Sailing the Cosmic Ether: A Critical Appreciation of Treasure Island in Outer Space (1987)
To transpose Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island into the celestial void is a conceit that sounds, on paper, like the fever dream of a commercial executive chasing the late-century afterglow of Star Wars. Yet Antonio Margheriti’s seven-part European miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space (L’isola del tesoro) is neither a glib space opera nor an ironic deconstruction. Instead, it is an astonishingly earnest, melancholic, and deeply literary meditation on youth, moral ambivalence, and frontier longing.
By taking the maritime iconography of the 18th century and translating it into the cosmic language of late-Cold-War science fiction, Margheriti (directing under his familiar international moniker, Anthony M. Dawson) created a work of rare, quiet wonder—an interstellar sea-shanty whose analog grandeur and philosophical resonance remain largely unmatched in European television history.
The Ocean and the Void: The Genius of Transposition
Stevenson’s 1883 novel is fundamentally about the terror and liberation of uncharted waters. The sea represents an unlegislated expanse where the polite pieties of English society peel away to reveal the raw machinery of human appetite.
What Margheriti and screenwriter Renato Castellani understood with singular clarity is that outer space is the only true 20th-century equivalent of Stevenson’s Atlantic. The void here is not sterile or hyper-technological; it is vast, indifferent, and nautical. The starship Hispaniola does not feel like an antiseptic NASA module; it behaves like a great celestial galleon groaning under the pressure of magnetic storms, navigating planetary shoals and gravitational eddies.
By preserving the archaic, courtly cadence of the original dialogue while surrounding the characters with retro-futuristic CRT monitors, chrome bulkheads, and laser blasters, the miniseries constructs a dreamlike anachronism. It inhabits the same mythic realm as the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs or the cosmic pulp of the 1930s, yet it treats its premise with absolute dramatic sobriety. When Billy Bones (played with roaring, weather-beaten intensity by Ernest Borgnine) clutches his cybernetic datapad and raves about the black spot, the technological shift does not fracture the story’s mythic architecture—it re-enchants it.
Anthony Quinn’s Twilight Majesty and the Faustian Father
The entire enterprise balances upon the peg-legged stance of Long John Silver, and casting Anthony Quinn in the twilight of his storied career was a stroke of casting genius.
Quinn does not play Silver as a pantomime pirate. Fitted with an articulated bionic limb and draped in pragmatic, functional spacer gear, his Silver is a creature of immense physical gravity and calculating intelligence. He is weary, cynical, yet possessed of an intoxicating, paternal warmth. His relationship with young Jimmy Hawkins (the tragically short-lived Itaco Nardulli, whose performance radiates an unvarnished, wide-eyed earnestness) is the beating heart of the production.
Where other adaptations treat Silver’s affection for Jim as a tactical ploy, Quinn infuses it with existential heartbreak. Silver sees in Jimmy the untainted purity he traded away long ago across countless light-years of petty crime and betrayal. When Silver mentors the boy, teaching him how to read navigation charts and read human duplicity, we witness the classic Stevenson paradox: the villain is infinitely more alive, more attentive, and more educational to the developing boy than the rigid, aristocratic moralists—Philippe Leroy’s aloof Count Ravano (Trelawney) or David Warbeck’s clinical Dr. Livesey. Quinn’s Silver is a masterclass in the seductiveness of moral compromise.
Analog Tactility in a Digital Horizon
Viewed today, Treasure Island in Outer Space serves as an altar to the lost art of European practical craftsmanship. Margheriti, a veteran maestro of Italian genre cinema, was renowned for his miniature work, and here his artisanal approach yields images of breathtaking, tangible beauty.
The spaceships, the orbiting spaceports, and the titular planetoid—a desolate, volcanic, mist-shrouded rock floating in the quiet dark—possess mass and texture. In an era where modern space adventure is overwhelmed by clean, weightless digital composites, Margheriti’s handcrafted models have dirt, smoke, scale, and soul. The planetary surfaces feel damp and inhospitable; the interior corridors of the Hispaniola hum with low-frequency mechanical dread. There is a theatricality to the staging that recalls mid-century European stage drama, allowing scenes to breathe and tensions to simmer over long, unbroken takes.
The Sound of Solitude: Ennio Morricone’s Score
It is impossible to discuss the atmospheric depth of this miniseries without acknowledging the masterstroke of its music. Scored by Ennio Morricone, the soundtrack completely subverts what audiences expected from science fiction in 1987.
Morricone discards the bombastic, brass-heavy militarism popularized by American blockbusters. Instead, he constructs an ethereal, synth-draped tapestry woven with mournful woodwinds, baroque textures, and sweeping, spectral strings. His main theme does not sound like a march into battle; it sounds like an elegiac lament for men lost between the stars. It lends the series an overwhelming sense of cosmic solitude. The music continuously reminds us that no matter how loud the pirates’ mutiny or how bright the laser fire, the universe outside the hull remains terrifyingly silent, ancient, and cold.
The Bitter Cost of Coming of Age
At its core, Treasure Island is a tragedy disguised as an adventure: the tragedy of growing up. Jimmy Hawkins leaves his mother’s terrestrial inn a sheltered boy and returns a man burdened by the knowledge of what human beings will do for wealth.
Margheriti’s spacebound island does not yield chests of overflowing Spanish doubloons, but crystalline databanks and radioactive elements—wealth abstracted into pure, cold power. The final confrontation is not a triumphal conquest, but a hollow, exhausted survival. When Silver inevitably makes his escape into the starry abyss, slipped away on a lone transport pod, the triumph belongs entirely to the rogue, while the respectable men are left counting their spoils in silence. Jimmy’s gaze toward the stars in the closing moments is laced with a devastating mixture of relief, grief, and eternal longing.
Verdict
Treasure Island in Outer Space is an idiosyncratic masterpiece of late-20th-century European television. It comes from a vanished moment when public broadcasters (RAI, Bavaria Film, and TF1) were willing to invest grand budgets into patient, adult, multi-part genre literature.
Unrushed, atmospheric, and profoundly human, it honors Stevenson not by mimicking him line for line, but by translating his foundational insight into the stars: that the darkest wilderness is never the ocean, nor the void between worlds, but the restless, untamable heart of man.
