And yet it's such a great-looking show it's hard not to watch it, to keep giving it a chance to redeem itself. One holds out hope that maybe, just maybe there'll be some fluke and an intelligently-written, imaginatively-directed episode will slip through the cracks, an anomaly rising above the usual sub-comic book level. But no, just when you think Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea can't get any worse, here comes next week's episode. Season Four highlights? A rampaging white gorilla, a rascally leprechaun, fish-men and, this being an Irwin Allen show, the usual assortment of silver-skinned humanoid aliens in aluminum-colored jumpsuits.

Fox's DVD of the series looks phenomenally good. Episodes have splendid, bright color and are impressively sharp and pristine, all of which is highly ironic considering the anger being expressed over the extremely poor and edited DVDs of another Fox-owned title, also newly-released, Rhoda. Allen's Voyage, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants all look spectacular, but MTM shows owned by Fox generally look pretty bad. And where Fox now has nearly Allen's entire crummy oeuvre out on DVD, they've been quick to abandon the far-superior MTM shows they also own (Mary Tyler Moore, St. Elsewhere, etc.).

Recapping: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was based on Irwin Allen's outrageous and goofy but undeniably fun 1961 feature film, chronicling the adventures of the crew of the Seaview, a futuristic atomic submarine. The movie starred Walter Pidgeon as Admiral Harriman Nelson and Robert Sterling as Captain Lee Crane, while the 1964-68 TV series top-lined Richard Basehart as Nelson and David Hedison as Crane, with only Del Monroe, in the relatively minor role of Kowalski, returning from the film.

The show's first season, filmed in black and white, was actually pretty restrained compared to the movie and overall quite enjoyable. The sci-fi/fantasy aspects were played down and there was a greater concentration on straightforward undersea adventure with an emphasis on international espionage. (The spy movie genre was just beginning to skyrocket in late-1964/early-'65.) What worked during Voyage's first tour of duty seemed to have more to do with the modest but not-terrible teleplays of William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, rather than creator-producer Irwin Allen's contributions. In 1966 Woodfield and Balter left Voyage to write for Mission: Impossible. Their Impossible scripts are clever and exciting while almost all of the post-Woodfield/Balter departure Voyage shows are terrible.

Voyage's second season was in color and pretty quickly the series traded what credibility it had for increasingly wild fantasy situations and extravagant monsters. Some years back an assistant director friend of mine gave me his scripts for a couple of Irwin Allen shows he'd worked on, from the last seasons of Voyage and Lost in Space. I was quite surprised to see multi-colored pages, indicating extensive rewrites. Surprised because, judging by the shows, you'd think they must have filmed everything as written, First Draft, straight out of the typewriter.

And there lies the biggest problem with all of Allen's shows: the writing. Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry and Twilight Zone's Rod Serling had their limitations, but as TV scribes themselves they knew the value of a good story and three-dimensional characters - and the importance of re-writing and polishing and fine-tuning a script. Voyage plays like the show had no story editor at all, and that producer Allen devoted all his attention to selling his programs via extravagant, showy production values. (Though Allen had a strong tendency to shoot his wad on the first couple of episodes each season.) It's difficult to imagine Allen ever offering anything like intelligent advice to his writers.

At least, that's the sense one gets watching Season Four episodes. Shows exhibit a complete disregard and/or appalling ignorance of the basic laws of science. In early season four shows characters stroll around the surface of Venus and inside an erupting volcano. (Actually - and oddly - that entire episode is built around the conflict between Nelson, who wants to prevent the volcano from erupting and guest star Victor Jory, as an ageless alchemist, who wants it to erupt. And yet throughout the episode the volcano is erupting like mad, black ash shooting up into the atmosphere and lava - which in this episode looks like BBQ sauce - running all over the place. Didn't they notice?) Characters behave inconsistently; without any motivation other than the writer's convenience, they'll suddenly do irrational things and turn on a dime. There's no storytelling logic; stories do not progress sensibly or build any momentum.

Indeed, one of the biggest failings of these latter-day Voyage shows is the way they cram everything interesting into the first few minutes while shamelessly padding the last thirty. Many Voyages start out well; the basic concept may be ridiculous, but at least the idea shows some potential on a movie serial action level. But then after the usual slam-bang pre-credits opening and a few colorful introductory scenes where the threat/menace/conflict is introduced, the narrative invariably stops dead in its tracks, always 15-20 minutes in. For the next 30 minutes, characters run around the Seaview/the inside of a volcano/the planet Venus, etc. aimlessly, with a lot of escape-recapturing and, usually, monster transformation-mutation-alien possession scenes designed to do nothing other than burn film, to bide time until the requisite hour slot is filled.

These last thirty or so minutes of every Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, from about the middle of the second season on, are excruciatingly dull. In nine of the last 10 or so episodes this reviewer watched, I fell sound asleep - no matter if I was watching the show at 11:30 at night or three o'clock in the afternoon.

Significantly, after Woodfield and Balter left for greener pastures and, eventually, long careers in television on a variety of projects, Allen created his own stock company of hack writers (William Welch, Peter Packer, Barney Slater) and traffic cop directors (Sobey Martin, Jerry Hopper, Nathan Juran), who worked almost exclusively with Allen from the mid-'60s on. Though some episodes admittedly are still a lot of fun, the sum of their efforts rank among the most intellectually vacuous programing ever done for network television, making the contemporaneous Gerry and Sylvia Anderson Supermarionation shows (Thunderbirds, Stingray, etc.) seem like Masterpiece Theater.

Similarly, Allen tended to hire the same guest stars for all his shows: This batch of episodes includes Victor Jory, Warren Stevens, Woodrow Parfrey, Henry Jones, and Don Matheson - all of whom appeared on other Allen shows. Vincent Price, who guest stars in the second episode, "The Deadly Dolls," is about as big of a name as this season gets, a step down from the first year, when respected actors like Eddie Albert, Everett Sloane, Viveca Lindfors, and Carroll O'Connor could still be coaxed on board.

Video & Audio

At least Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea looks great, almost flawless in fact. Episodes appear uncut and are not time-compressed, with 13 episodes spread over three double-sided discs, two per side with the exception of Disc One, which has four shows on the first disc. Audio is 1.0 Dolby Digital mono with an option to direct the mono signal to 2.0 as well. A monophonic French track is also included, along with optional English subtitles (but no Spanish). The discs are closed-captioned and region-encoded. Several episodes into the fourth season a new main title was created; some include an "In Color" placard at the beginning.

Extra Features

Supplements include a recut version of the pilot, "Eleven Days to Zero," in color. This extra was included once before, so I'm not sure what it's doing here as well, especially since the comparatively adult and restrained pilot so contrasts the unbridled goofiness of the later episodes. Also included is about four more minutes worth of the ongoing David Hedison interview and a limited still gallery.

Parting Thoughts

Children and nostalgic adults might still enjoy Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on a camp and/or sub-comic book level, but it's a far cry from the decent, sometimes exciting series it had been just a few years back. If you've come this far you'll probably want the rest of the series for completeness sake, and the gorgeous transfers help a lot, but overall it's quite bad. Rent It.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's latest book, The Toho Studios Story, is on sale now.