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This question: Which part of 2001 takes place in 2001?

Asks about when the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) happens, since the discovery of the monolith on the Moon happens 18 months before the events on the spaceship headed for Jupiter. Thus the monolith could be discovered in January to December 2001, and the events 18 months later could happen between August 2002 and and June 2003, or the Monolith could be discovered 18 months before the space events that were sometime between January and December 2001, making the monolith discovered sometime between July 1999 and June 2000. If I did the math right.

So the tv series Space: 1999 (1975-1977) was made by people who were aware of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and who could have noticed that with an 18 month gap between the main sequences of the film they could not both have happened in the year 2001.

So did they decide that the main space sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) happened in 2001 and that the monolith was discovered on the Moon in 1999 or 2000, and thus decided to have the Moon ejected from Earth orbit on September 13, 1999, thus showing that even if the two productions happpened in the same mulitiverse they would be in alternate universes?

So was 1999 selected as the year when the Moon was ejected into interstellar space based on the possible discovery of the monolith in 1999 or 2000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)?

M. A. Golding
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    I mean, certainly Space 1999 seems to have been influenced by 2001 in terms of special effects. The bulk of your question seems very unlikely to me. People did not talk or think about sharing universes between franchises and crossovers and multiverses and all that stuff back in the 70s. 1999 was most likely selected because it’s a cool year, numerically. Just like the Prince song. – Todd Wilcox Jan 19 '22 at 22:31

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Story, plot, whatever, have nothing to do with 2001 and 1999.

All they share is Earth, Moon, Moon base, humans. And if you stick within the universe of the movies, the script for 1999 would have had the Moon blowing off before they discover the Monolith in 2001... Multiverse? very very far from it. Different times.

As has been pointed out though, is that the visual effects were very much influenced by 2001, with many shots and visuals, season one, echoing that of 2001, and for the same reasons stated in the comments.

https://catacombs.space1999.net/plus/dt/2001/up2001.html

relates to the crew that shared productions. Sharing production credits does not automatically mean there is any story/creative relationship between the two shows though, far from it (in terms of pecking orders, these guys would not be influential, at all). This only shows that the people that worked on the later production were hoping to do as much of a good job as on the production they had done before, whatever the budget given to them.

The origins for 1999 come from a different place though, being preproduction artwork for a new series of UFO.

That was a series that had been in production for television in 1969. The second season was proposed to be set entirely on the Moon, which is where Moonbase Alpha came from.

Chris Penfold, working on preproduction for 1999 has said that his influence was more Star Trek, though the actual creators of 1999 were less so.

Season two makes a dramatic change in many areas from the previous year and is almost a complete break from 2001 visually for many reasons: The primary being that the producer from Star Trek came over and made lots of changes, being influenced by shows like the one he had just worked on and the series Lost in Space.

Going back to the visuals, the treatment of the environment was very dfferent for its time though: 2001, everything was very clean, whereas 1999 had it all dirtied up. Something you would see later again in SW.

https://screenrant.com/space-1999-aged-well-poorly/

blobbymcblobby
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