Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Cast Then and Now 2026 | Is Anyone Still Alive Today?

[00:00:00]Buck Rogers in the 25th century looked like a triumph. A NASA pilot frozen for five centuries waking to a glittering future.

[00:00:08]Behind the cameras, the future was collapsing.

[00:00:11]Its leading man refused his own lines, rewrote scripts to shrink his co-stars, and was threatened with legal action by the network that paid him.

[00:00:20]Two writers walked off mid-season.

[00:00:23]An entire supporting cast vanished between year one and year two, cut without a word of explanation on screen.

[00:00:30]One of them would die broke in a charity home for forgotten actors.

[00:00:34]Another carried a voice the whole world knew and was still replaced.

[00:00:38]Seven of the people you are about to meet are already gone.

[00:00:42]Here is what actually happened.

[00:00:44]The man at the center of all of it was Gil Gerard, and the trouble started with the scripts.

[00:00:49]Gerard had spent the years before the flight suit as a Ford commercial spokesman and a daytime soap actor on The Doctors, grinding through more than 160 episodes before the title role made him a star at 36.

[00:01:01]He arrived on set with firm ideas about who Buck Rogers should be, and he hated the jokes.

[00:01:07]He complained that the writers had reduced his character to what he called "just a wise ass who was making one joke after another." And he began refusing to say some of the comic lines he was handed.

[00:01:17]Refusing them was only where it started.

[00:01:20]Gerard rewrote scripts himself, building up his own character while trimming the people around him. And in one first season episode called Escape from Wedded Bliss, he vetoed a scripted ending in which Colonel Wilma Deering rescues Buck because he did not want to be the one rescued. The pattern set the tone for everything that followed.

[00:01:40]A leading man who rewrites the writers and overrules the plot is a leading man who has decided the show belongs to him.

[00:01:47]Those writers did not stay to argue.

[00:01:49]Script editors Anne Collins and Alan Brennert quit in the middle of the first season after a confrontation with Gerard went badly, walking away from a network hit rather than keep fighting its star for control of the page. The network itself went further.

[00:02:03]NBC threatened Gerard with legal action if he continued to cause problems and hinder the production. An extraordinary move to make against the face on every poster and lunch box.

[00:02:14]Legal threats did little to soften him.

[00:02:16]Speaking to Starlog magazine in November 1980, Gerard admitted something almost no leading man ever says in print, that he had hoped the series would not be picked up for a second season because he had no wish to go through another year like the first.

[00:02:30]Read that again and the whole show tilts.

[00:02:33]The star of one of the biggest science fiction series on television was openly rooting against its survival.

[00:02:40]When the series did return, it came back on his terms as much as anyone's.

[00:02:44]A devout Christian, Gerard had reportedly disliked the sexual undercurrent running through the first season and pushed for stories that were more uplifting and more family-friendly.

[00:02:54]And reports from the period say he forced those changes onto a less than enthusiastic Glen Larson, the man who had created the show in the first place.

[00:03:02]The second season also brought in a new producer, John Mantley, a veteran whose background lay in television westerns rather than in space adventure.

[00:03:10]The tone shifted, the cast shrank, and the leading man who had wished the show dead ended up with a version remade closer to his own taste right before the audience walked away from it.

[00:03:22]Getting his way and getting an audience turned out to be two very different things.

[00:03:26]His wish was denied and the show returned rebuilt around him, which is the cruel joke buried in this entire story.

[00:03:34]What the fighting cost is easier to measure in the people who disappeared than in anything Gerard actually won.

[00:03:40]He spent the decades afterward working steadily on television in Sidekicks and e a r t h force and dozens of guest spots right up to a final film in 2019.

[00:03:51]Though he later estimated that a long struggle with his weight had cost him work worth close to a million dollars.

[00:03:57]His private life carried the same turbulence as his sets.

[00:04:00]Gerard married and divorced several times, most publicly to the model and actress Connie Sellecca, whom he wed in 1979 and divorced in 1987 after a bitter custody fight over their son, Gibb, born in 1981.

[00:04:17]Calm arrived late in an 18-year marriage to his wife Janet that held until the very end. That end came with terrible speed.

[00:04:25]On December 16th, 2025, Gerard died in Georgia at 82 of a cancer his wife described as so rare and so aggressive that only a handful of days passed between the first signs of trouble and his death. The character he had refused to be rescued by belonged to Erin Gray, and what happened to Colonel Wilma Deering is the clearest measure of how much power a single actor can hold.

