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Drill time for us VTTBOTS obsessives [Scott (Mc)Oldsmith, Advise & Consent, ...] to dive into the depths of our waves of faves.
I'll leave dock with 10 of mine:
1) The Fear-Makers
2) The Enemies
3) The Condemned
4) Leviathan
5) The Phantom Strikes
6) The Human Computer
7) Sealed Orders
8) The Saboteur
9) The Cyborg
10) The Death Watch
Plenty more in the TV ocean; most of the first season I like, honestly.
Fire away with yours. 
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Wellllll, let's see....
Season 1: Overall the most mature and considered season. Most fans prefer it, but I like more fun in my Irwin Allen shows. But when it was good, it was astounding.
Eleven Days to Zero
The Sky Is Falling
THe Fear-Makers
The Mist of Silence
Submarine Sunk Here
Turn Back the Clock (I know, but there's the "fun" I was talking about)
The Invaders
Doomsday
The Condemned
The Ghost of Moby Dick
The Enemies
The Secret of the Loch
Most of the spy episodes got too dry and frankly dull for me. But then, espionage was rarely Voyage's stronger suit.
Season 2: This is my favorite season overall. The move to color was a huge boon, the Flying Sub was amazing and I love the 4 window version of the sub. The music becomes more adventrous also and the energy adds to the excitement. Everyone seems to be having a good time and even the stock footage/pirate episodes are great. The "giant creatures who wrestle the sub" thing begins here and it's great!
Jonah and the Whale
The Cyborg (these two tie for favorites of the run)
Leviathan
Escape from Venice
The Left-Handed Man
The Phantom Strikes
The Return of the Phantom
Killers of the Deep
Dead Men's Doubloons
The Machines Strike Back
Graveyard of Fear
The Menfish (even though I really miss Basehart in this one)
The Mechanical Man (the only truly great non-Basehart episode)
Season 3: Things get weird this season and I rate most of these as "good" only because they're so much fun. Most fans hate the 3rd season, but it's such great schlock. It doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is. The back half of the season was insanely cheap. Stock footage padding and "skeleton crew" episodes dominated. Maybe the money was being used for The Time Tunnel which had copious location shooting 'til the end.
Monster from the Inferno
The Day the World Ended
Deadly Waters
Day of Evil
Thing from Inner Space
Deadly Invasion
The Lost Bomb
The Mummy
The Creature
The Haunted Submarine
The Heat Monster
The Fossil Men
No Escape from Death (45% stock footage but so fun)
Deatroy Seaview! (after weeks of money saving episodes Irwin spends cash on guest actors, speaking parts and laser effects for the final episode of the season - go figure).
Season 4: For the first half of the season, the money was being well spent and the stories were more grounded. But halfway through, it got weird again and I loved it.
Fires of Death
The Deadly Dolls
Man of Many Faces
Journey With Fear (this is the goofiest episode of the run but it's amazing)
Cave of the Dead
Blow Up
Rescue
The Return of Blackbeard (one of the only apparantly intentionally funny episodes - the music is amazing and Basehart is taking it lightly)
The Death Clock
A Time to Die (5 minutes of stock footage padding notwithstanding)
Savage Jungle (I used to hte this one but it's really grown on me)
The Lobster Man (what a great costume)
Flaming Ice
No Way Back (a very classy ending to the series - actually felt like a final episode)
Funny thing about this series and Lost in Space is that the last few episodes filmed had new music. Usually Irwin would front load his seasons with scores and track the rest but Attack! (not on this list) and Flaming Ice were given new scores. And Savage Jungle, a VERY late episode, was blessed with new model footage of the Seaview among monster plants. So even when the scripts were being dashed off, Irwin was still tossing money at episodes.
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I didn't discover this series until I was well into my 20's. So the "kid in me" loves it. My brain is turned off for a lot of it.
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I'm the same age as Graham, and I remember VTTBOTS as much as the other Irwin Allen shows. Like most of them it was shown on our commercial ITV channels. For me then living in the Barnsley area most of Voyage was seen in the Granada region. We started getting Yorkshire TV in 1968, and I think they carried on showing it. I didn't have a problem with this or Stingray, because they were science fiction and not just any old undersea series. In fact I conned a school friend into watching Voyage because he wasn't into sf and fantasy but he WAS keen on underwater stuff.
