Do I understand you correctly, sir? Do you mean to suggest that Erin Gray was not a worthy choice to portray Wilma Deering?

https://www.buckwiki.com/data/Wilma_Deering

Scandal! Outrage! I shall write a sternly-worded letter to the Times!

Less racist than I remembered. There’s even a good word for Asians not corrupted by evil space alien blood. Still, not politically correct.

The stuff about the crushed subjects of the evil empire spending their days on drugs, never leaving cramped apartments, watching viewscreen agitprop all day, failing to reproduce even with the Emperor giving bonuses, while maintenance workers shake down Princes of the Blood and rail their top concubines at will . . . That Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff.

I can see why Niven and Pournelle gave Buck Mordred, his doom and bastard child by his rape of the Han princess.

I remember trying to like the TV show, because Science Fiction, but thirtyish actors just don’t impress small boys as beefcake and cheesecake. And as you say, the TV show’s not taken from Armageddon 2419, which I’d read and liked. I also liked the trilogy Jim Baen published per the Niven and Pournelle outline. Especially the second, which may have been written by the guy who wrote ‘The Sand Pebbles’. The second novel actually is a novel, not just pulp.

Legend has it James Baen gave Niven and Pournelle a case of beer to fix up an outline of 1919 Buck Rogers to 1979 SF standards. There’s enough good stuff in ‘The Coming Race’ to do this. Vril is a good name for psychic power: Virility! and Will! But psychic powers, quoth Niven, are Author Control. Vril is no better than usual, combining healing, mind control, and artillery strikes at the author’s will. The ‘Vril-staff’ operated by hydraulic stops is not bad.

For language and biology Lytton used Max Muller and Louis Agassiz; still solid authorities, well worth stealing from. There are a lot of Brit in-jokes in the invented language, like using ‘Posh’ to mean ‘trashy’.

Vril-Ya are obligate vegetarians, no canine teeth. It’s a minor plot point that if the hero has children with a smitten princess of the Vril, they might have carnivore canines and require destruction as abominations. The Vril-Ya also have inherited power over Vril, as electric eels have inherited batteries for electricity.

It’s a major plot point that Vril females are much bigger, mightier thewed, more endowed with magic Vril power, and generally dominant than male Vril or human males. Cute flirtations and honorable True Love between the charming hero and smitten Vril females, whose mightily-thewed height and dominance he finds off-putting. Bulwer Lytton, not a tall man, was very successful with the ladies. Louis Agassiz mentioned many cases of animals whose females are hugely bigger than males.

Children, being more ruthless and less experienced in the subtle aspects of Vril, are the soldiers and giant robot operators of their people. Vril mothers focus on healing and mind control.

Even in 1979 comic books, Warlord of Skartaris was in an alternate dimension, not actually in a hollow Earth. The Subterranean Race would have to be in an O’Neil colony or something. There are many references to rivers of naptha flowing through the Vril cities. Doesn’t sound safe underground. Or above. Anti-American snipe at 19th century US industrial pollution?

This book is anti-American in the 1870 conservative British way, appalled by American equality and democracy and confidence in our Manifest Destiny when ’200 millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should supply to a cowering universe the doctrines of the Patriot Monroe’. Of course like all humans we’re inevitably doomed by The Coming Race when they emerge from below.

Slightly less direct ones range from Gygax’s underdark (D series) to this filk by Kanefsky.

Gaikokumaniakku says:

Blavatsky was operating without scientific education, in a time before…

Blavatsky was a mostly typical representative of late 19th to early 20th Centuries’ mysticism. Either way, it’s not like the concept was completely original, yes?

Yes, lol. The woo is likely limited, for the most part, to extremely mild “psychic” phenomena like autonomic response to trauma a second before it happens, and not to channeling spirits from beyond the grave… or whatever weird stuff that dramatic performers like Blavatsky et al. thought was cool in early-twentieth-century Germany.

Incidentally, Bulwer-Lytton’s books are popular with a considerable subset of modern occultists — they purchase them, they start to read them, and usually they can’t make it all the way through “The House and the Brain,” much less Zanoni.