DVDs!

[ellarien]

My stray package was waiting for me when I got back from lunch; the first sixteen episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in a slim package of three double-sided DVDs.

It's hard to explain why I love this show so much; I admit it's corny, and relies heavily on stock footage, and is generally regarded as strictly kids' stuff. I first encountered it when I was in my mid-twenties, living alone for the first time with a tiny old B+W TV that had no channel presets at all, just a tuning knob on the side. Channel 4 showed it at 1pm on Sundays, and I got adept at cooking my Sunday lunch in the commercial breaks. It was a fairly stressful time in my life, and the show -- silliness and all -- was my joy and delight. It had an adventure hero who was a scientist! It had characters who cared about and respected each other, without getting gooey about it. (That made a nice change from the endless squabbling and permanent annoying characters on Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, which had preceded Voyage in the same time slot.) And cool toys! And sea monsters!

It was also the only show that ever inspired me to fanfic, which meant that the characters stayed in my head for years after that Channel 4 run ended.

I got cable in London so I could see it again on the Sci-Fi Channel. Sadly, they cut it to pieces to fit in more empty commercial breaks -- they weren't actually selling much advertizing at the time, but the holes had to be there -- and the version on the US Sci-Fi channel that I taped when I moved to Tucson was even worse. It always seemed to be the little bits of character development that got snipped, not the endless stock shots or fights in the missile room. I've been waiting and hoping for these DVDs for a long, long time.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm going to introduce myself here because I put you on my friends list when you posted that you were waiting for your 'Voyage' DVDs the day after the Region 1 box set was issued.

I fell in love with 'Voyage' first season on its original broadcast in the UK, and have remained in love with said first season ever since. I was... let me see... 14 or 15. I had a best friend who I bored silly with recitations of what had happened in the early episodes - the only way I had of hanging on to them in those days, as there was no videotape and we didn't possess a reel to reel sound recorder. Well, I bored her silly until 'Mutiny', which was when she fell just as deeply in love with it as I was. I used to put myself to sleep reciting the dialogue and plots. It was that bad...

I was incredibly excited by the next season, but as time went on, though I never missed an episode or a repeat, I had enough critical faculties left to realise it wasn't that good. I bought a reel to reel, and taped most of the episodes on repeat, then started novelising the scripts. Well, it certainly taught me a good deal about the technicalities of writing without having to worry too much about dialogue or script. Except, of course, for first season, where I had to fill everything around the bits I remembered. Of course, being black and white it wasn't repeated...

Until Channel 4 decided to show the whole thing, in production order, on Sunday mornings. What's more, the b&w prints were spanking new and gorgeous, and I am hoping they are the ones used for the transfer. The first few episodes (which I hadn't seen back in '64) worried me enormously, because it seemed to take both Basehart and Hedison time to 'find' Nelson and Crane and their relationship. Then, suddenly, we were in the epsisodes I knew, and I found that the dialogue I'd memorised over twenty years before was pretty accurate. I put (nearly) all of the first season on videotape, plus those episodes of the other three seasons that took my fancy, so I have not been deprived of it since then. And I found, to my joy, that because I could now treat first season as a separate entity, I could write fanfic - in this case for my own amusement, as the zine the long story I wrote was to be published in never happened, and I wasn't overly impressed by some of the other stuff about at the time.

As 'Lost in Space' came out on Region 2 soon after the Region 1 broadcast, and I prefer to buy Region 2 in case that the major DVD publishers manage to either ban or 'fix' multiregion players, I am sitting on my hands trying desperately not to purchase the Region 1 set.

The first series of 'Voyage' was one of the best of its time. The plots made sense and did not repeat themselves week after week, as happened in the later seasons. All the characters were strong and complex, and there was a lot of conflict, which is the heart of drama. First loves do not go away. For me, 'Voyage' never has.

[ellarien]

Hello and welcome!

I regretted for years that I didn't have a VCR until nearly the end of that C4 run -- not that it would have done me much good after I moved here, as multiregion VHS players were ridiculously expensive and hard to find.

I watched the first episode last night, and it looked and sounded pretty good. I'm tempted to gulp them all down in a marathon, but I'll probably ration them to one a week and hope the next set isn't too long delayed.

I wrote my first several pieces of fanfic without even knowing that was what it was; it was only when I joined the old Irwin Allen Mailing List that I realized there were other people doing the same thing. After that I was peripherally involved in online Voyage fandom for a while, and helped edit a webzine for a few years. (Technically I still do, but it's been on hiatus since about 2000.)

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I found out I was writing fanfic when I met early 'Blake's Seven' fandom.

I've never been closely involved with 'Voyage' fandom, though I know some British fans. ('Blake's Seven' and 'Professionals' fandom, yes, because my mates were running them in the early days.) For my sins I even helped run a fanzine review zine (confusingly called 'Critical Mass') back in the early 80s. My mate Jean (aka Ina McAllan, aka Oriole Alma Throckmorton) and I published 'Blake's Seven', 'The Professionals' and most recently 'Garrison's Gorillas' fiction fanzines over a 20 year period. However, stuff we didn't publish mainly went into multi-fandom zines - and that was where I published some 'Voyage' (comic stuff from 2nd,3rd and 4th season) and 'UFO' and 'Captain Scarlet' and even, lord help me, 'V'. Some of it was straight and some of it was slash. (We set what was probably a precedent by publishing 'Gorilla Warfare' - a Garrison's Gorillas fanzine in a long slash version and a shorter straight one.) I'm afraid we were and are terribly picky about fanfic - demanding decent English, a plot, and characterisation that does not do too much damage to the originals...

[ellarien]

We were picky, too; we did a lot of work on editing stories that looked fixable and turned down those that didn't. Eventually, we ran out of writers who would stand for it.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

We got a big enough rep for being picky (at one stage in B7 fandom I was known as 'Lil the Critic') that people used to send us stories - and not only their own - just to see what we would say about them. (There was the memorable occasion on which a Big Name Starsky and Hutch fan told me I would have criticised Rembrandt when he painted the Mona Lisa (sic))

I've always found that the best way to deal with this is to publish only really good stories. At that point the good writers start sending stories to you - and the good writers will take criticism, though sometimes there are people with really good ideas but so many niggly faults you don't know where to start. ("Ann, you use too many adjectives." "What's an adjective." "It's a word that describes a noun." "What's a noun?")

I haven't had time to explore the website yet, but will definitely do so. I always like to read decent fan fiction.