Otherworld

1 9 8 5 (USA)
8 x 60 minute episodes

Hal (Sam Groom) and June (Gretchen Corbett) Sterling were on a sight-seeing trip with their three children – 18-year-old Trace (Tony O’Dell), 17-year-old Gina (Jonna Lee) and 11-year-old Smith (Brandon Crane initially, and then Chris Hebert) – when their lives took a very bizarre twist.

While touring the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt the family became lost inside the labyrinths and inadvertently passed through a portal to a strange parallel universe (don’t you hate it when that happens?).

The world in which they found themselves was called Thel – a planet ruled by the Church of Artificial Intelligence and kept in line by ruthless Zone Troopers.

Thel was full of radically different societies, each inhabiting its own province or “zone”. The Sterlings set about making their way through the various provinces to Imar, capital of Thel and home to Signpost Astrologers who had the power to return them to their own universe.

Along the way, the family came across a mining town run by human-like androids, a society in which families were against the law, and a pleasure resort that killed its guests to obtain from their bodies a substance that could give eternal youth to others.

Each week the Sterlings found themselves in a new environment where they had to try and fit in while keeping their identities secret.

Hot on their trail was the malevolent Kommander Nuveen Kroll (Jonathan Banks), whose mysterious ‘access crystal’ they had stolen when they first stumbled into Otherworld.

Otherworld was first telecast on 26 January 1985, and originally screened on Saturdays on CBS from 8.00-9.00PM

Hal Sterling
Sam Groom
June Sterling
Gretchen Corbett
Trace Sterling
Tony O’Dell
Gina Sterling
Jonna Lee
Smith Sterling
Brandon Crane (1)
Chris Hebert (2)
Kommander Nuveen Kroll
Jonathan Banks
Praetor
Peter Bromilow
Lieutenant
Wayne Alexander