Toomorrow (1970): The Lost Olivia Newton-John Sci-Fi Musical That Was Meant to Launch a Trilogy

When I first started to watch this clip from Toomorrow, I initially thought that it was a very cleverly rendered pastiche of late 1960s pop music.  The colours were spot on, the costumes were groovy and the music very much of its time.  Then I had a wait a second moment because the girl singer in the clip looked remarkably like a young, pre-Grease Olivia Netwon-John (or Neutron-Bomb as we would sometimes call her).   Sure enough, a little research (OK, reading the video's information) told me that it was indeed a 21 year old ONJ, from a 1970 science-fiction musical (the first?). It was about a band kidnapped by aliens (a couple pictured below) to save their species… with music. I’m not alone in thinking this was a modern-day, very clever take on the late Sixties.  Many people have commented on this on YouTube, with one saying: was going to comment that this is the most period-accurate sendup I've ever seen... then realized why it's so "accurate".

If anything, that made me scratch my head even more, because being a bit of a science-fiction buff, I might not have been old enough to watch this movie on its first release, but I would almost certainly have caught it later on TV (and it looks harmless enough to be repeated ad infinitum as part of summertime scheduling) or on video release. That was, after all, how I had discovered a number of films, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Planet of the Apes and Barbarella – I could go on.  There was a treasure trove of films from the late sixties for me to get my teenage paws on.  But not Toomorrow.  I had not even the vaguest recollection of this film – and I would almost certainly have given it a watch had I known of its existence, particularly because of Newton-John’s subsequent global stardom.