Voyage to the Bottom of the CHEESE!

So I've been watching old reruns of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on the Tivo lately, since I have a warm fuzzy spot of memory in my childhood that involves running home every day from school to watch that show on TV. I was expecting cheese and I am getting it in spades, though it is also kind of amusing how every so often the show turns out to be not entirely cheesy. First season actually for the most part is pretty sane, and even into third season when we're well and thoroughly into wackyland, with a plethora of giant undersea critters menacing the Seaview, Captain Crane getting his mind taken over and/or escaping from bad guys in the sub's AMAZINGLY! HUGE! air vents every other episode, and crewmembers hallucinating right and left and in general demonstrating that this is obviously the most unstable crew anywhere in the Navy, we even still get occasional glimmers of character development. Watching solarbird double-take at one of these was very giggleworthy. ;)

Also very giggleworthy was watching the original Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea movie that came out before the series did, but in which Irwin Allen, King of Cheese, also had a hand. It was wacky how the sub in the movie was simultaneously less cheesy and MORE cheesy than the one in the series -- but while the science was just as ridiculously bad, and we did in fact get the obligatory giant octopus trying to eat the front of the sub, did we get Captain Crane escaping through the air vents?! NOT ONCE! While I do approve of Crane getting to smooch Barbara Eden, the movie Crane was just not nearly as fun to look at as series Crane, and hell, David Hedison wasn't even really all that cute. But he was vaguely cute. ;)

Walter Pidgeon as Admiral Nelson, however, was just wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. I'm with Gypsy: RICHARD BASEHART RICHARD BASEHART RICHARD BASEHART!

There's one other way in which the cheese factor for the movie shot right off the scale, though: Frankie Avalon actually SINGING the theme song over the credits. Mercifully, he didn't sing during the actual movie.