[00:04:49]Gray came to the show as one of the highest-paid models in New York, the face of Virginia Slims and L'Oreal, pulling in more than a hundred thousand dollars a year before she ever stood in front of a camera to act.

[00:05:01]She had moved in the front rank of that world in company with names like Farrah Fawcett, Veronica Hamel, and Susan Blakely, and she had already married her first husband Ken Swartz and had a son before Hollywood came calling.

[00:05:15]All of that accomplishment counted for little once the producers had her under contract.

[00:05:20]Producers reshaped her the moment she arrived.

[00:05:23]They demanded that Wilma be blonde, forcing dye jobs onto Gray's natural dark hair, and across the first season they softened the sharp, commanding Colonel of the pilot into something gentler and less threatening.

[00:05:37]Season 2 carried the reduction much further.

[00:05:40]The trade publication Film Ink later wrote that Wilma was disempowered and shunted to the side where she held Buck's water while he had adventures, and reported that the change traced directly to Gerard's unhappiness over how prominent her role had grown.

[00:05:55]Gray remembers those same years differently, and both accounts deserve to stand side by side.

[00:06:01]In her telling, Gerard fought hard for her character and for the other women on the show to be written with dignity, and the two of them built a friendship that lasted 52 years. When Gerard died, Gray wrote that he was an important part of my life for over years. And she closed her tribute with the words, "Rest easy, my partner."

[00:06:22]One set, two versions, and no way now to say which sentence was the truer one.

[00:06:27]Gray herself came through the whole ordeal unbroken.

[00:06:31]She moved from Buck Rogers straight into five seasons of Silver Spoons, built a talent and convention agency called Heroes for Hire, married Richard Hissong in 1991, and at 76, she stands as one of only three people from this story still living.

[00:06:46]Most of the others were simply erased.

[00:06:49]When production resumed for the second season under an entirely new set of producers, the format was gutted. The Earth-based world of season 1 was thrown out for a starship wandering the galaxy, and nearly the whole supporting cast was written out at once, with not one line of dialogue ever explaining on screen where any of them had gone.

[00:07:08]Tim O'Connor felt it first.

[00:07:10]O'Connor had played Dr. Elias Huer, head of Earth's Defense Directorate and Buck's grounding authority figure through the entire first season.

[00:07:18]A role that rested on the credibility of a man who had already logged years on Peyton Place and hundreds of hours of television drama.

[00:07:26]Vanished he was, without a syllable of goodbye.

[00:07:30]For an actor of his standing, being deleted from a hit show with no on-screen acknowledgement is a particular kind of insult. The production treating a full season of work as something that could be quietly painted over.

[00:07:42]O'Connor kept working for decades more and died in his sleep at his home in Nevada City, California on April 5th, 2018 at 90 with reports citing heart failure. The show's most striking villain disappeared exactly the same way.

[00:07:58]Pamela Hensley had turned Princess Ardala, the Draconian conqueror who wanted Buck as her consort, into the most memorable antagonist of season 1 and the revamp cut her loose without ceremony.

[00:08:10]What she chose to do next was rarer than any firing in this account.

[00:08:14]Hensley finished one more series, the detective drama Matt Houston, and then in 1985 at just 34, she walked away from acting entirely and never came back.

[00:08:25]She married the television producer E.

[00:08:26]Duke Vincent around the same time and stayed married to him for roughly four decades until his death in February 2024.

[00:08:34]At 75, she remains retired and almost entirely out of public life.

[00:08:39]The performer who left the screen on her own terms after the screen had already decided to leave her.

[00:08:44]There is a quiet dignity in that timing.

[00:08:47]Being cut by a show is one thing, but choosing a few years later to close the door on the whole business and never reopen it is a decision very few actors ever manage to make cleanly.

[00:08:58]Beside Ardala stood Kane and Kane was pushed out, too.

[00:09:02]Michael and Sarah had given the enforcer a cold, deep-voiced menace that made him the most frightening regular the show ever had and he was dropped in the same off-season sweep as the rest.

[00:09:13]Ansar hardly needed Buck Rogers to prove anything.

[00:09:16]He had already played the Klingon commander Kang across the original Star Trek and he would later voice Mr. Freeze in Batman.

[00:09:23]The animated series, a life of definitive villains framing this one on both sides. His personal history touched television royalty as well through his marriage to Barbara Eden during the run of Broken Arrow, a union that produced a son before ending in 1974.

