To honor the memory of Andy Griffith (RIP Andy Griffith), I wanted to point out his science fiction show that he did in the late 1970s, Salvage 1. The two hour pilot centered around Andy Griffith as Harry Broderick, a junkyard owner who gets a wild idea to go to the moon and salvage the junk left up there by the Apollo missions. He hires an ex-astronaut (Joel Higgins who later played the dad on Silver Spoons) to fly the ship and an female explosives expert (Trish Stewart) to figure out the propulsion. The two hour pilot was a lot of fun with the hair-brained idea become reality with this rag-tag bunch of amateurs. When they converted it to a series, they really didn’t have enough ideas (where do you go after you’ve been to the moon) and it died early in a second season.

The show has never been released on DVD (probably because there isn’t a lot of demand) and the series itself was pretty bad. But for a single two hour pilot, I loved the show. And, as a fun side note, as I researched the show, I discovered that Isaac Asimov was the Science Advisor for the show. So, I’m assuming that a lot of the science (at least in the pilot) was fairly accurate. See after the jump for some clips. Someone put the full pilot on YouTube. Watch quickly before it disappears