Made at the same time as Allen's disappointing The Time Tunnel, an astoundingly uninventive show that could have/should have been a whole lot better; and the second (and most embarrassingly bad) year of Lost in Space, already in the toilet after a promising first few shows, Voyage desperately needed a producer with more talent and better taste than Irwin Allen. To his credit, he had in the 1960s a P.T. Barnum-like knack for creating exciting, visually arresting pilots. Bad as all his shows eventually became, their pilot episodes overflowed with production razzle-dazzle. Unfortunately, in the end each promised far more than they delivered. Allen's three other sixties shows started going downhill almost at once; Voyage's decline was more gradual, but by the beginning of Season Three, the sharp drop in quality was undeniable.

In the near future, Admiral Harriman Nelson's (Richard Basehart) fantastic submarine, the Seaview, explores strange, usually undersea phenomenon and helps maintain the peace in during the Cold War. Captained by Nelson's best friend and surrogate son, Lee Crane (David Hedison), they're joined by, among others, Lt. Commander Chip Morton (Robert Dowdell), seamen Kowalski (Del Monroe), Chief Sharkey (Terry Becker) and, occasionally, Doc (Richard Bull), chief medical officer.

Where the second season opener, "Jonah and the Whale," with Nelson and guest star Gia Scala's diving bell swallowed whole by a colossal Sperm Whale, had been a visually spectacular if somewhat silly show, Voyage's third season kicks off with a tale of an evil, beanbag-size talking brain from outer space, "Monster from the Inferno." Possessing the mind of visiting scientist Dr. Lindsay - guest star Arthur Hill, fresh from his Broadway triumph as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf; I'm betting he didn't encourage Edward Albee and Uta Hagen to tune in - the Big Brain plots to take over the world in a story as simple-minded as the cult camp classic The Brain from Planet Arous (1958).

"Night of Terror" (which, incidentally, mentions the development of a new spaceship, Jupiter, a reference to Lost in Space), another early third season show, exemplifies Voyage's willingness to toss all logic and believability out the window. In this episode, a massive earthquake/tidal wave beaches the Seaview's diving bell with Nelson, Chief Sharkey, and visiting scientist Dr. Sprauge (guest star Henry Jones) aboard, on an island where a strange mist causes all sorts of strange hallucinations. Nelson imagines he sees Captain Crane, while Sharkey is attacked by a lava-red humanoid monster. Worse, Sprague has visions of a rascally pirate and his treasure of gold doubloons and instantly and inexplicibly becomes obsessed with the imaginary gold, eventually falling into the phoniest-looking patch of quicksand this viewer's ever seen. (It looks like an 18-inch-deep layer of sawdust.) Unaccountably, the island is also inhabited by a "dinosaur" (a lizard with fins and a rubbery collar glued to its body) that for no good reason is real. Meanwhile, the hallucinations continue as Crane and Kowalski, aboard the Flying Sub, both experience the exact same hallucinations but at different times, as the craft is about to crash headlong into a range of snowcapped mountains. How did the mist get into the ship? Through the (fresh air) ventilation system, Crane says. It must work real well when the ship is underwater.

Beyond the charm and charisma of the actors playing them, the characters remain undeveloped and largely interchangeable, hence the ease in which one is possessed or behaves irrationally one week, while another regular (or guest star) flips out the next. Continuing characters are almost never consistent in their behavior; the actions are steered by the machinations of each week's script alone.

In far too many shows, a menace will be introduced that has somehow snuck aboard the Seaview or unwisely has been brought aboard, only to take possession of one or more of the crew. (Poor Captain Crane and Admiral Nelson seem to be under some kind of mind control in every other episode.) Like virtually all shows from the middle of the first season forward, whatever interest is generated in the first act evaporates with scripts that simply burn up running time in the second half with the menace taking over part of the ship, or with the crew trying to track it down and isolate it.

Guest stars in this set include Charles Aidman, Paul Fix, Francis X. Bushman (his final role, aired after his death), Don Gordon, Hugh Marlowe, Warren Stevens, William Smithers, and Gerald Mohr. Another sign of the show's decline is Allen's greater reliance on journeymen-to-hack scribes and directors long associated with Allen, some of whom (notably excepting Nathan Juran) did little work outside Allen's TV shows. The plurality of shows were penned by associate producer William Welch, who seems to have done almost nothing outside his association with Allen. Conversely, the show's popularity continued attracting not-bad writing and directing talent, mostly veterans of the dying TV Western genre, but Allen just couldn't tell a good script from a bad one, and had no talent at all to nurture promising material into something good.

Video & Audio

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - Season Three, Volume One presents the first-half of the third season, thirteen 50-minute episodes in all, on three double-sided discs. The organization is a bit odd, with six shows on disc one, four on disc two, and just three on disc three. In any case, the stellar, often eye-popping transfers are up to the level of Fox's Time Tunnel and other Voyage releases (and light years ahead of their appallingly bad Lost in Space DVDs, among the worst ever from a major label). The shows are not edited or time-compressed and this reviewer experienced no problems playing the discs. Episodes are offered in both their original 1.0 mono and a Dolby Digital 2.0 "stereo" remix. A French mono track has been added to this season, along with the previously available Spanish mono track, along with optional English and Spanish subtitles.

Extra Features

There's still more of the David Hedison Interview, running five short minutes, of which half consists of a syndicated 1966 radio interview. A modest Still Gallery of episode and general publicity photos is okay, but the real fun here is the comic contents, story-wise of an entire Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea comic book, which wisely magnifies one or two panels at a time. It's actually more exciting and better written than most of the third season show's scripts.

Parting Thoughts

All complaints aside Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - Season Three, Volume One still has dopey fun to spare, but it's a shame the series wasn't able to evolve into something a little more ambitious, more character-driven, more clever than it became, which was just another idiotic Irwin Allen series. For fans of the series, this is modestly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon, due out this year.