ABSTRACT
In both his film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) and the television series of the same name (1964–68), Irwin Allen made what many consider to be marginal science fiction, yet it was science fiction that was commercially viable and indeed proved to be highly popular entertainment. When he adapted his movie into a television show, the resulting series ran four years, a record run for prime-time television sf that would not be surpassed until the late 1980s by Star Trek: The Next Generation. Voyage’s long run also gave Allen the credibility to develop several other sf-oriented series with varying degrees of success. But the show’s most crucial significance may be its simultaneous demonstration of two conflicting sides of the adaptation issue, for it both offered a viable formula for adaptation and underscored the difficulty of replicating a cinematic feel, especially for spectacle, on the television screen.
