Whatever Happened to Andy Griffith’s Space Series ‘Salvage 1’?
What To Know
- In 1979, Andy Griffith starred in the sci-fi TV movie and series Salvage 1.
- Despite a strong premiere, Salvage 1 struggled in weekly ratings against popular shows and was cancelled.
- Griffith later found renewed television success with Matlock and eventually returned to his musical roots.
When most people hear the name Andy Griffith, they don’t normally think about science fiction. Instead, it’s more likely they are reminded of Andy Taylor, the sheriff of everyone’s favorite small town, Mayberry, North Carolina.
That’s because reruns of The Andy Griffith Show have been playing pretty much non-stop since the series ended in 1968 (most regularly on MeTV). For whatever reason, this wonderful show somehow manages to set the heart at ease even in our modern, chaotic world while still eliciting more than a handful of chuckles in each episode.
When Salvage 1 debuted as a TV movie in 1979, sci-fi mania was rampant due to the success of Star Wars, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, and, on the small screen, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. The premise of Salvage 1 was simple: Griffith played Harry Broderick, a salvage company owner who builds a spaceship to go to the moon and recover the high-tech equipment that’s been left behind. Way back then, the plot seemed not only whimsical but also pretty darn far-fetched. Never in a million years did anyone imagine that we would all see a day when private companies would be building spaceships expressly for the purpose of commercial gain.
©ABC/Everett Collection
While Salvage 1 had solid ratings for its premiere, when it transitioned to a weekly hour-long TV series also starring Joel Higgins and Trish Stewart, things took a turn for the worse. Why? Probably because it was scheduled against WKRP in Cincinnati and Little House on the Prairie. Sadly, in an era when many homes didn’t have more than one TV, it turned out that after those two hit shows, there really wasn’t much of an audience left for Salvage 1.
In the end, Salvage 1 only ran for 16 episodes. By the time it was cancelled, ABC was so eager to have it go away that four episodes remained unaired for more than a decade. However, the biggest crime of all has to be that this show has never been released on DVD or streaming. Although a bootleg copy of the movie can be found on YouTube, the quality isn’t all that great. Salvage 1 deserves to be released in a cleaned-up, remastered collector’s edition.
Of course, you can’t keep a talent like Griffith down for long. Just a few years later, he would find great success on television again, playing a southern lawyer solving crimes in Matlock, securing his legacy for a whole new generation of TV viewers.
After Matlock ended, Griffith chose to scale back his TV appearances and rediscovered his long-abandoned musical career, focusing primarily on gospel music. Speaking to NPR in 1995, Griffith said this, “People walked away from a simple life we had in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and I’m glad that I can touch that period in our lives … with the music I do.”
Remind