I did used to think it odd that the film was often shown on the BBC when the series was always on ITV. But I just loved the feel and atmosphere of the Irwin Allen shows. They have their own personality and can't be mistaken for anything else. Sure, I knew that whenever dinosaurs showed up they were spliced in from Allen's The Lost World! But I loved everything including the sound fx. I could hum the Seaview's bleeps anytime. They had a rhythm and almost a melody! The hardware was cool. But I don't remember favourite episodes. I do remember enjoying ones with a Mr Pym in them, and enjoyed any with monsters.
Then in the 1980s all the Allen shows were shown in straight runs by Channel 4, and I recorded them all on vhs. They broadcast them on Sunday lunchtimes while I was working in my mother-in-law's restaurant so I had to get a friend to record it for me. He was another tv and movie buff, so he had a second video recorder and sat watching so that he could edit out the ads. By this time I'm an adult and knew very well the difference of reasonably genuine sf of the Star Trek kind, and this. But, like the sfx and production values of Classic Series Doctor Who, the taste was already ingrained in me, and no amount of shaky stuff seen through grown up eyes can shake off the fun to be got from it. Even if much of it is nostalgia.
I'm still in the process of throwing out those vhs tapes of this....
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Yes. The difference between the ITV regions was annoying more than anything else. There was a time in TV Times, when you had the little boxes with 'regional variations' printed on the listings pages. All the Ray Harryhausen b&w films seemed to do the rounds anywhere but on bloody Yorkshire!
Even today it's mid boggling that the Gerry Anderson stuff didn't actually get picked up by all the stations. Certainly Joe 90 wasn't shown in it's release time on Yorkshire. Never seen an episode of Secret Service on broadcast telly. UFO was all over the place (though the tone itself was too which is why most regions had trouble with that one).
A lot of things had a good start like Space 1999. Regular slot on Thursday evenings, 7.30. And then disappeared. Then first runs of some episodes might be on Sunday afternoons, late nights, all sorts.
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Then in the 1980s all the Allen shows were shown in straight runs by Channel 4, and I recorded them all on vhs. They broadcast them on Sunday lunchtimes while I was working in my mother-in-law's restaurant so I had to get a friend to record it for me. He was another tv and movie buff, so he had a second video recorder and sat watching so that he could edit out the ads. By this time I'm an adult and knew very well the difference of reasonably genuine sf of the Star Trek kind, and this. But, like the sfx and production values of Classic Series Doctor Who, the taste was already ingrained in me, and no amount of shaky stuff seen through grown up eyes can shake off the fun to be got from it. Even if much of it is nostalgia.
I'm still in the process of throwing out those vhs tapes of this....
I had a lot of those Channel 4 Voyage's. A fellow in the UK transferred them to NTSC for me and sent a bunch. Which was super nice. I also had the entire run of The Time Tunnel. These were great to have then since the US only had really beat up 16mm prints and mostly were edited for time. Time Tunnel wasn'y run much at all due to it being only 30 episodes. I still have the tapes. Don't ask me why...
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Scott, I recognise your story here, so I think we've traded these very same words before. But hey I'm ALWAYS telling the same story. The Kong one elsewhere here I've told many times already! But it's interesting that we managed to get better prints for broadcast than the material's own country. I seem to remember a problem with one episode of Time Tunnel, about coal miners?. Not sure if it was missed out or heavily edited for some reason. Could be wrong but it seems to ring a bell somehow.
And Xebec I'm absolutely certain that Voyage was never shown on the BBC, though am happy to be proven wrong. I'm knocking on 60's door now so the memory will dim over time... The only Allen show I feel was actually broadcast on the BBC (1 too) is Time Tunnel. For some reason I get the feeling it was shown first time on the BBC, whereas all the others were ITV until that Channel 4 broadcast in the 80s. And then I've got a funny feeling that Time Tunnel was the odd one out by being shown on Thursday evenings instead of Sunday lunchtimes like all the others.
Back further in the sixties I get the feeling that Lost in Space might have been shown in my ITV region (which was then Granada Mon to Friday, and ABC at the weekends) on Saturdays, because I vaguely remember switching over from BBC 1 after Doctor Who to watch Lost in Space on ITV. And I have in my mind the photo from Mission to the Unknown ( a prelude to the famous 12 part Dalek epic The Daleks' Masterplan) whilst looking at the Radio Times (BBC owned tv listings magazine).
