Sci-fi geeks have long worshipped an obscure TV show about a futuristic Moonbase Alpha and its spacecraft fleet of Eagles.

Now, about a half-century in, those “Space: 1999” superfans are about to get the homage they deserve, courtesy of a Stillwater filmmaker and Eagle devotee who recently completed and is preparing to release a semi-autobiographical documentary, “The Eagle Obsession.”

Jeffrey Morris calls his doc an exercise in “future nostalgia.”

On a basic level, it’s a tribute to the Eagle, which bears a strong resemblance to the lunar module used in America’s real-life lunar missions during the 1960s and 1970s. Morris was only 4 when he fell in love with the lunar module, which ferried astronauts from a command module in lunar orbit to the surface.

Morris was crestfallen when the U.S. government pulled the plug on the Apollo program in 1972 — he had assumed he and countless others would go to space, eventually — but the Eagle stole his heart in 1975.

“I fell in love with the Eagle immediately, because those were the kinds of spaceships we were going to fly on the future moon, when there are people living up there, and I wanted to be one of those people living up there,” he said.

Two years later, “Space: 1999” died, to Morris’ chagrin.

This is “The Eagle Obsession” on a deeper level. It’s a lament that America never fulfilled its planetary potential in space.

“It’s about a future that didn’t happen,” Morris says at one point in the documentary. “There’s a future that I thought was coming and that I believed was out there.

“For a lot of us, we also thought it was just going to be a better world, smarter people, kinder people,” he said.

Morris in his documentary only hints at the far-fetched premise of “Space: 1999” — that explosions on the moon cause it to break free from Earth’s orbit and fling it into deep space. Fans seeking plot and character minutiae will be disappointed.

In fact, some of “The Eagle Obsession” isn’t about “Space: 1999” or the Eagles, at all. Morris interviews Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke at Cape Kennedy, and he meets “Star Trek” star William Shatner within a faithful recreation of the Starship Enterprise bridge in upstate New York.

But, true to its name, the documentary largely obsesses about the Eagle.

Morris interviews its creator. He meets the actor who played an Eagle pilot on “Space: 1999” and invites him to participate in an Eagle cockpit rebuild. He coaches fifth-graders at a Blaine aerospace magnet school in an Eagle-redesign exercise. He travels to Denmark to meet the constructor of a near-life-size Eagle.

Along the way, he talks to novelists, visual effects experts, historians and others.

“My summary is that I wanted to tell a big story about my life and wanted to include examples of my influences,” Morris said.

Moon House

When Morris was growing up in Tempe, Ariz., he and his friends played space-related make-believe episodes during school recess. A schoolyard centerpiece was what they called the “moon house,” a climbing structure that looked vaguely like a sci-fi-movie building or ship.

Filmmaker Jeffrey Morris and his playmates christened this piece the “Moon House.” (Courtesy of Jim Miller-Melberg)

Anna Barab, a Ph.D. educator and software expert, recalls how those play sessions helped change the course of her life.

She was a traditional girl in many ways. “You know, I was playing Barbies,” she said.

But she also watched “Star Trek” and, later, at Morris’ urging, “Space: 1999.” That’s how she became acquainted with Dr. Helena Russell, the show co-star played by Barbara Bain alongside Martin Landau.

“Helena Russell is a character defined by her professionalism, intelligence, and quiet emotional strength,” Morris said. “As chief medical officer aboard Moonbase Alpha, she serves not only as the base’s top physician but also as a moral compass and stabilizing presence within an often-chaotic environment. She’s the rock of ‘Space:1999.’”

Bain proved to be a stabilizing influence in Barab’s life, too.

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“It wasn’t typically seen on TV at the time that you could be beautiful and smart and have a career and a family,” Barab said in a documentary chat with Morris. “I remember thinking, like, oh my gosh, I need to make a choice on this.

“And then I see something like Dr. Russell, Barbara Bain’s character, who is beautiful, blond, super smart, a doctor, and it made me realize, I can be anything,” she said.

“This is really powerful. I think there was a real message for young people like us watching a show like that, that this is a world that not only could be but should be.”

