I love this show. Despite all the silliness, it has some pretty grim & serious plots.

In one, the head guy uses the jet to fly to pick up medicine to save his dying son. But when a UFO threat arises, he has to divert it to protect the planet from the invaders.

In another, a UFO incident interrupts a plot by a wife & her lover to murder her husband. The people in S.H.A.D.O. end up having to blank their memories, put them all back as they were and let the murder happen.

This show seemed to be totally serious drama to me and thrilling, and I see now that they put some effort into it.

They would have saved money by having headquarters at a film studio, and you have to love the DeLorean as the car we'd be driving by 1980, at least executives would.

One specific scene I remember vividly from the show was an alien on a moon buggy, toying with the lead actor in the show, who had a gun and was trying to shoot him, while the alien was using different powers he had, and couldn't be killed.

There was a special effect where the alien on the buggy circled in an arc around our hero by stop motion filming, stopping in several spots. I think our hero shot at him, and the alien said, 'You can only shoot me, where I had been.'

How would you know exactly where he had been? The hero then fires a sweeping volley, and the alien is hit and slumps over in a whole different direction from where the shots were fired.

I remember that because I hadn't seen anything like it before.

Boomer

What I like most is that he still shoots and directs the actors AS IF they were marionettes. Nothing but mid-shots and slow reactions.