Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968)

Richard Basehart and David Hedison on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (Photo: 20th Century Fox)

In 1961, producer/director Irwin Allen made a science fiction/adventure film for 20th Century Fox called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, inspired in part from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the Disney adaptation of that book from the mid-'50s. As with his earlier films, such as The Big Circus and Five Weeks in a Balloon, he used his contacts and friendships, dating to his career as a publicist, to recruit a cast of overage but still recognizable Hollywood notables -- Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, Henry Daniell -- and younger, attractive players (Barbara Eden, Frankie Avalon), although to play the captain of the submarine, he didn't get the actor he wanted; he'd offered the part to David Hedison, who had worked in Allen's earlier production of The Lost World and was under contract to Fox, but was turned down -- instead, he'd used Robert Sterling, a competent actor but one not quite right for the part of the male sparkplug in the cast of veteran performers.

The film was a hit, though hardly a critical success -- most reviewers took it as the modern equivalent of Saturday afternoon adventure entertainment for kids, though the script, by veteran playwright Charles Bennett (who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock during his British period), had a topical edge. The plot dealt with a doomsday scenario that was as new as the headlines of the day, in which the Van Allen Radiation Belt (then a new discovery) is ignited by a meteor shower, and only the atomic submarine Seaview, designed and built by a brilliant but eccentric admiral, Harriman Nelson, can save the world. In 1961, atomic submarines were still new enough to be a serious source of wonder for the public, and the character of Admiral Harriman Nelson was loosely based on real-life admiral Hyman Rickover, an engineer and scientist who'd risen to flag rank despite being a navy maverick, who had developed a reputation for fierce independence in the course of founding the nuclear submarine fleet, and who had become a public figure and a celebrity in the media. Though these allusions to current events were vague and unstated, it was impossible for an educated adult, or a teenaged science enthusiast, not to pick up on them.

The movie was enough of a hit that the possibility of a television series seemed tempting to the studio and Allen, and by 1963 it was falling into place. Allen and Fox still had the models of the Seaview and the standing sets for the ship's interior to work with; and L.B. Abbott and Howard Lydecker, who had devised and shot the superb special effects for the movie, would be available to do the series as well. The feature film thus became the "pilot" for the series, and as a result the proposed Voyage series was less of a heavy-lifting production job than might normally have been the case. For casting the series, he kept one member of the movie's cast -- a young actor named Del Monroe, as a crewman, Koski in the movie and Kowalski on the series -- but for his ship's officers he went for a much younger, more dynamic cast than the movie. Hedison signed on to the television Voyage for the role of Commander Lee Crane, the captain of the submarine Seaview; and for the role of Admiral Harriman Nelson, Allen lucked out in getting Richard Basehart, an exceptionally talented American actor who up to that time had mostly played villains, heavies, and psychopaths in Hollywood movies and spent a decade working in Europe in a much wider array of roles, including starring parts of major films by Fellini (La Strada) and John Huston (Moby Dick). The rest of the cast of regulars was filled out by Bob Dowdell as the ship's executive officer Lt. Commander Chip Morton; Paul Trinka as crewman Patterson; and ex-wrestler-turned-actor Henry Kulky as the chief-of-the-boat, CPO Curly Jones. One other actor who turned up in a recurring role in the early episodes was Paul Carr as Clark, one of the Seaview's junior officers. Allen jetisoned the romantic main-title song from the feature film (sung by Frankie Avalon, who was also in the movie) and commissioned a new score from composer Paul Sawtell. Sawtell had worked with Allen for more than a decade, going back to his production of the documentary The Sea Around Us (1952). Sawtell also delivered a main-title theme that would last the run of the series, that also helped set the pattern for John Williams' work for Allen on his subsequent series Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants, built on the musical suggestion of the submarine's sonar pulse leading into a sweeping nautical theme that suggested wonder and adventure ahead.

Although the show went out in black-and-white for the first season, Allen shot the pilot, "Eleven Days to Zero," in color in order to better match footage of the submarine from the feature film. In the opening episode, the Seaview's first commander, Captain John Phillips (William Hudson), is killed in an assassination attempt on Admiral Nelson, and Lee Crane comes aboard as captain. The series' first season (1964-1965) coincided in production and scripting with the first big boom in espionage movies, and television shows (including The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), and the scripts that season had the ship and its crew -- especially Crane and Nelson -- coming up against hostile foreign powers and embarking on spy missions, in addition to a certain number of science fiction-oriented scripts, and also one or two that were based on contemporary news events and inspired by feature films of the period. One episode, "Doomsday," was essentially an underwater retelling of "Failsafe," while another, "Submarine Sunk Here," was clearly inspired by the coverage attending the loss of the deep-diving submarine Thresher a year earlier. The espionage and land-based programs were probably the weakest of the first season, but they did serve a purpose -- breaking up the action which otherwise would have been confined almost entirely to the interior of the ship and the ocean floor. The science fiction shows in that season often had an interesting edge -- in "The Indestructible Man," a robot sent into deep space returns to Earth and is picked up by the Seaview, which ends up in danger when its now-defective control system causes the mechanical man to run wild; in "The Invaders," the Seaview finds the remains of multi-million-year-old civilization on the ocean floor and revive one member (played by Robert Duvall) found sealed in one of many strange capsules, who wants to restore his compatriots, only to learn that the body chemistry of this prehistoric humanoid race is incompatible with and deadly to that of humans. In what was probably the best of the science fiction stories, "Mutiny," Nelson discovers an immense -- and incredibly dangerous -- jelly fish, a product of a radiation source on the ocean floor, but is lost at sea and nearly killed in the process of escaping; his partial recovery and an addiction to his prescribed medication lead him to a paranoid breakdown and a confrontation with Crane that nearly destroys the ship.

Halfway through the shooting of the first season, Henry Kulky died and the part of the CPO was written out for the remainder of the season. Already, the show was changing, however -- plans were afoot to shoot in color, starting with the second season, and a new main title theme and score -- by Jerry Goldsmith -- would be tried out and rejected in the coming season. Much more important was the early series suggestion of a recurring nemesis for the Seaview, in the guise of Dr. Gamma (Theo Marcuse), was dropped, and after the first season there would be no more than a tiny handful of recurring off-ship characters with whom the Seaview's crew were ever seen having contact. Allen's wide web of friendships in Hollywood and his keen eye for casting benefitted the series throughout its run. Eddie Albert was a major film star in 1964, and he was the guest star in the first episode. Other guest stars on subsequent shows would include Edgar Bergen (in a straight acting role), Nick Adams, and George Sanders; by the same token, Allen had an exceptional eye for talent, and the up-and-coming actors on that first season featured in important guest roles included Carroll O'Connor, Robert Duvall, and George Lindsey. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide