Irwin Allen produced four of the best known science fiction series of all time through the sixties and early seventies - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. The first one started life as a movie starring Walter Pidgeon, the second two become kitsch movies in the 1990s and no-one's had a go at the fourth one yet, but it is probably only a matter of time.
None of the series had any pretensions to great art or deep concepts, but, as Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin might say, "By Crikey, they were entertaining."
Mr. Entertainment
Irwin Allen deserved the nickname "Mr. Entertainment," if anybody did. He was born in New York in 1916. He was given no particular advantages as a child - he attended public schools and when on to study journalism and advertising at Columbia University. At the tender age of 22, he became editor of "Key" magazine in Hollywood, and within a year was working as the producer of a one-hour show for radio station KLAC. His reputation of a workaholic started to form as he wrote, narrated, produced and directed the show which ran without a break for more than a decade.
As television began to make inroads into the entertainment business, Allen took his imagination to the small screen and came up with America's first celebrity panel game, Hollywood Merry Go Round, which ran for four years.
In his spare time - what spare time there was, anyway - Allen went on to run his own literary agency, which led in turn to him putting together 'packages' for motion pictures.
His first Oscar was for The Sea Around Us which starred Rachel Carson, and for which Allen wrote the screenplay and produced. His stock was high with the Hollywood studios, and he went on to produce and direct the circus flick The Big Circus. He switched studios to Twentieth Century Fox and produced his first Sci Fi-Fantasy movie The Lost World, starring Michael Rennie.
Small screen success
His next science fiction epic, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, starred Walter Pidgeon at the helm of a futuristic nuclear-powered submarine, the Seaview. The Van Allen belts which surround the Earth caught fire, and the Seaview is all that stands between the human race and extinction in a planet-wide slow cooker. But it led to a spin-off TV series, which saw the Seaview take on a variety of undersea adventures in more than 110 episodes from 1964 to 1968. Sadly, the series degenerated over the years until it became a parody of itself. (I vaguely remember a series of monsters which generated fear - one was called the fear monster. Anyway, once they'd run out of fear spiders and fear jelllyfish, they ended up with a fear phobia, which seemed something of a contradiction in terms). The series economically used, re-used and and re-used again stock special effects footage of the Seaview underway, surfacing, and diving, and so on - a tradition which later Irwin Allen productions (and indeed most other science fiction series) repeated.
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