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.
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.
