Pondering her first venture into science fiction, the 1986-7 syndicated attempt at interactive TV, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Jessica Steen remembers being upset by the show's built in merchandising aspects. " It seemed that there was so much negativity and anger, and the future was post-apocalyptic. My involvement was political and an agent/casting director thing. I wasn't happy about it, but learned a lot, made some good friends, and had a good time with that group.
" I'm almost tempted to go back and look at all the tapes of the episodes. We went through all these stories, and I often was sitting in the cockpit as Pilot. There were all these buttons and levers. I was thinking,' What does this stuff do?' And they would put all these words together that looked like they had gone through a bit,fat dictionary of long words. I wasn't fully savvy to the work or the concept. I would go,'Beep,beep. Oh Beep,' and then take out my proton spanner, which was a Black & Decker screwdriver. I just shook it over here and it would do all sorts of stuff. I was thinking, 'Oh,come on.' You have to suspend your disbelief when you do science fiction. you really have to believe what you're doing."
The series had it's many fans. "In the letters we got, people remarked that we had put a lot of thoguht into how this all came about, what our roles were and how the Soldiers of the Future operated. And I've had people come up to me out of the blue and say, 'Wow, we were the biggest fans.' I was surprised because to me, it was all rubber rocks and stuff
"The mail taught me that people see things that I might now. There would be whole frat houses that wrote in. I thought ' Get a life,guys. Aren't you supposed to be playing football or something?' I didn't realize what they were seeing because I never really watched the shows with any focus. It was only from my bad-sport position that I saw it. I'm not belittling the people who watched because they saw things in it that I didn't see. It's my job to find those things because you have to value everything in which you involve yourself."
Looking for the good in Captain Power , the Toronto native remembers the actors with whom she worked. " Tim Dunigan, who was Captain Power, was such a great guy" she remarks. " We had so much fun because there we would be, sitting in these ridiculous suits. We were all in spandex and high leather boots and gloves, and we were very sort of Power Rangerish. We would spend hours and hours on set just boiling hot or freezing cold in our suits, and we had a howl laughing at all the situations we found ourselves in. We had a great time. When we would power on, I would go from my fatigues, which were pretty cool, and suddenly I would have these huge conical gold boobs that came out from nowhere. I was asking, 'What happens when I power on? I seem to have become this robust gal.'
" We did a fair amount of stuntwork with a lot of squibs and explosions. The computer-generated images were very difficult. We had to do a lot of blue screen stuff. Peter McNeill was Hawk and he would spend days strapped up and flying around in his suit. He was dangling from the ceiling for hours in front of this blue screen. It was painful to watch. And Sven Ole-Thorsen[as Tank] was dressed in this huge costume just like a tank. He was hilarious, but he could barely move. And we always had to react to these nasty metallic birds of Lord Dread's. They would fly around, wrecking havoc on us while we stood there, fearful of a little tape 'x' on a grip's stand. We would cringe and have to freeze. It was hilarious."
At the series' end, Jennifer 'Pilot' Chase was killed off. While fans were upset, Steen was steeled for the event during her whole Captain Power tenure. "I knew from the beginning that I was going to die, and I was ready," she says. "When I signed on, I said that if I was going to do this series, I wanted to be killed off at the first season's end, and they agreed. I didn't want a commitment for five years, so it was according to plan. It's just that the toys didn't sell at Christmas and that was the show's end, too. I was prepared for the death and I liked the way it happened. It was very touching and heroic how Pilot runs back in and saves the whole base camp. People were upset by it because I was the only regular actor on the show who was female."
After leaving Captain Power, Steen had a co-starring role as Linda in Homefront . Most people know her from that critically acclaimed drama series, but she occasionally still runs into a Captain Power fan. " I gave all my toys away just this past year. I had a whole pile of stuff and I was moving. I saved a couple of my action figures. I was always a hoot to me because, of course, they went with the silver and big gold boobs version of Pilot. The show comes up at the weirdest times. You just never knew what people thought since Captain Power was syndicated and it wasn't a huge hit. "