In September 1964, American audiences were transported to the ocean’s depths via the modern Jules Verne-esque escapade VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, the first of many Irwin Allen productions that continue to be popular to this day. With the aid of actor DAVID HEDISON, Paul Simpson steps back aboard the Seaview…

“Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is an exercise in action-adventure. It has dash, verve, an honest, high-hearted approach to exciting entertainment. In spirit, each episode contains the rapidly sputtering fuse, the breathless, desperate race against the clock, the gripping suspense of overwhelming danger.

“Obviously, then, this is not a show of social crusades, satirical comments or probing searches into the human psyche. Such themes, fascinating and worthy as they may be, are outside the province of a series dedicated to the heady business of high adventure…”

So began Irwin Allen’s pitch document for a series to be spun off from his successful 1961 feature Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Around the same time that Gene Roddenberry was working on his ideas for a ‘Wagon Train to the Stars’ that eventually evolved into Star Trek, Gerry Anderson was overseeing the production of his classic puppet series Thunderbirds, and William Hartnell was preparing to pilot the TARDIS around the remoter reaches of Lime Grove studios as the first Doctor Who, Allen was crossing from film production into series television.

For his first attempt, he wanted to take advantage of the investment that had already been made in the 1961 feature in terms of props, sets, costumes and underwater footage. “The three main underwater sections of our Seaview submarine cost more than $400,000 to build, more than most television pilot films in their entirety,” Allen claimed in the publicity brochure for the series. “Yet, when we were ready to make the television pilot, we had at our disposal, and in perfect working order, the intact sections of the control room, the viewing room (the only submarine with a glass nose) and the missile/torpedo room, fully equipped with more than two-dozen of the latest atomic warhead-carrying missiles.”

Taking many of the characters from his 1961 film, but refining and recasting them to fit a TV budget, Allen proposed taking viewers forward approximately 20 years to a time when the Cold War was still continuing, albeit never specifically stating that the Russians were the enemy. “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is not way-out science fiction in its accepted form, but actually an extension of science fact and thereby all the more exciting and thrilling because of the extreme plausibility of the men, their submarine and the situations the sub and crew encounter in their hour-long television voyage,” he stated.

Before the series began, Admiral Harriman Nelson had retired from the US Navy to head up the Nelson Institute of Marine Research in Santa Barbara, California, using his self-designed super submarine the Seaview to chart the world’s waters and investigate the mysteries of the depths. What most people were unaware of was that secretly Nelson and the crew of the Seaview led by Captain Lee Crane are working for the United States government. Their cover of scientific research gave them carte blanche to travel anywhere they wished to deal with America’s foes.

Dive! Dive! Dive!

Allen cast veteran movie actor Richard Basehart as Admiral Nelson, replacing Walter Pidgeon from the movie. Basehart had recently switched from movies to television, appearing in episodes of The Naked City and Route 66 before being approached by Allen. Actor David Hedison, who had worked for Irwin Allen on his 1960 film The Lost World, had been offered the chance to play Lee Crane for the feature film, but turned it down because he felt that the character was “a dry one-dimensional bore.” When Allen brought the concept to television, he once again called on Hedison, who he later said, “looks like the type of modern, thinking-fighting man that we have come to recognise through the brilliance of the image created by the astronauts.” Hedison wanted to refuse, but eventually was persuaded by his friend Roger Moore to take the part.

Although most people now think of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as a ‘monster show’, recalling moments when plant people invaded the Seaview or Lee Crane metamorphosed into a werewolf, that wasn’t Allen’s original intention. “The first year was basically an espionage show,” Hedison recalls. “It was very interesting and much more adult than some of the later shows. Towards the end there were a lot of monster shows: I think the network rather pressed Irwin to do more of that. It was on at 7 o’clock at night, and it got a very young audience, so I think the network thought it might be best if we put a lot of that stuff in.”

One thing that didn’t change was the implacable seriousness of the lead characters. From the start, Irwin Allen maintained that “talk for talk’s sake – even for the development in depth of character – [is] considered expendable.” “Our characters were terribly grim,” Hedison says. “A couple of times Richard and I tried to do a scene a little lightly, with a little twinkle in our eyes to make it just a little more comedic and more real. We shot a scene once, and it was very good. The crew thought it was great, and the director loved it. I was in the commissary having lunch, and Irwin walked by with a long face. He said. ‘Why did you play the scene like that?’ I said that we thought it was very good. He said, ‘We’re reshooting it this afternoon.’ So we went back on the set and had to reshoot the whole scene and be as grim as we possibly could. We couldn’t get away with anything. Along with Richard, who was phenomenal, the two of us found a very real line, because we had some really crazy situations that we became involved in and we made them quite real.”

Very little was learned about the characters’ backgrounds during the entire run of the series. “I had a whole biography made up before the start of the series, but Irwin didn’t want any of that,” Hedison notes. “He wanted me to play heroic, and that was it. He wanted me just to be myself, and play it as realistically as possible, and not go into any kind of background. He just wasn’t interested in that. There would be times when Richard might be out sick for the day, so they would give me his lines! It was as simple as that: there was no specific characterisation in the lines. But Irwin was right – the show ran for four years, and 110 episodes. We did as Irwin said, and he got a great show going.”

Deep Sea Adventure

Once the series was up and running, Irwin Allen wasn’t a great visitor to the set, according to Hedison. “Every now and then he would come on, just to check things were going okay. He would wear this aftershave cologne, Aramis, and when we got a whiff of that, we had to be very careful what we were doing. But he was always on top of things, and he was always very enthusiastic about all of it.”

The special effects involved a lot of miniatures and back projection, particularly once the aerial Flying Sub was added at the start of the second season, and to produce 50 minutes of footage, the cast and crew worked six full days on each episode. “We zipped through it as quickly as possible,” Hedison says. “As long as we got the lines out, it was a print. That was it. Six days we had – sometimes it would bleed into a seventh day and the budget people would go crazy.”

One of Captain Crane’s central tenets was that he would never put one of his men in a position that he wouldn’t be willing to assume himself, and David Hedison had the same attitude to the stunt work. “It was a lot easier if I did it – you could always tell it was a stuntman,” he points out. “I loved doing my own stunts and thought it was much more real: my body moves differently to a well-trained stuntman’s body. I would be a little awkward at times, but it was good. I had a wonderful stunt double, George Rowbotham, who would come in, choreograph the scenes, give me the right punches and the right look, then we would do it. We would rehearse on our lunch hour to make sure the fights looked good.”

The series premiered in America on September 14 1964 with TV Guide giving prominence amongst the stars of the series to “the Seaview, a glass-nosed atomic-powered submarine of the 1970s’” before mentioning Basehart or Hedison. It came to an end with the episode No Way Back on March 31 1968, which began with the Seaview exploding, before an encounter with time travel and the traitorous Benedict Arnold set history back on course, allowing the Seaview to survive into syndication where it has continued to play ever since.

“I thought as I was doing them, they were just ordinary shows,” David Hedison concludes, “but when I saw them again recently, I was amazed at how entertaining they were. I would love to get in my car tomorrow morning, go to 20th Century Fox, get on the set, and there’s Richard and we start working again…”

Originally published in Dreamwatch 144, September 2006.