[00:09:39]A second marriage to Beverly Kushida in 1977 lasted the remainder of his life.

[00:09:45]Ansara died of complications from Alzheimer's disease at his home in Calabasas, California on July 31st, 2013 at 91.

[00:09:55]Ansara, though, had himself been a replacement because Cain was recast before the series ever reached the air.

[00:10:01]Henry Silva originated Killer Cain in the 1979 theatrical pilot, playing him with the same still coiled threat that had carried Silva through a career already built on menace.

[00:10:12]And when the pilot was expanded into a weekly show, the role was handed to Ansara instead.

[00:10:18]Silva returned to the work that had always both defined and confined him.

[00:10:23]His face, dark and severe, kept him locked into gangsters and killers across more than 130 screen credits, from Ocean's 11 in 1960 through The Manchurian Candidate.

[00:10:35]And he outlasted nearly everyone he had shared a frame with.

[00:10:38]When Silva died on September 14th, 2022 at 95, he was the last surviving credited star of the original Ocean's 11, a distinctive talent the industry had spent 50 years typecasting as the heavy.

[00:10:53]Losing Buck Rogers before it aired was, in the arc of that career, one small recasting among hundreds of roles the business decided a face like his was allowed to play.

[00:11:03]A man with that kind of presence spent his life being cast for menace and rarely for anything else.

[00:11:09]One leading man's war with his own writers rippled outward until a doctor, a princess, and two separate actors who had each played the same villain were all swept off the board in a single off-season.

[00:11:20]Tell me in the comments whether you believe anyone star should hold that much power over the jobs of every performer standing next to him.

[00:11:28]I want to know where you land on it.

[00:11:31]The purge did not stop at the faces you could see.

[00:11:34]Twiki, the beeping little robot who trailed Buck Rogers through nearly every episode, spoke in the voice of Mel Blanc, the man who had already handed the world Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig across five decades of animation. Blanc fell seriously ill during the second season, and the production replaced him with a performer named Bob Elie for the first five episodes, giving Twiki a higher, boyish voice that sounded nothing like the character audiences had grown to love with no explanation ever offered on screen.

[00:12:05]His recovery brought Blanc back for the final six episodes, yet the swap had already happened. The most recognizable voice in the history of animation quietly set aside the moment illness made him inconvenient.

[00:12:18]Think about the arithmetic of that decision for a moment.

[00:12:21]A production willing to reshuffle its entire cast between seasons saw no reason to wait a few weeks for the man whose voice had defined Bugs Bunny Daffy Duck, and it slotted in a substitute rather than lose a shooting day.

[00:12:35]Blanc died on July 10th, 1989 at 81 of complications from lung and heart disease at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

[00:12:44]His headstone at Hollywood Forever Cemetery carries the sign-off he made famous across a thousand cartoons, "That's all, folks."

[00:12:53]Inside the Twiki costume was another man altogether, and audiences never saw his face either.

[00:12:59]Felix Silla, a performer of 3 ft and 11 in, supplied the body and the movement that made the robot feel alive while Blanc supplied the sound, and his entire career ran on that same invisibility.

[00:13:12]Silla was Cousin It on the Addams Family, an Ewok in Return of the Jedi, and a stunt performer across Battlestar Galactica and Planet of the Apes, concealed every single time inside a costume, a mask, or a wall of hair.

[00:13:27]Two of the most recognizable characters he ever played, Tweeky and Cousin It, never once showed the world what he actually looked like. Silla died of pancreatic cancer in Las Vegas on April 16th, 2021 at 84. A career spent making other people's creations move while his own face stayed hidden behind them.

[00:13:47]Fame of a certain kind found him without ever attaching itself to the man.

[00:13:51]Millions of children knew Tweeky and knew Cousin It, and almost none of them could have named the performer breathing life into either one.

[00:13:59]If these are the stories you want more of, the ones the credits and the press releases never told you, think about subscribing because almost every old show is hiding a set exactly like this one.

[00:14:10]The saddest reversal of them all belonged to a man the second season actually chose to bring in.

[00:14:15]Wilfrid Hyde-White joined the revamped show as Dr. Goodfellow, the gentle, endlessly curious scientist aboard the Searcher. And by the time he arrived, he had already stood beside Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady, and appeared in well over a hundred films.

[00:14:32]Money had run straight through his hands his whole life.

[00:14:35]A heavy gambler who spent with abandon, Hyde-White was declared bankrupt by the British tax authorities in 1979, the very year Buck Rogers began, and his tax troubles were so severe that he could no longer film in Britain at all.

