Salvage (1979)

In this feature-length TV series pilot, Andy Griffith stars as maverick junk dealer Harry Broderick (evidently a pun on Harry Brock, the junk-king villain of Garson Kanin's play Born Yesterday. Figuring that NASA has left millions of dollars' worth of discarded equipment on the moon, Harry hits upon a scheme to retrieve the paraphernalia and turn over a huge profit. Together with his youthful assistants Skip (Joel Higgins) and Melanie (Trish Stewart), Harry assembles his own ramshackle space ship and blasts off to the moon. Though the takeoff, landing, and Lunar scavenger hunt prove to be successful, getting back to Earth may not exactly be a bowl of cherries--or even scrap iron. Salvage made its ABC network bow on January 20, 1979, one week before the official premiere of the weekly series (renamed Salvage 1).