MovieChat Forums > Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) Discussion > The continuity on Voyage was appalling.

The continuity on Voyage was appalling.

posted 11 years ago by CavalorCumano
6 replies | jump to latest

Possible spoilers ahead!

I watched the third season episode "Day of Evil" today and was annoyed that (yet again) the writers had completely cast aside a previous episode that dealt with a similar theme. By that I mean Nelson and Crane coming face to face with themselves. Now in "The Sky is Falling", an alien craft landed in the ocean, and the occupant disguised itself as Crane and Nelson in order to interact with them. This is exactly what happened in "Day of Evil", yet neither Lee or Harriman could believe their eyes when they saw their doubles. Why did they not remember the previous encounter?

Take "Leviathan" as another example of this. When Riley said he had seen an underwater monster, Nelson (I think) said he must have been seeing things. Why was Riley not believed as the Seaview had already encountered quite a few monsters?

And don't get me started on "The Shape of Doom". It was more or less a carbon copy of "The Ghost of Moby Dick". Both episodes had an obsessed scientist tracking a sperm whale in the hopes of gaining information that could help humanity. "The Shape of Doom" also borrowed from "Jonah and the Whale" in that the former had the whale swallow a bomb, and in the latter it was the diving bell. Having three very similar sperm whale episodes in just a couple of seasons wasn't that original either.

I can understand that recycling footage helped to keep costs down, but I found it rather insulting when the writers didn't think that viewers would remember previous stories, and expected them to believe the characters had poor memories too.

Any more thoughts on this?

[–] StuOz 11 years ago

Every point you make is fine with me and I am sure I could add many more continuity points if I gave it some thought.

But hey, it is an IRWIN ALLEN series, all IA shows were like this, you just don't think about it too much and have fun.

To me, VOYAGE/SEA, is the definition of screen entertainment.

[–] 11 years ago

[deleted]

[–] ddc300 11 years ago

Continuity problems?? What Continuity?

VOYAGE suffered from what I call the "Godzilla wrecks Tokyo syndrome". What I mean by that is when you watch a Godzilla movie, Tokyo is attacked and leveled to the ground. Yet, every other Godzilla or generic Japanese monster film you watch after that has a monster attacking Tokyo, but the populace (and government soldiers and scientists included) don't recall the previous monster encounters and it's as if Tokyo has never been attacked by monsters before. It's just a convenient 'cinematic license' to ignore continuity so that the writer(s) aren't 'stymied' into following any real criteria in that particular series/genre.

This applied to all of Irwin Allen's series with exception to "The Time Tunnel" where more attention to detail was shown (at least in the beginning).

[–] spotter-2 11 years ago

American TV shows from the 50s through 70s had little continuity between episodes. Even Star Trek was guilty of a lack of memory. The one exception I know of is the season two episode "by any other name."

From season 2 on VTTBS became more juvenile in it's plots, dropping the cold-war theme of season 1. The reason for this change was the producers discovered the largest segment of the audience by far were pre-teen boys.

The reason was for the lack of continuity was perhaps that the producers were thinking of ahead for future syndication. That's where TV production companies would make the big bucks.
Another exception to the lack of continuity were "clip" shows. Comedies did it more dramas. It was a technique to make a cheap episode.

[–] scubadivergeek 11 years ago

<<
The reason was for the lack of continuity was perhaps that the producers were thinking of ahead for future syndication. That's where TV production companies would make the big bucks. >>

That's the way it became, but not true in the 60's and early 70's. Back then, nobody had any idea that people would want to continue watching reruns of an old TV show for decades to come. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Anne on Gilligan's Island, said she asked her agent way back when Gilligan's Island first went into syndication about getting paid for reruns. At the time, you got paid for the couple reruns and that was it. She said her agent told her, "Don't worry about it, the show will only run a couple years, the first season is in black and white, nobody's gonna watch THAT", etc.

Back then, nobody knew that syndication could be the gold mine that it turned out to be. Nobody knew Star Trek was going to be more popular in reruns than it was in it's network run. And so on. That's stuff that just kind of happened.

In fact, I think the fact that producers and TV execs didn't have that foresight is the REASON for continuity errors on a lot of shows during those early TV years. They didn't foresee watching a favorite programs again and again, setting aside whichever time of day the reruns aired, and they certainly didn't predict the ubiquity of VCR's or any of it's descendent technologies. At the time, syndication was just a way to squeeze a few extra bucks out of what was expected to be a soon-to-be moribund program.

[–] darkness_surroundz 10 years ago

yeah at first the movie companies were terrified of home video. Now is their golden calf for movies and TV shows