#spaceknights

Rom #66, May 1985. P. Craig Russell cover pencils & inks.

Behold, Rom! Greatest warrior of the Legendary Space Knights! Dire Wraiths beware, Rom will hunt you to the ends of the galaxy and back.

It's 1981. Drunk on power, the executives at Marvel Productions greenlight a ROM: Spaceknight TV series made possible with a new whiz-bang special effects by the best Tokusatsu FX team they can blackmail into doing it.

The series ran for three years, with a couple of follow up direct-to-TV movies, keeping on budget with frequent flashbacks to Galador that let ROM be out of costume.

Of course, all of this is 100% unreality in this ramshackle universe.

Spaceknights in Training

From the 1981 "ROM the Spaceknight" TV series.

I'm going to be posting my various reference pieces for my 80s Rom Music Video through the week.

The premise of the project was "What if ROM got a TV Show in 1981." I don't think I entirely hit the mark as Vidu couldn't consistently give me the tokusatsu look I wanted for the Spaceknights and effects, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and I wanted it out in time for Valentines weekend.

And it was an excuse to do some fan-casting.

I couldn't just pick A-listers of the time, however, because if it was a Marvel project in 1981, you got Reb Brown, not Burt Reynolds.

Ron Ely as ROM. Tarzan was over, he could grow his hair out or wear a wig.

Haywood Nelson as Karas/Firefall I - Haywood would have been two years out from the end of What's Happening? and Karas's human form in the comics was yet-another-long-haired-white-guy, so a good fit in my book for Rom's best bud.

Cheryl Ladd as Landra/Starshine I - She would have been one of the major draws from the show, as an ex-Charlie's Angels actress.

Erik Hexum as Rem/Terminator - We never saw Terminator's human form or got his Galadorian name in the comics. Here he's reinterpreted as Rom's brother and Erik Hexum, because I'm still upset about Voyagers being canceled.

My thought is that a TV adaptation would use flashbacks to Galador, dream sequences, and "how I see myself" VS "the real me in the mirror" scenes to give the lead some actual face-time.

Thinking like a TV producer, matching the Galadorian uniforms to the eventual spaceknights they would become, and while i love Galador, it's civilian clothes are dorky as hell. Rom's was first, with Karas and Terminator's photoshopped and in-painted off his.

I generated roughs of them in Midjourney with a combination of text and image prompting. Once I had a stack, each of the costumes were inpainted and photoshopped, and composited faces from various 1978-1981 actor head shots both the old fashioned way and with some help from Huggingface spaces.

Spaceknights

The Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe #010 (1983)

Character pin-ups from Rom 50, featuring Rom, Earth’s heroes, those who’ve died in the war against the Dire Wraiths, the Spaceknights, the Dire Wraiths themselves and the freaky mutant-Dire Wraith Hybrid!

Rom and the Spaceknights sketch (2011)