Hell yes - I not only have heard of it I own the movie on VHS (yep, I’ve had it that long), the TV show on DVD, and I’ve read the entire trilogy of novels by William F. Nolan (really, think the first one was the best of the lot. It got…weird).
By golly, I think it does deserve its own thread.
Have you ever heard of Farrah Fawcett?!
One of my favorite Phil Hartman quotes from NewsRadio: “If this was Logan’s Run, we’d all be Soylent Green by now!” 
I’m 34* and have heard of it, but don’t have the faintest idea of what it’s about. In fact, I thought it was a TV show (and see that it was both) until someone in the other thread mentioned in the other thread that it was a movie. Furthermore, in the other thread things like sci-fi and murder were brought up. Again, I don’t know anything about it, but I didn’t have any idea that that’s what it would be about (of course, if you had no idea what Marathon Man was about, it would probably catch you off guard as well).
*Not seeing it wouldn’t have anything to do with my age though, someone how it just slipped through the cracks. Not winning any AFI/Acadamy awards is probably why it never caught my attention. Now that I think about it, I’m kind of surprised there isn’t an AFI sci-fi list. It’s certainly a big enough genre.
I’m 51. I’ve heard of it, and watched the movie on TV (probably the first time it was shown on network TV); I also remember watching the TV series.
It seems like the film rarely (if ever) gets shown on cable, which probably doesn’t help its lack of awareness among people who weren’t old enough to have seen it originally.
Plus, it came out during what I think was a bit of a dark age for sci-fi films (an age which obviously ended with the releases of Star Wars and Close Encounters). I’d bet that not too many people of that age group are familiar with Silent Running, either.
I’m 36, and I love this movie. It was one of my favorites as a kid.
Growing up, I lived for the sci-fi movie marathon weeks that the local PBS station would run. I got my fill of sci-fi that way. Logan’s Run, Tron, Silent Running, 2001, Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Voyage, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, Close Encounters, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea . . . man, I miss those days!
I read the book, and I seem to recall that in it, the cutoff date was age 21, not 30. But I may be misremembering.
No, that’s what I recall too. I think casting the movie forced them to move the age up.
I remember when the show Sliders went to a Logan’s Run themed Earth.
49 and I still love it. It’s a bit cheesy but still loads of fun. All bright colors and ludicrous plot.
But you’re right that prior to Star Wars there wasn’t a lot of big budget SF heavy movies like that.
Heck, I still have the seven issues of the comic book Marvel produced from it. George Perez did the artwork - I think - and it ended on a cliffhanger.
I remember the movie. The original release was R rated, I think everything available now is the PG version which has perhaps the slightest of cuts. I’m not surprised it’s forgotten or never known by those under 40 or even 50.
Heck, I heard of Logan’s Run back before there was a movie – just a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (a big writer for Twilight Zone). The “dedicated to” section in the front thanked a lot of people, but misspelled Fredric Brown’s name. In the book, IIRC, they killed you when you turned 21. They upped that to 30 for the movie. It was kinda interesting.
The 1976 film, it has been argued (by the magazine [Cinefantastique and others) started the Big Budget Science Fiction cycle of the seventies. If so, it was sort of a fizzle, and if Star Wars hadn’t come along there almost certainly wouldn’t have been such an event. Logan’s Run took a bunch of ideas and clichés that were kicking around and crystallized them into a movie. The movie had the distinction of having the first real hologram I know of in a film – they made a Benson hologram of Farrah Fawcett and filmed it as it spun. This shows that filming an actual hologram isn’t all that exciting. The fake hologram of Carrie Fisher in Star Wars looked a helluva lot better. I did like the idea of Peter Ustonov as the Last Old Man, and the heroine asking if his wrinkles hurt. But a movie really does need a lot more than that.
Never watched the TV series.
There were several sequel books to the original, which I never read. Apparently somebody has been trying to remake the movie, for no discernible reason, except that movie studios have no creativity.
There are better science fiction “run before they kill us” films.
Its production values weren’t all that great, people flying around in the dome and going poof comes to mind, but I have it on DVD nonetheless.
“Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea.” Cheesy and one of my first experiences seeing sci-fi hotties. I remember it well.
I watched it the first time when I was about 11 and again many years later. I do think that a remake would probably be pretty good as the original hasn’t held up well.
43 and ten year old me found it fascinating seeing it as a late night movie. A couple years back, a buddy of mine and me watched it again. All night we were drinking at our favorite bar yelling “Fish! Plankton! Protein from the sea!” to anyone who would listen.
I think it would be a perfect movie to remake (I think they’ve been trying for awhile). Particularly in our current post Hunger Games environment of bad YA dystopian fiction. Take the entire under 30 cast of Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Giver, The 5th Wave and send them all to “Carousel”. A fitting end to the genre.
Hell yes. And we reference it often enough. Loved that movie- a classic from my childhood.
I am 30 and I only know of the movie because of a joke in Family Guy about it.
Didn’t know what the joke meant when I heard it (I was probably in my early-to-mid 20s at this point) so I looked it up.
Never saw the film though.
27
Heard of it and my understanding is that it’s a thriller about a dystopian society that euthanizes people when they get too old. Couldn’t tell you any more than that.
Yes, but they euthanize them in sparkly clothes!