She added to Morris, “And kudos to you for including me in your space episodes.”

“Oh, well, you had to be there,” he replied. “You were one of my cool friends.”

Shortly afterward, in one of the documentary’s climactic sequences, Barab got to meet Bain and tell her how much her influence had meant to her at a time when her own mother was fighting for equality.

“Space: 1999” star Barbara Bain, left, has lunch with filmmaker Jeffrey Morris and Ph.D. educator and software expert Anna Barab in a scene from the documentary “The Eagle Obsession.”

“And so as a young girl figuring out my potential was, and what my possibilities could be, I realized that’s my future,” Barab told Bain over lunch.

“It’s amazing, it’s amazing,” Bain replied.

Seeking support

Morris’ high school physics teacher was aghast.

He had just learned that his star pupil intended to pursue a career in filmmaking and not physics.

“When he found out, he contacted my parents and said, ‘Don’t let him do this,’” Morris said. “He has a brilliant mind for physics and science.”

Turns out, “my parents (also) were very challenged by the idea that I wanted to be a filmmaker,” he said.

But Morris had made his life call much earlier.

“I really sensed that the space program wasn’t going to go where I hoped it would,” he said. “And I made the decision by the time I was, like, 11, 12 years old that I wanted to make movies about the world that I wanted to grow up to live in. Because I figured it’s not going to actually happen, so we have to motivate people. Media can motivate people.

“It was much to my parents’ dismay that I went down that path, and it took them a few years to get their heads around it,” he said. “I think in the early 1990s, when I started my first video production company, that my father saw what I was doing and he was blown away.”

Morris founded a new company, Morris Future Works, at the end of 2010, and has since spun out a couple of acclaimed short science-fiction films. Each has millions of views on YouTube.

In one of these, “Oceanus,” a marine biologist and her aquatic engineer husband fight to survive after a global cataclysm strikes, separating them from their spectacular underwater habitat.

In the other, “Parallel Man,” a rogue agent from a totalitarian regime has stolen a top-secret assault vehicle and plunged into the multiverse to prevent our Earth from being enslaved.

Morris is proud of these and other moderate-sized projects he’s developed but acknowledges that they fall short of his ultimate goal — producing a full-length feature film.

“The biggest challenge is pulling together the money” to make such a film, Morris said. And “you really shouldn’t try to make a science fiction feature film for under, say, $15 million.”

“The Eagle Obsession” was a change in strategy, he said, because documentaries tend to be much less expensive to make. The Eagle doc was produced for the low end of seven figures. It was easier to make, too, because it could be financed in chunks whereas features typically require full financing up front.

Two and a half years after he first had the idea, Morris finally had his feature film.

He celebrated by honoring his dearly departed parents in a quiet yet flashy way. He rounded up family photos and handed them to local illustrator and animator Kelly Brown, who added them to the film: Jeffrey opening an Eagle at Christmas, Jeffrey playing “Star Trek” and looking through a telescope with his father.

“The Eagle Obsession” documentary immortalizes Jeffrey Morris’ nerdy childhood, including the time his parents gave him a scale model of an Eagle from the TV show “Space: 1999.” (Courtesy of Kelly Brown)

“And so I got the chance to honor them with this movie and to show the world there are people like them,” said Morris, referring to their race. His adoptive parents were black, as is he. “There are success stories. My father was an aerospace engineer and my mother was a librarian.”

How to watch

“The Eagle Obsession” is being screened publicly and privately across North America, including at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Twin Citians’ best upcoming shot at catching the film is at 7 p.m. Oct 18 at the Twin Cities Film Fest (twincitiesfilmfest.org).

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There is a new backup quarterback in Minnesota.

After hosting Carson Wentz on a visit over the weekend, the Vikings have agreed to terms with the veteran.

To open up a spot for Wentz on the roster, the Vikings have also agreed to trade Sam Howell to the Philadelphia Eagles for a sixth-round pick in the 2026 NFL Draft and a seventh-round pick in the 2027 NFL Draft.

A source confirmed the moves to the Pioneer Press.

