Songwriter, publisher, and music mogul Don Kirshner hit the jackpot twice with invented rock bands tied in to hit television shows, the Monkees and the Archies, but when he tried to do the same on the big screen, he reached too far, and the group Toomorrow proved to be one of the most notorious flops of his career. In 1969, Kirshner held auditions to find actors and musicians to form a group called Toomorrow, who in addition to making records would star in a series of movies that fused music and fast-paced adventure; producer Harry Saltzman, who with Albert Cubby Broccoli brought Ian Fleming's James Bond novels to the screen, was Kirshner's partner in Toomorrow's screen career. After a handful of casting calls, Kirshner found the four figures for his band: Karl Chambers, a drummer from Philadelphia, Vic Cooper, a multi-instrumentalist from London, Ben Thomas, a Georgia-born singer and guitarist, and Olivia Newton-John, a British-born and Australian-raised singer and actress.

In the film, Toomorrow were a pop group based in London whose music attracted the attention of a displaced alien scientist who believed the group's positive musical vibrations could save his home planet. Val Guest, a British filmmaker whose credits included the witty Cliff Richard vehicle Expresso Bongo and the sci-fi cult items The Day the Earth Caught Fire and The Quatermass Xperiment, was hired to write and direct the movie, while the songwriting team of Mark Barkan and Ritchie Adams created material for the group to perform onscreen. Despite the talent involved, the project was a misfire, with the songs and production sounding saccharine and gimmicky, and the movie more silly than anything else. The film's quality eventually became a moot point, as Saltzman had used his share in the James Bond pictures as collateral to fund the picture, over the objections of his partner Broccoli. Broccoli sued Saltzman, and the legal action cut off payments to Guest and Kirshner. Guest in turn sued for his salary, and the suit kept the film in legal limbo for years, though Toomorrow's weeklong run at a single London theater in 1970 suggested the public wasn't especially interested in the project.

The Toomorrow soundtrack album was released by RCA Victor the same year, but with the movie MIA, the LP sold poorly, and though a subsequent Toomorrow single was released months later by British Decca, "I Could Never Live Without Your Love" b/w "Roll Like the River," by the end of the year all four members were released from their contracts. In 1971, Olivia Newton-John scored her first hit single, "If Not for You," and as she became a major pop star, the Toomorrow album and movie became a phantom in her catalog, with fans curious about the rare album and unreleased film. In 2000, in cooperation with the Val Guest estate, the film received its American premiere with a special screening in Los Angeles (with Newton-John in attendance), and it was released on DVD in the U.K. Karl Chambers went on to work as a drummer, producer, and arranger, working with Philadelphia International Records in its glory days; he succumbed to cancer in 2002. Vic Cooper worked with Tom Jones' road band and enjoyed a long career as a journeyman pianist. And Ben Thomas worked in television before releasing his first solo album, Boy on a Pony, through Newton-John's ONJ Records label in 2004; he died four years later. In 2014, Toomorrow's album was finally released on CD by the noted reissue label Real Gone Records. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi