Lileks has a review:
Now. Let’s think. The escape portion is the rear. It has no controls or power, according to Captain Video. Yet that’s where the engine was. So the escape pod is powerless and rudderless even though it has the engine, and that’s what you get into to escape. From onrushing asteroids. How? By disengaging from the front half, which cuts off the engines, which makes the escape capsule fall.
Captain Video and the Ranger landed on the planet when the gravity of Atoma took their escape capsule and laid it down gently about 14 feet from the front door of the evil bad guy’s lair. What a stroke of luck! They dress up as natives. Aliens always dress like 19th century Arabs with big futuristic guns.
It was amazingly bad, almost Plan-9-like.
Actually, Captain Video is among my first memories. I was about 4-5 and had to go to bed immediately after the episode, which was right after the evening news which was right after the family supper.
One should keep in mind that this stuff was among the earliest on TV; the look of the technology was based on what people knew: ie not all that different from the big multi-engine bombers of WWII with some imagination applied to what the inside of a B-17 would look like in the future 😉
It’s rather silly to knock something that is of its time and did its job. It, along with the slight later Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, plus assorted USAF guys, pilots, ATC’s, Stewardesses who roomed at my mothers house; plus IGY and Sputnik, are what send me off into my career.
So laugh, ye of the Post-Star Wars world. What would you have done differently… with the caveat that you know nothing beyond 1954 technologies and just a few years before were fighting for your life in WWII?