Dive! Dive! Dive!

Rec’d Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the other day on DVD, the first few episodes of the TV series, not the movie. Actually, I hadn’t meant to let that one creep up to the top of the queue quite so soon, since I don’t have a lot of time for it. Just about anything by Irwin Allen is a good way to waste time.

Still, I’ve managed to see about half of the first episode, which involves the Seaview thwarting both a bad-ass tsunami and the murderous operatives of an unspecified Them organization. In the first 30 minutes or so, there’s machine-gun play, a man falling to his death from a helicopter, an international doom scenario to put Al Gore to shame, depth-charge explosions, divers fighting a giant squid, and a submarine chase scene ending with the bad-guy submarine exploding (?) when it dove too deeply and was crushed by extreme water pressure. Allen knew how to keep the story moving along, at least.

I don’t remember the show that well as a kid, since it ended when I was 7. But I do have fond memories of a toy Seaview we had around the house. That was one cool submarine: bright yellow with special curling fins up front that only the Seaview seemed to have. It might have had rubber-band propulsion for bathtub use, but I don’t ever remember using it that way. Mostly its play purpose was to torpedo ships on imaginary seas, Lusitania-style.