Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
MEMORIES:
Beatlefreak remembers...I just bought the first season of this show on DVD. I love seeing this show again, even though the ... More »
Posted on 12/09/07
PHOTOS:
Cast:
Captain Lee B. Crane...David Hedison
Lt. Commander Chip Morton...Robert Dowdell
Chief Curley Jones (1964-65)...Henry Kulky
Chief Francis Ethelbert Sharkey (1965-68)...Terry Becker
Stuart Riley (1965-66)...Allan Hunt
Kowalski...Del Monroe
Patterson...Paul Trinka
Doctor...Richard Bull
Sparks...Arch Whiting
Studio:
Network:
Release History:
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.
