Ok, why am I back on this topic after 5 years?

Because Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episodes are finally out on DVD!!!

The Season One, Box One set is already out and Season One, Box Two is coming in a month or so.

Lost in Space has already been done of course and they issued The Time Tunnel on DVD recently as well but having Voyage in all its wonderful and horrible glory is more than welcome. Now if they finally do Land of the Giants and get all of this IA stuff out there, I might be foolish enough to devote 6 months to a year of my future life running through all of this media again.

True, I should probably avoid another encounter with this trash and watch something of quality, but there is always something positive to be said for entertaining trash as long as it is indeed entertaining.

And as should be obvious from looking through the 3 pages of previous text, Voyage should be commended for getting solid scores out of good composers and re-using quality music written for 50s features. This seems a much better practice than hiring some hacks and having them blandly wallpaper current TV as so many current TV shows do.

In any case, I just returned to this topic to tell people they can get on the Voyage bandwagon now in DVD form--just another piece of evidence to remind us all we're living in the best possible time for media & media music availability.

ie-in the little robots one he tracked quite a bit of the Day the Earth Stood Still music

I hear that Jonah one in other episodes too

First off, even if the series itself is hit & miss or mediocre, the premise & idea of the series was still a great idea. The idea of the series is to be involved in the fantasy of having your own private submarine and being a part of an efficient crew that goes out on adventures that often save the entire world. Individual episodes may not live up to the premise, but when they do, watching is a lot of fun.

I think the original film is very entertaining and its score is tremendous. If the series seems a bit watered-down in comparison, it's simply because the episodes of a TV series have to have a simple conflict that can be solved within 50 minutes and that week's budget.

Voyage as a series is all over the map. Some episodes are "monster of the week" ones: aliens & giant sea-creatures being the main ones. Other episodes, perhaps the best ones, are espionage ones (that sometimes take place on dry land) with the crew up against Cold War villains. There are a few mind control ones or ones with hallucinations. Finally, there are ones where the ship itself is the problem through malfunction. Since the war is a cold one, there aren't the same sub battles that you might get in WWII sub movies, that's about the only difference. One episode with an alien will be dull; the next episode with an alien might be really interesting & entertaining. It's hard to know what you'll get after the titles are over--that's part of watching Voyage.

But even if we are talking TV and not even TV at its greatest, I have to consider Voyage a guilty pleasure, or a cult item of pulpy drama that I've acquired a taste for knowing that it can't be shared with everyone.

Like Gene Roddenberry & Rod Serling, Irwin Allen knew the importance of having good composers score the episodes and a number of decent composers wrote Voyage scores or cues.

Aside from the wonderful theme by Paul Sawtell, the two best Voyage composers are Jerry Goldsmith and Leith Stevens.

Goldsmith only wrote one episode, the first episode of the 2nd season. That episode has a theme by Goldsmith that replaced the 1st season theme by Sawtell. I don't know the actual notes but the theme has 3 sets of 3 notes followed by 1 set of 4 notes. The next episode returned to the Sawtell main title but used the Goldsmith end title. The 3rd episode returned to the Sawtell main & end titles. And that might have been it for the Goldsmith, except.....a lot of the episodes in the 2nd & 3rd season re-use the cues Goldsmith wrote for the first episode. Then, a number of the other composers to work on Voyage incorporate Goldsmith's theme in their cues, so that, in addition to Sawtell's original theme, the Goldsmith one is heard just as frequently! The Leith Stevens' cues that incorporate the Goldsmith theme give it a very neat twist/rendition by scoring it to Stevens' trademark style or by putting different rhythms underneath it.

Let's talk about Leith Stevens. The key Stevens' films, the ones where he really shines & establishes his trademark sound are the George Pal sci-fi films from the early 50s, Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, and War of the Worlds, which contain (to me) some of the best movie music ever written.

Stevens' trademark sound, which again not being a musicologist I can't accurately describe, could be said to have two layers. There is a slow, slow bass line. I'm not sure what the instrumentation is that produces it but it comes in on lower registers. Then over this slow bass line comes the motifs or themes in a faster form at a higher register. This too uses a specific instrumentation that I can't identify by instrument. Not much help, huh? But if you hear it, you will almost always recognize that it is Stevens.

A lot of the Stevens Voyage cues sound like the best cues from the old sci-fi days but they've been minimized or reduced to these two simple lines without all the elaborations that Stevens would have normally included for those films. This may be due to time constraints or the nature of scoring for a TV speaker. In a way, it's a disappointment. One hears a Stevens cue on Voyage and thinks, if he'd fleshed this out a bit, it would be tremendous. In another way, it's amazing. One hears a Stevens cue on Voyage and realizes this is solid scoring that tops what you'd normally get anywhere else.

Of course, just as the series is a mishmash of quality, so are the scores. Some episodes are given original scores or mostly original scores where the composer's name appears in the end credits and then others are tracked with library cues from earlier episodes or other cues in the 20th Century library. There have been one or two Stevens episodes that have had great scores with long cues running 7-10 minutes.