The addition of Wentz provides J.J. McCarthy with an experienced sounding board that he can lean on for advice. It also provides the Vikings with a reliable option on the field should Wentz have to play in pinch.

After starring at North Dakota State in college, Wentz was selected by the Eagles with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft. He looked the part of a franchise quarterback in the early stages of his career before being overtaken by Nick Foles.

After his time with the Eagles, Wentz has bounced around, playing for the Indianapolis Colts, the Washington Commanders, the Los Angeles Rams, and most recently, the Kansas City Chiefs.

It’s not surprising that the Vikings decided to move on from Howell. He struggled throughout training camp, and while he impressed in an exhibition game against the Houston Texans, he was a disaster in the exhibition game against the New England Patriots.

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Edward Lotterman

With Donald Trump’s outbursts amping up attention on the Federal Reserve and markets hanging with bated breath on what Chair Jerome Powell is going to do, arcane monetary policy has moved to center stage.

Yet the issues are more complex than many think. It’s not as simple as headlines about the president’s social media posts on wanting lower interest rates make it seem to be.

Most news stories fail to mention key questions or misunderstand key institutions. So a primer on basic terms of money, banking, central banking and the effects of all these on our economy is useful even if details are sacrificed for brevity.

Start with “money.” What is it really?

Money is anything that fills all three of these common functions:

First it must be a “medium of exchange,” something widely used and commonly accepted to buy and sell things.

Secondly, it must be a trusted “standard of value,” or yardstick, by which we measure and compare the value of goods and services or of physical or financial assets like houses or shares of stock. “Unit of account” is a synonym used by some.

Third, to be money, it must work as a “store of value,” a way of maintaining value produced in one period until spending it later on.

Historically money consisted of precious metals like gold or silver. But belts of small seashells or doughnut-shaped stones also were used. So might be perishables like beaver pelts, cigarettes or bread. For these, see Aleksander Solzhenitzyn’s novel, “One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” or downed-RAF pilot R.A. Radford’s 12-page “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp.” Yes, money is nicknamed “bread” for a reason.

However, pieces of paper with pictures of buildings and heads of state have been acceptable representations of value for several centuries, as have electronic numbers on various media for nearly one. Some such papers once had a legal tie to a quantity of gold or silver. Nowadays most do not, but have value anyway.

“Value” here depends on two common elements for money to be successful: First, the money must be “commonly acceptable.” People must be willing to use it. Secondly, it must be kept “relatively scarce.” The first depends on the second. If any form of money is not kept scarce, it soon will lack common acceptance, and lose relative value.

Now for “banks.” These businesses provide financial intermediation for households and businesses and other financial services. “Intermediation” means that anyone having money now but not wanting to spend it until later need not search out a borrower to add more value to the money. Nor is anyone without money but wanting to spend now forced to find an individual lender. Banks move money from savers to borrowers and back again. They spread and absorb risk and handle bookkeeping details. They also may offer checking accounts, credit cards, electronic transfers and other payment services.

Banking as we know it originated in northern Italy and in the Low Countries several centuries ago. Early ones were rich individuals like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, but more commonly rich families like the Medicis, Fuggers or Rothschilds.

These entities bought and sold goods. Often some trade was with other nations. This might involve sharing fractions of ships or cargoes with others, leading to insurance. They lent money to individuals, businesses, governments and popes. And some did take money from savers and lend it to borrowers, although this was a minor activity for many.

These late medieval “merchant banks” that could do anything gave rise to the more specialized ones we know today.

The ones most of us commonly know that accept deposits, make loans and provide payment services are “commercial banks.”

Those that work with corporations or governments to sell bonds to the public, that carry out the issuance of shares of stock to the public or that organize syndicates of lenders for very large loans to businesses or countries are “investment banks.”

In some countries, banks can do all of the above, including insurance underwriting. The term “universal banking” may be used.

In our nation, commercial and investment banking could be combined until the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, passed in response to the Wall Street crash in 1929. The bank owned by J.P. Morgan and partners, for example, became investment bank Morgan Stanley and commercial bank J.P. Morgan & Co. But all that was repealed by 60 years later.