[00:14:49]So, his Buck Rogers scenes were shot in California while he lived out his years in America as a tax exile. His ending was harsher than any firing anywhere in this story.

[00:14:59]Hyde-White died on May 6th, 1991 at 87 of heart failure inside the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, a charity facility built for film industry workers who could no longer support themselves. A man who had once shared the screen with Audrey Hepburn spent his final days in a home for actors who had run out of money, six days short of his 88th birthday.

[00:15:22]His son, the actor Alex Hyde-White, carried the family name forward into a career of his own. The father, for all his hundred-plus films and his years of gambling away fortunes, left the world dependent on the charity of the industry he had served for more than half a century, and the small science fiction show that gave him a last paycheck could do nothing to change that ending.

[00:15:44]That same season, which erased so many people, also handed one actor the richest part of his career at the worst imaginable moment to receive it.

[00:15:53]Tom Christopher came aboard as Hawk, the stoic half-man, half-bird warrior and last survivor of his people, and he gave the revamped show the only genuine dramatic weight it ever carried.

[00:16:05]NBC canceled the series after just 11 strike-shortened episodes, ending his showcase almost the instant it started.

[00:16:13]What Buck Rogers refused to let him finish, another genre eventually delivered.

[00:16:18]11 years afterward, in 1992, Christopher won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor as the mob boss Carlo Hesser on One Life to Live, and he earned a second nomination the following year, proving in daytime the exact talent this show cut short.

[00:16:35]Consider the strange justice of it.

[00:16:37]The most award-decorated performer on the entire season 2 roster was the one handed the richest, most complicated character just as the network decided to switch the lights off.

[00:16:48]Christopher died on December 5th, 2024 at 84 in New York after a long illness, five years after losing his wife, Judith Leverone. Another newcomer got even less time than that.

[00:17:01]Jay Garner signed on for the second season as Admiral Efram Asimov, commander of the Searcher, a distinguished stage actor stepping into the anchor role of a brand new format.

[00:17:12]Garner had played the side-stepping governor in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Benjamin Franklin in 1776 on Broadway.

[00:17:19]And he brought that theatrical gravity to a show the network pulled the plug on within weeks of his first appearance.

[00:17:25]Broadway welcomed him back, the theater proving steadier than the network ever had.

[00:17:30]Garner died in New York City on January 21st, 2011 at 82 after a respiratory illness. A stage veteran who had lent his considerable weight to a spaceship that barely got to leave the dock before it was scrapped.

[00:17:44]The last of the erased never appeared on camera at all.

[00:17:48]Eric Server had been the voice of Dr. Theopolis, the disk-shaped talking computer that hung around Twiki's neck and served as the calm, reasoning conscience of season 1.

[00:17:58]And in the revamp, that voice simply went silent with no story reason ever given for its disappearance.

[00:18:04]Server kept working through the 1980s and well beyond on B.J. and the Bear, T.J. Hooker, L.A. Law, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

[00:18:15]And at 81, he stands as the third and final living member of this cast. A man whose contribution was erased so cleanly that most viewers never realized a person had been removed at all. Line the 12 of them up in a row and a pattern hardens into view.

[00:18:29]The show that turned Gil Gerard into a household name treated almost everyone else on it as replaceable furniture. A doctor written out in silence, a princess and a villain swept away between seasons. The most famous voice in animation swapped the week its owner fell ill. A veteran of 100 films flown to a different continent because of his debts.

[00:18:49]What the audience saw each week was a bright, optimistic future in which humanity had solved its oldest problems.

[00:18:56]Behind that future, the cast lived through an ordinary Hollywood machine, one that valued the name above the title and the title above the people who filled it in.

[00:19:05]The gap between the two is the whole reason a story like this one exists.

[00:19:10]Three of them remain, and the man who set every bit of this in motion is gone.

[00:19:15]Gil Gerard told a magazine in 1980 that he hoped the show would never return, then received the second season he dreaded, watched it torn apart and rebuilt around him while a dozen colleagues were quietly cut away, and saw it canceled anyway after 11 episodes.

[00:19:30]For the next 40 years, he signed autographs as Buck Rogers at conventions, the role he had fought so bitterly against becoming the one thing the public would never let him set down until the cancer took him in a matter of days at 82. The partner he argued with and defended in the very same breath had the last word on him.

[00:19:48]"Rest easy, my partner." Erin Gray wrote 3 days after he died.