Where Have All the People Gone?

I didn’t find any evidence that TV movie Where Have All the People Gone? was actually a failed pilot for a series, but it definitely exhibits some of the danger signs:

1. Dubious premise. In WHAPG? a really big solar flare mutates a virus that inflicts a rapidly disintegrating disease on all except those few who have a genetic resistance to it. Thus the majority of the human race has been reduced to little piles of white powder inside their clothes. It’s a really rapid disintegration. Oh yeah, and all the animals have gone crazy. Peter Graves and his son and daughter were on a remote camping trip in the mountains—which in retrospect was coincidental to their survival—and try to reunite with Graves’s wife. It’s sort of like Panic in Year Zero!, only without the jazzy score or Frankie Avalon. Or any panic. This is not a very exciting apocalypse.
2. Overly neat casting. Along the way Graves and family add a bereaved mother and an orphaned child who's handy with a gun to their entourage, becoming the model post-catastrophic blended family. (Do I need to tell you that original mom ends up blowin' in the wind?) 1974 would not have been too early for a black man to get added to the mix, Athens notes, but no dice. In the fevered imagination of Peter Graves, the end times are lily white!
3. Hopeful, open-ended narration. Daughter Kathleen Quinlan ends the movie with the sentiment I don’t know what the future holds, but whatever it is, we’ll face it together.
4. Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. Wow, what a career this guy had! Genesis II; The Strange and Deadly Occurrence (note the definite article—that was one strange and deadly occurrence!); Ebony, Ivory, and Jade; Conspiracy of Terror; The House That Would Not Die; The Death of Me Yet; and episodes of Mannix, Kung Fu, Police Story, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O… plus, he helmed the cult classic The Night Stalker with Darren McGavin as quixotic supernatural-investigating reporter Carl Kolchak—the pilot for one of my all-time favorite TV series (which still shows up on Sci-Fi once in a while).
5. Peter Graves. Around this same time Graves played a secret agent in Dead Man on the Run, a retired cryptozoological big-game hunter in Scream of the Wolf, and Lew Archer in The Underground Man. It was the post–Mission: Impossible era, and Pete needed another regular paycheck.
Where Have All the People Gone? wasn’t the first time, of course, that Peter Graves faced the end of the world from extraterrestrial sources. There was The Beginning of the End (which I always thought was called The Beginning or the End?, but maybe that’s a different movie), It Conquered the World, and Killers from Space, and that was all in a three-year period! God knows how many alien invasions he foiled in his downtime.

The TV movie… Writing this post has made me nostalgic! Once a reliable, ninety-minute delivery system for thrills and chills, as an art form it’s gone the way of scrimshaw, ships in bottles, and regurgitation on demand. But Athens and I won’t forget! Here’s to you, Killdozer! Here’s to you, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Horror at 37,000 Feet! Here’s to you, Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Summer of Fear, and Satan’s School for Girls!