Most importantly — on coming up on this past week’s news, there are “central banks.” These “banks for bankers” hold some of the “reserves” of commercial banks. These are the fraction of deposits not lent out. Central banks can make loans to financial institutions temporarily short of liquid funds. They also may handle payments between banks, such as clearing checks.

Sweden and England set up central banks in the 1600s. While we had two 20-year attempts early on, the U.S. did not get a lasting one until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. That institution underwent major changes in 1935 to produce the system with a Board of Governors that we know today. The point of this, arguably, was to insulate objective monetary policy from subjective politics or investment trends.

This “lender of last resort” function of the central bank protects commercial banks from going broke. That also protects the public since it reduces the chance of losing their deposits in a banking panic. And it can keep temporary bank system problems from torpedoing the economy as a whole, sending it into recession as happened so often in the 1800s.

Without going into detail, understand that a banking system in which some fraction of deposits may be lent out results in an “money supply” that can expand or contract regardless of the quantity of “currency,” paper money or coins, in circulation. This lets capital be mobilized to increase production. Also, by reducing risks of losing savings, households and businesses can conduct their affairs with greater certainty and less fear.

The “money supply” is all of the currency in circulation plus the fraction of bank deposits rapidly accessible to make payments. In the past, especially when banks were more regulated, currency plus checking account balances was one measure of the money supply. Add savings accounts, “certificates of deposit” and “money market mutual funds” and you had additional categories.

These complicated exact definitions of different money supply metrics does not change the fundamental idea that the money supply is currency plus deposits that are liquid and can be used to purchase goods and services or pay obligations.

Decades of booms, panics and busts led painfully to consensus on a central bank. It was a complex system of 12 regional banks rather than one. This allayed fears by some of control by Wall Street and by others of control by Congress or the president.

The preamble to the Federal Reserve Act noted objectives “to furnish an elastic currency,” and “to establish a more effective supervision of banking.” Expanding and contracting our “elastic currency” is what the Fed’s policy making Federal Open Market Committee does. Interest rates are just gradations on a speedometer. The money supply is the amount of fuel being injected into the engine. More on all of this later.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By Madyson Fitzgerald, Stateline.org

Self-driving vehicle technology continues to advance, prompting a wave of liability and safety regulations from state lawmakers.

This year, lawmakers in Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada and the District of Columbia enacted legislation to regulate driverless vehicles, according to a database from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

While much of the legislation aims to update existing law to include new definitions for autonomous vehicles, other measures put rules in place regarding insurance, permitting, licensing and road testing.

In total, lawmakers in 25 states introduced 67 bills related to autonomous vehicles, according to the database. California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania currently have bills under consideration. Alaska, Delaware and Washington have bills that will be carried over into the next legislative session.

Governors vetoed two measures this year. Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis shot down a measure that would have required a driver to be present in any commercial vehicle being operated by an automated driving system.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed a measure that would have put rules in place for “high-risk artificial intelligence systems,” but would have excluded “autonomous vehicle technology” from that category.

As of now, there are no vehicles that have achieved full autonomy, according to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ criteria. But several car companies have introduced automated driving features, allowing drivers to take their hands off the wheel.

Tesla is rolling out its Full Self-Driving feature, a system under which a vehicle can drive itself almost anywhere with minimal intervention from the driver. Tesla Autopilot, which the company made available to the public in late 2024, also helps with basic vehicle maneuvering.

And Waymo, the country’s first autonomous ride-hailing service, is currently operating in Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; Phoenix and San Francisco. The robo-taxi company plans to expand to Miami and Washington, D.C., next.

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According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, vehicle safety is the main benefit of driverless cars. With higher levels of automation, there is less room for human error or driver distractions. The new technology also could improve safety for bicyclists and pedestrians, according to the agency.

But driverless cars have been involved in hundreds of accidents over the past few years. Between 2021 and 2024, there were 696 accidents reported that involved a Waymo vehicle, according to an analysis by California-based law firm DiMarco — Araujo — Montevideo.

And last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system after multiple reports of crashes that occurred in low-visibility conditions.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.