And to complicate things even further, the BBC did actually show sf/fantasy originally on ITV on original broadcast. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and The Invaders were two of these in a kind of weekday teatime sf strand. And one better, UK stuff like many of the Gerry Anderson shows plus The Avengers which were actually made for ITV in the 60s, were also shown by the Beeb in teatime slot on BBC 2.
What all this means is, both Channel 4 and the BBC are basically national broadcasters. So, for many of these properties the very first fully national network showings were on rerun. In the 60s and 70s these shows were all over the place with no co-ordination. Which is why the popularity of Thunderbirds went through the roof on the BBC, resulting in the infamous search and in-store fights over Tracey Island toys, for an old show made in the 60s!! I was very impressed by this turn of events and got quite a sense of pride.
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"Now on 4 something evil is lurking...just below the surface." - The announcer intro to The Mummy.
Scott, I recognise your story here, so I think we've traded these very same words before. But hey I'm ALWAYS telling the same story.
Haha, have we?! Were you the gent who made the copies? That would be quite the small world-type coincidence.
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"Now on 4 something evil is lurking...just below the surface." - The announcer intro to The Mummy.
Scott, I recognise your story here, so I think we've traded these very same words before. But hey I'm ALWAYS telling the same story.
Haha, have we?! Were you the gent who made the copies? That would be quite the small world-type coincidence.
No. Wasn't me. But I wish it had been! Lol.
Seriously though, I have the fortune to among a large group of friends who are into tv/film and in the days of vhs, most of us had two recorders. There was quite a gathering of tv shows from all over the world, very often shows from our own country that were being rerun in other countries except our own. So frustrating. But I would have been happy to record or copy stuff back in the day.
Then there were the times when we missed an episode of something we were recording for keeps. Having two recorders meant we could borrow someone's copy of an episode and slot it in order before the next week's. It just meant a lot of flexibility for collecting.
Nowadays we have it so easy. Everything at least dvd quality. No second generation copies, or much worse. I once got a copy of a Doctor Who story called The Sea Devils, that was so far down the chain of rerecording it looked like a cartoon!
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very often shows from our own country that were being rerun in other countries except our own. So frustrating. But I would have been happy to record or copy stuff back in the day.
That was the issue here. Lost in Space could be seen now and again, but Voyage all but disappeared from my market from the 70's until the Sci-Fi Channel ran them (cutting 5 minutes - badly - in the process). The Canadian channel "Space The Imagination Station" ran them uncut (except for "The Mummy" which was missing the first 1:20) but via crummy 16mm prints.
The UK were provided tapes from 35mm and you guys ran them unedited. They weren't perfect: the PAL to NTSC differences resulted in a speedup which put the episodes at around 48 minutes rather than 50, but that's how I was able to get a lot of uncut episodes (and those missing bits of The Mummy). Getting those episodes was one of the most fun and challenging hunts I've done for TV shows. I did wind up with all 110 episodes uncut in various forms: UK Channel 4, Space, Columbia House VHS releases and then transfers from 16mm (exactly half the run from this source).
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I saw about 5 minutes of Voyage in 1984 and thought it was laughable. That was it until 1993 when I saw them on the Sci-Fi Channel. Strangely enough, the same scene I laughed at came from what became one of my favorite episodes. In context, the scene worked. But I didn't see Voyage until I was in my 20's. I had only seen the Time Tunnel pilot in my teens and then the entire show at about the same time I found Voyage.
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I saw about 5 minutes of Voyage in 1984 and thought it was laughable. That was it until 1993 when I saw them on the Sci-Fi Channel. Strangely enough, the same scene I laughed at came from what became one of my favorite episodes. In context, the scene worked. But I didn't see Voyage until I was in my 20's. I had only seen the Time Tunnel pilot in my teens and then the entire show at about the same time I found Voyage.
@ Mr. McOldsmith: which episode?
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@ Mr. McOldsmith: which episode?
The Return of the Phantom. It was the last 10 minutes or so when Crane is possessed by Captain Kruger yelling (in that accent) "Lani, come back! Lahn-NEEE!" I turned on the TV because Lost in Space was due to come on and Voyage was ending and I really just thought it was awful. Flash forward about 10 years and I'm watching this one, totally loving it, and this scene comes on. Totally different opinion at that time.
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Loved the concept, the hardware, the actors, the characters (same with Lost in Space), but they lost me on the execution and writing. Wanted more classic Star Trek like stories and less silliness. 
