Review of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) by Donald W — 05 Dec 2011

This was an expensive pilot for a TV show. The special effects were all models shot in a tank of water. All the underwater life looks like rubber toys. The story is far fetched and has every cliche from every other Sci-Fi or submarine movie.

The acting is over done and melodramatic. Some of the plot elements were done better in the Star Trek TV series. In the story the Van Allen Radiation belts have caught fire and are causing rapid global warming.

Of coarse this is not possible. The Van Allen Radiation belts are just solar radiation trapped by the earth's magnetic field in the vacuum of space. When this movie was made the Van Allen Radiation belts had just been discovered by the U.

S.'s first satellites and the USS Nautilus had also recently traveled under the Artic ice cap to the North Pole. The only reason to watch this movie is to see a young Barbara Eden in a pre I Dream of Jeannie role.

The bad guy in the movie is played by Barbara Eden's real life husband at the time Michael Ansara who also played several characters on I Dream of Jeannie. He was most famous for playing Kang the Klingon in Star Trek.

The TV show that came from this pilot was totally recast and was better written for the first few years. By the time the TV show ended it had become a monster of the week Sci-Fi series. However, without this movie and then TV show there may have been no Star Trek.

The success of the TV show led NBC to look for a similar series that became Star Trek. The star of the movie was Walter Pidgeon who was also in Forbidden Planet which was also copied by Star Trek.