So goes the opening title of "Space Academy", as narrated by the star of the show, Jonathan Harris of "Lost In Space" fame. Space Academy was a half-hour children's show broadcast in 1977 during the Saturday morning lineup on the CBS television network in the US. Answering the increasing demand for more sci-fi, the most ambitious and expensive Saturday Morning live action kid's show ever made was produced by Filmation Associates, ran for only one season, and consisted of 16 episodes. The show later spawned a spin-off program called "Jason Of Star Command", which was produced by the same company, used a lot of the same hardware, and lasted for two seasons. "Space Academy" concerned the student crew of a man made asteroid/university and their adventures exploring space. The Academy itself was the "home base" for the show, and the Seeker shuttle crafts are the main means of transportation for the young scholars and their professor/commander, Isaac Gampu, played by Jonathan Harris. 

The special effects for the series, supervised by Rob Maine and Chuck Comisky, were the most elaborate ever done for a live action children's show at the time, and accomplished for the paltry sum of only $95,000! If you'd like to read more on how the FX for this show were done, you can read an interview  with Chuck Comisky HERE. After reading, use your browser's "Back" button to return to this page.

Small Art Works is pleased to present this exquisite model kit of the spaceship from the classic seventies Filmation "Kidvid" show. Accurately molded in quality urethane resin, this kit of the Seeker is a faithful reproduction of the original special effects model used in the show. 11 inches long, the model is virtually identical in size, proportion and detail to the medium-sized filming miniature. This easy to build kit is complete with all resin cast parts necessary.  All photos shown here are of the finished prototype kit.
 
 

Notably,  making of this very kit, from concept to prototype, is featured as a five page spread in the November 2002 issue of the popular "FineScale Modeler" magazine. However, there were several glaring errors created when the editors re-wrote the article. I have written to the editor to try to have corrections printed in a future issue. Below are those errors and their corrections.

• This Small Art Works  web site address was misprinted as ending in ".com" instead of the correct ".ca", but then if you're reading this right now it doesn't matter much. Hopefully those who've  read the article and wish to visit this site will do a search of some kind to find the right location.
• The references made in the article to "Evergreen" products are incorrectly rewritten by the editors. As I wrote in my original document, the products used on my model were "EMA/Plastruct" materials. Evergreen does not even make the dome products I used, and I used no Evergreen products in the building of the model, so how they came up with that substitution is anybody's guess....
• The section which describes using superglue to seal the MDF parts is incorrectly written as applying the glue to the surfaces AFTER  finish sanding instead of before. You actually need to sand the dried glue after it's been applied to the wood surface to smooth it out.
• The parts incorrectly referred to as "thruster tubes" on the sides of the model are actually docking tubes as I had originally written, and as actually shown in one episode of the show. (In reality they were mounting points, used to mount the studio model onto  the filming pylons)

Dear Jim,

   You have done an excellent job in recreating the Space Academy SEEKER with your new model kit. It's exactly like the 11 inch long model we used to film the majority of the space effects scenes for the Space Academy series. I look forward to more models from Space Academy as well as vehicles from other popular science fiction shows that have never been available before in kit form.