Many people first watched 'Star Trek' and 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea' on TV when they were children at junior school or in their early high school years.
Which series did you enjoy the most when you were children????
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I liked both when I was a kid.
Now I can appreciate that Trek is a far superior show. Voyage was always purely an action show, which later degenerated into po face (as opposed to camp) absurdity, Trek had action but with rather more and never got as goofy and incoherent as the Irwin Allen shows, even at its worst.
I feel Basehart was rather wasted in Voyage; a tremendous actor, one can imagine what he felt when Voyage scripts were throwing leprechauns and sinister puppets at him. Basehart makes the later sillier episodes more tolerable. I hated the way the series combined some excellent sets and effects work in the later seasons with the worst kind of shoddy pantomime monsters. "Lost in space" did the same..that series was saved by the comedy of Jonathan Harris and the robot.
I agree. The 'curse of Irwin Allen' affected all of his TV series. Irwin loved elaborate sets, special effects and great stunt work. He put all his efforts into those areas and neglected the scripts, particularly in the area of character development. It is often mentioned in interviews that Irwin Allen was like a 'man-child', a kid trapped in a man's body. Urgo, he was not a 'deep thinker' in terms of what motivates a character, or how can a romantic interest be developed for a character, etc. All he cared about was the LOOK of his series, not the content. It is surprising that the early VTTBOTS episodes were as good as they were.
A good indicator of a well-written episode for VTTBOTS is one that is written by a freelancer and NOT one of Irwin's contracted 'hacks' like Al Gail (Irwin's cousin), Sidney Marshall, William Welch*, or Arthur Weiss.
*Welch was one of Irwin's most prolific writers, having almost single-handedly churned out more than 70% of the fourth season's scripts! Welch can be considered an inconsistant writer, as he turned out both excellent, and horrendous scripts over the series's four-year run. Obviously, his better works were in year one and two.
I never saw Star Trek in prime time, due to only 1 TV and Dad's obsession with westerns, but would watch Voyage whenever it was shown. I started Star Trek after it was in reruns after school every day.
Of the two, like ST better.
As a kid, and to this day, I like Voyage the best.
Really that shouldn't take anything away from Star Trek because I liked that too, it just didn't resonate with me the way the Seaview and her crew did.
I probably couldn't have explained it when I was 10 but looking back I seem to have preferred the "let's go in and solve this with atom bombs" approach rather than the preachy "no interference policy that always backfires and leaves the planet morally straight but in chaos" that was what I thought of as the main contrast in the shows.
The Enterprise had a more "hip" crew in comparison with Seaview.
Admiral Nelson was like your dad; he kept things in order but let you fudge the rules once in a while if it vaporized the Lobsterman, and Captain Kirk was like that uncle you had that went out to California on a motorcycle after he got out of the Air Force.
Oh and the Seaview didn't have any circuit breakers, that's a ballsy way to build a boat.
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By the time I was old enough to watch any night time TV, both shows were long gone. As a kid I was aware of Star Trek but never really paid attention until the movies started coming along. As far as Voyage goes I probably saw the movie as a kid but was really unaware of the TV show until I saw it on sale at Best Buy less than a year ago. I am only as far as Season 2, so I haven't gotten into any of the later really "silly" shows, but thus far I would say that I like Voyage better than Trek.
shareI had a model of the SEAVIEW as a small child. I had a lot of fun with it in the tub "recreating" the show. Star Trek came later. It is the better show, but Voyage was more fun for a kid.
shareI liked star trek much more.
But a few of the early star trek episodes, especially "Where No Man has Gone Before" reminded me of Voyage to the Top of the Sky, an imaginary space series based on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
I took me a while to see how much better Star Trek was than Irwin Allen could ever have made Voyage to the Top of the Sky.
As a kid, I watched Voyage, Time Tunnel, Lost in Space and Star Trek (as well as the inanely ridiculous Land of the Giants). Always preferred Star Trek. But it is interesting that as each show progressed, the stories tended to get worse. I know Star Trek suffered from continued budget cuts. I also know that creatures/story lines/ideas used to make their rounds between all the IA shows.
One thing is for sure, Star Trek had a much bigger impact on pop culture, though Lost in Space had it share of memorable lines ("Danger Will Robinson", "Oh the pain, the pain" and "Never fear...Smith is here").
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My favorite Smith line: "I wonder what this one does?"
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