by Highball on Sat Apr 14, 2007 12:22 am
Oh, man was I glad to have found the ed2k links for this lost piece of my childhood! I was 6 years old going on 7 and in the first grade when the Gemini Man started his short lived run. My parents had separated, and my mother and I were living with my grandmother and my younger aunt who was just old enough to be like a big sister to me. I started watching the show on the only working TV in the house from the time it hit the airwaves, and I thought Ben Murphy as Sam Casey was soooo cool!! I wanted my very own Gemini Man watch so that I could turn invisible on demand and freak out everyone at school. My younger aunt even made me a Gemini Man watch with a nickel, some tin foil, and an old zipper, but she strongly suggested that I not take it to school since it would not REALLY make me invisible. Then, one night came along when I was getting ready to watch the Gemini Man, everyone else in the house came into the living room with our only TV and declared that they were all going to watch this really great show they had heard about called "Welcome Back Kotter." The fact that it was time for me to watch Gemini Man did not seem to matter to them, and so I was "outvoted." I recall pitching a HUGE temper tantrum over not being able to watch my TV program. This was also before VCRs became widely available, or I probably could have survived. I was in a snit for weeks as my family continued to want to watch those damn Sweat Hogs. In later weeks, they would let me turn the channel for a couple of minutes during the a commercial to the Gemini Man, but they always turned the channel back to those $#$%@#$% Sweat Hogs. My family told me that I could always catch the show the following summer when shows went into reruns, and I took solace in that. Unfortunately, when the season of Welcome Back Kotter ended, the Gemini Man was GONE!!!! It did not even come on in the summertime like my family had promised me it would. I was bewildered, and my family had no explanation. I never forgot about the show, and in later years I heard that it has been aired at odd hours on the Sci-Fi channel. I learned through research on the Internet that NBC had canceled the show due to low ratings secondary to programing it against Welcome Back Kotter. Nevertheless, to this day, I absolutely HATE Welcome Back Kotter to the degree of wishing that someone would have just busted into that classroom with an automatic weapon and blown away all the Sweat Hogs so I could watch my TV show and that really cool Sam Casey! Thanks to these ed2k links, I've been able to download the few episodes that aired and get some closure to that lost part of my childhood. Still, it was hard finding the time to screen all of the episodes since I'm now a father to a baby daughter who wants to mash all of the keys on my laptop while I'm trying to watch videos. The Gemini Man is not a series that would hold my interest if I were my age now when it had its short run, but I can see why it would be neat to a 6 year old first grader in 1976! Now that I have all the episodes that were aired, I have this sadistic fantasy of requiring all of the members of my grandmother's household in 1976 to attend a "Gemini Man" film fest screening in her house of all of the episodes of the show as payback for not letting me watch my TV show in 1976.
I sure wish I could snag the four episodes that never aired due to the cancellation of the series!
Highball
but from what i can remember it's typical 70's/80's cheese tv but entertaining nevertheless 
