed to be old breeding grounds and power rooms that the city has abandoned - as well as everyone's favorite meat processing plant run by the lunatic robot called Box.  "Fish!  Plankton!  Proteins from the sea!"

The TV series, then, started off on a good foot.  It was brutally destroyed by bad writers and weird network rules against violence.  It's tough to avoid violence when you're a heavily armed refugee pursued by police forces ordered to kill you and you're in a world populated by tribal post-apocalypse monsters and blood-thirsty robots.

Somehow, the series does avoid killing people on screen.  This is, as you can tell shortly into the first episode, because it was all written by a five year old.

However, the series did the right thing.  It borrowed from the movie and from the books and then created its own little mythos.  This time, Logan is given the mission, falls in love, runs through the abandoned parts of the city, defeats Box, steals a fancy sci-fi truck and takes off.

Francis 7, Logan's old buddy, is then called in by the computer and given the low-down.  Logan went rogue during a mission, so now it's up to Francis to destroy Sanctuary, destroy the runners, and kill Logan.  He can pick five other Sandmen and they're all going outside, but no one can learn of outside, but they will, so it's, and the...with the...You know, just kill him.

Now, here's where the series gets nice.  Francis is told to walk through a door beside the big computer screen.  He does, and he's in Oz.  The men behind the curtain - a council of elders who have been secretly controlling both the computer and the city.  Now Francis knows the truth and, instead of freaking out and going rogue, he accepts everything these old men say and rides out to his death.  Overall, he's pretty calm for someone who's never seen anyone over 30 and has dedicated his professional life to killing people when they hit 30.  (Not to mention learning that there's an outside and that everything in the city is a sham run by the Freemasons.)

Meanwhile, the outside world is populated by folks who didn't make it into the city back during the "catastrophe."  Unlike the movie (but like in the books) the unexplained "catastrophe" came at a time far in our own future.  So there are plenty of little toys and hidden bases and forgotten vaults with nifty sci-fi crap in them.  Logan and Jessica's first adventure is at a robot vacation land where, after hundreds of years, the robots have gone crazy.  Destroying it, they're joined by the lovable android REM, who sort of fills the role of Peter Ustinov.  Then it's off - Logan, Jessica and REM pursued by Francis and his squad of Sandmen.  They battle tribal freaks, highly advanced brains with eyestalks (the sci-fi staple), and even meet angry time travelers and confused people from the 1970's who had been cryogenically preserved.  It's classic journeyman sci-fi.  Francis is always one step behind, every episode ends with a laugh, and you know that every problem has an easy solution in the last 15 minutes.  (Dear Francis:  Just shoot them!)

Once every couple of episodes, Francis catches up and either he and Logan must join forces to survive, or some clever trick leaves Francis stumbling over his own bootlaces and Logan, laughing, runs away. 

The series is bone-deep painful at every turn.  The saving grace is the post-apocalyptic journeyman aspect combined with extensive exploration of urban ruins.  You kind of have to watch it.  It's the ultimate "what could have been" 70's sci-fi series.  Space: 1999 started out amazing, then got fucked.  Clear.  Battlestar Galactica, now, has been vindicated.  Planet of the Apes: The Series, was always falsely accused of being bad, I think.  I loved it, and I say it suffered from overexposure.  Logan's Run - it was bad from the beginning, and it didn't have to be.  It had the potential to be an Earth-bound Blake's 7.  What operated against it was the movie, the networks, and the worst team of writers this side of reality. 

However, the series featured a few points that may be familiar.  REM is the innocent, loving android who seeks to become more human.  Ring a bell?  In the final episode, all-powerful aliens journey to Earth via a...Stargate.  Hmmm. And, hey, I should be kind to the series.  The episode with the cryogenically frozen folks is stand-out sci-fi, all the way through. Penned by Harlan Ellison, it sort of removes Logan and crew from the formula and tells the tale of a group of people from the past - one of whom is a serial killer.  Who is the killer?  They're all trapped together until the mystery is solved.  Ellison always delivers.

Fortunately (maybe), for the Logan's Run legacy, the series was forgotten almost as soon as it ended.  The books, of course, have also faded away.  Now it's just the movie, awaiting some shit-swilling Hollywood remake.  Even though there is no way to suspend noticing the piss-poor special effects and the ridiculous finale, the movie continues to stick like bad oatmeal.  Me?  I'd like to have the whole movie be about exploring the unused parts of the city.  That and the ruins of DC have become the only reason that I watch it again and again.  Oh, and Jenny Agutter.  Have I mentioned Jenny Agutter?  Jenny Agutter.  Get it in you, before the remake magically appears and causes emotional harm.