Saturday, June 18, 2011

Voyage to the Bottom of Sea : The Invaders (1965)

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a 1960s American science fiction television series based on the 1961 film of the same name. Both were created by Irwin Allen, which enabled the movie's sets, costumes, props, special effects models, and sometimes footage, to be used in the production of the television series. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the first of Irwin Allen's four science fiction television series as well as the longest running. The show's main theme was underwater adventure. Voyage was broadcast on ABC from September 14, 1964 to March 31, 1968, and was the decade's longest-running American science fiction television series with continuing characters. The 110 episodes produced included 32 shot in black and white (1964–65), and 78 filmed in color (1965–68). The first two seasons took place in the then future of the 1970s. The final two seasons took place in the 1980s. The show starred Richard Basehart and David Hedison. The first season began with Admiral Nelson and the crew of the Seaview fighting against a foreign government in order to prevent a world-threatening earthquake, continuing with a foreign government destroying American submarines with new technologies in The Fear Makers and The Enemies. The season also had several ocean peril stories in which the Seaview crew spent the episode dealing with the normal perils of the sea. Two examples are "Submarine Sunk Here" and "The Ghost of Moby Dick". The season introduced the diving bell and a mini-submarine, as well as the first alien story and the first sea monsters. The season ended with the Seaview crew fighting a foreign government to save a defense weapon. In the first season, the gritty, atmospheric, and intense series featured story lines devoted to Cold War themes, as well as excursions into near-future speculative fiction. Many episodes involved espionage and sci-fi elements. While aliens and sea monsters, not to mention dinosaurs, did become the subject of episodes, the primary villains were hostile foreign governments. While fantastic, there was a semblance of reality in the scripts.


The Invaders: season 1 episode # 20  Airdate: January 25, 1965
A severe undersea earthquake exposes an apparently ancient, yet advanced city, an area of which is littered with metallic canisters. Nelson and company bring one of the capsules aboard and discover life within. They manage to cut the thing open and retrieve a strange looking man, a man who claims to be from a civilization twenty million years old, the product of a previous evolutionary cycle. He is most concerned that Nelson also rescue the other canisters, each of which the alien Zar claims, contains one of his people. When questioned, the alien says, among other things that his people do not sleep -- sleep is for animals. Nelson and Crane, suspicious of circumstances and of Zar's odd demeanor, stalls for time to learn more about the creature.  Robert Duvall as Zar. Zar, meanwhile, secretly tinkers with Seaview's equipment,while more publicly, he sits before the sub's microfilm library, absorbing information about us humans at an alarming rate. It eventually turns out that Zar and his people are carriers of diseases which would destroy humanity if loosed on the world; Nelson and Crane must destroy Zar in a blast of fire--Nelson figures it's the only way to kill the cantankerous creature without unleashing his diseases on the world. Realizing that Zar's people have had their day, the Admiral covers the remaining canisters with tons of rock spilled down by several well-placed torpedoes.


I noticed Robert Duvall has his name misspelled in the credits


VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA : THE INVADERS
SOBEY MARTIN (1964)
ABC TELEVISION
55 MIN
USA

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