ARK II. ARK II thrusts players into a brutal new world of primitive survival against both beast and man, facing down the ever-present threats of hyper-realistic intelligent dinosaurs, aggressive alien fauna, and the exotic environments of an u.
Ark II is an American live-action science fiction television series, aimed at children, that aired on CBS from September 11 to December 18, 1976, (with reruns continuing through November 13, 1977 and reruns returning from September 16, 1978, through August 25, 1979) as part of its weekend line-up. Only 15 half-hour episodes were produced. The program’s central characters were created by Martin Roth; Ted Post helped Roth develop its core format.
The opening titles for each episode, as narrated first by executive producer Lou Scheimer (using his then uncredited pseudonym Erik Gunden), then by the voice of Terry Lester, who portrayed Jonah, summarized the show’s backstory:
For millions of years, Earth was fertile and rich. Then pollution and waste began to take their toll. Civilization fell into ruin. This is the world of the 25th century. Only a handful of scientists remain, men who have vowed to rebuild what has been destroyed. This is their achievement: Ark II, a mobile storehouse of scientific knowledge, manned by a highly trained crew of young people. Their mission: to bring the hope of a new future to mankind.
(Voice of Jonah): Ark II log, entry number 1. I, Jonah,…Ruth,…Samuel,…and Adam are fully aware of the dangers we face as we venture into unknown, maybe even hostile, areas. But we’re determined to bring the promise of a new civilization to our people and our planet.
Ark II had a racially mixed cast starring Terry Lester as Ark II’s commander, Jonah, Jean Marie Hon as Ruth, José Flores as Samuel, and a chimpanzee named Moochie (owned and trained by Darrell Keener) responding to the name of Adam and voiced by Lou Scheimer.[1] The show’s premise was inspired by the story of Noah’s Ark, and the characters were given names taken from the Hebrew Bible. It was set in a post-apocalyptic 25th century (specifically, 2476, the show having debuted in 1976), after Earth’s civilizations had been decimated by the effects of waste, pollution, and warfare, falling back to a civilization comparable to the Dark Ages. The surviving scientists pooled their knowledge and resources, training three young people (and the chimp, who was capable of speech and abstract reasoning) to search for remnants of humanity, reintroducing lost ideas as they traveled the barren landscape in the high-tech Ark II.[2]
The show mentions a “headquarters” and that the crew are scientists. The titles “commander” and “captain” are both used to refer to Jonah. All the installments began and ended with numbered entries in the Ark II’s log, which Lester, in character as Jonah, narrated in voiceover. Like other Filmation shows, Ark II also had a moral lesson derived from the preceding events seen in the episode. However, the epilogue log entry narrated by Jonah is used to deliver the moral rather than have any of the characters break the fourth wall (i.e. speak directly to the camera and TV viewers) to deliver the moral which was common in most Filmation shows.
In “The Launch of Ark II,” the documentary filmed for the release of the DVD set, Lou Scheimer and others mention that the program was filmed during the summer of 1976 predominantly on location at Paramount Ranch near Malibu, California. Establishing footage of the Ark traveling at high speed was shot at the Rogers Dry Lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base. The show was filmed at a rate of two episodes per week.
According to Lou Scheimer, Moochie the chimpanzee was very angry and aggressive as a result of mistreatment by his trainer, sometimes witnessed by the cast and crew.[3]