LA LA Land Records issued music from Lost in Space, another Irwin Allen series, that included a suite of music that Stevens wrote for a Lost in Space episode and it struck me as weaker than the music he did for Voyage. It may still give people an idea of what 60s TV Stevens sounds like though.

Another pleasant surprise is the use of Hugo Friedhofer music throughout the series. Friedhofer actually composed a few episodes for the 1st season but the music supervisors and editors (Lionel Newman, Len Engle, & Morrie McNaughton) all seem to have liked Friedhofer cues enough to track them in on a frequent basis. They lean towards using cues from The Young Lions, In Love and War, and Between Heaven and Hell, the so-called War Trilogy of films Friedhofer scored at 20th in the late 50s, and this music is as common in the series as the Goldsmith & Sawtell themes and Stevens cues.

I'm not necessarily recommending you go out & get these DVDs and watch this series as I am doing (yet again). I'm someone who will watch hours of weak B-movie shtick just to hear good music and I'm not sure this is a path that you should follow if you've managed to avoid it up until now.

I ran into an old friend who teaches TV history & production at a college. I asked him what were the good TV shows currently on (because I don't watch current TV) and he surprised me with his answer. "I can't watch new TV," he said. "I grew up with these older shows & movies and this is all I can respond to." He could have been quoting me.

One aspect of the DVDs is that they have interviews with David Hedison. It seems both he & Richard Basehart started out with high hopes for the series and what they could do with it. Also, in the first season, they had William Woodfield & Allan Balter working on it. These guys would soon migrate to Mission: Impossible and write some of that series' best episodes. The first three seasons of Mission are on DVD now as well and I hope to get to them later this year.

Despite all this writing, I still feel as if I don't have anything new to say, certainly my positions on most topics haven't changed, and the people already here are doing fine analysis without my input. I don't lurk. I just come by every few months and chime in if I feel like it. And this was one of those times. Good luck to all. Later.

I'm posting here because I've been watching these episodes on dvd (still waiting for Season Four to come out--it hasn't yet!). I watched an episode from the first season that I somehow missed seeing for 40 years called "The Human Computer". There were long stretches without dialogue as Crane moved through the empty ship hunting a stowaway. The score for this was unmistakably Goldsmith. There was the piano work from Thriller, the french horn slides, playing with the piano strings, and a lot of other 60s Goldsmith effects. The end credits come up and lo and behold the music credit reads "Music by Morton Stevens and Michael Hennigan". So, after 8 years, I can finally tell Greg (who isn't around) that I found one of the Michael Hennigan Goldsmith episodes. They really exist.

It's great that we recently got a Volume One of Goldsmith CBS 50s scores to shows like Perry Mason but I still feel that the Irwin Allen scores we have aren't enough. I want La-La-Land Records to go back and give us a 2 cd set of Voyage scores like they did with Lost in Space. Courage, Friedhofer, now more Goldsmith, Stevens, and the rest (I heard a solid Herman Stein score the last time I sat down to watch one of these). These would be great to have.

Oh, and I saw an episode that was tracked with some music from Five Fingers which suggests that the original score is somewhere in 20th's music vaults or was in the mid-60s and yet neither Varese or FSM has issued these original tracks.

I did some research on Michael Hennagin as a Goldsmith pseudonym, came across Jeff's article, and it turns out that Michael Hennagin is...Michael Hennagin, once Goldsmith's brother-in-law who was also a composer and got some composing gigs due to Goldsmith.

However, if you listen to the music that Hennagin writes in "The Human Computer" episode of Voyage, it really sounds like...Jerry Goldsmith. Hennagin ghostwrote cues and orchestrated for Goldsmith so he may have consciously tried to mimic him in the film music work he was doing.

In any case, here is a link to Jeff Bond's article:

http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/articles/2002/26_Nov---The_Real_Michael_Hennagin_Story.asp

In addition to the usual mix of Voyage library cues, I've seen an episode so far in season four with a neat original score by Harry Geller.

The resurgence of 60s TV on DVD (either legitimate DVDs or boots on ioffer) has been a godsend. Room 222 is out. I watched all two seasons of The Invaders (great series with great music). Route 66. The Wild Wild West. The Man from UNCLE. Rawhide. Branded. The Untouchables. The Fugitive. Mission: Impossible. Combat. The Rat Patrol. The Mod Squad. Coronet Blue (short-lived but sweet and with tremendous scoring by Laurence Rosenthal).

FSM just put out a disc of Goldsmith music from Cain's Hundred and I only wish I could see the episodes to go with it (they were on TNT but I didn't see them when they were aired). I recently caught one episode of a series called Wild Country which had a theme by John Williams and a solid score by Mort Stevens. 2 sets of Checkmate (also with John Williams scoring) are available on DVD now but I haven't caught up to them yet. TV westerns & variety shows don't hold up as well as the dramatic series (and some comedies) but even here there are pleasant surprises.