Television Thinks Big

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In service to network demands for more product, science fi ction series dotted the TV schedules. Ranging from espionage and spy series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart (1965-1970) to action adventures such as Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968), the diversity in science fi ction output was extraordinary. Even children's television was being given a futuristic revamp with animated sitcoms like The Jetsons (1962-1963) bridging the gap between Saturday morning and prime time. The network grab for audiences ensured a healthy turnaround of science fi ction that would appeal to the most discerning fans.

Not content with garish and colourful yarns produced by the likes of Irwin Allen, viewers could still watch stories written and inspired by established science fi ction authors in the anthology series The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Inspired by the success of prime time anicoms such as The Flintstones (1960-1966), networks also saw potential for targeting both adults and children in the animated series market. In what is described as ‘television's fi rst animation boom' ABC introduced The Jetsons to American audiences (Mittell 2003: 46). Animated series, or anicoms, like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, differed from their feature-length and seven-minute progenitors ‘in their employment of live-action narrative conventions commonly associated with sitcom series' (Dobson 2003: 85).

This mixing of genres was intended so that a wider audience could be reached; however, critics immediately lampooned these series for their perceived limited attraction to only children. Produced by Hanna-Barbera, The Jetsons was a thirty-minute, family-orientated anicom about the Jetson family and their life in the twenty-fi rst century. While both The Jetsons and The Flintstones projected contemporary American culture and lifestyles onto different time periods, these series can clearly be read as traditional sitcoms with a domesticated settings, strong family structures and emphasis on daily life and routine.

The Jetson family lived in a future utopia, where humans benefi ted from every elaborate robotic and technological device writers and animators could think of. Parodying the suburban nightmare of the 1950s, with George Jetson feeling trapped by his three-hour, three-days-a-week offi ce job and tyrannical boss, Mr. Spacely, the series used established science fi ction and sitcom clichés to emphasise the absurdity of human reliance on technology to make their lives easier. The family clearly live a perfect life, depicted in what we read now as a retro aesthetic, yet they often complained about the hardships they endured such as going to work or doing the occasional spot of housekeeping.

Although ultimately unsuccessful, being dropped from prime time to Saturday mornings (Hilton-Morrow and McMahan 2003: 76), the series can be seen as a direct infl uence on contemporary anicoms such as Futurama (1999-2003) which become popular when networks returned to animation to provide prime time viewing. Parody proved popular in Bond-inspired spy series such as Mission: Impossible (1966-1973), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart. Like their big screen brethren Dr. No, these series combined gadgets and futuristic technology with traditional espionage and Cold War narratives pitting the masculine and stylish heroes against evil foes usually from the Eastern Soviet bloc.

Not only infl uenced by the British Bond franchise, these series followed in the footsteps of a pioneering television from the UK called Danger Man (1960-1962 and 1964-1968), broadcast in America as Secret Agent (1965-1966). Characterised by an intense and cynical ‘realism and seriousness' Danger Man has attracted critical and popular praise (Chapman 2002: 16). As both British and American television benefi ted from bigger budgets, realism was sacrifi ced for more fantastic and parodic espionage narratives, foregrounding guns and gadgets used by the agents rather than characterisation and plot. Yet the popularity of the many spy series in the 1960s indicates the mutability of science fi ction across different television genres and allows us to see such series as important contributors to the history of the genre on the small screen.

The continued fascination for spying also highlights their Cold War contexts. Whereas Agents 86 and 99 in Get Smart worked for CONTROL, an overtly American government secret spy agency, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. worked for U.N.C.L.E., a neutral organisation more aligned with the United Nations than any specifi c country. Ignoring national rivalries, the series was pitched as a glimpse of a post-Cold War world an interesting idea since it was fi rst broadcast two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened nuclear Armageddon.

The series implied that an organisation like U.N.C.L.E. could exist in the present day, therefore making the extraordinary feats of James Bond and fellow television spies appear more realistic. Weapons and technical gadgets like the super car again alluded to Bond, but the sheer amount of technology used to help the agents get out of sticky situations or travel the globe overloaded the series, eventually appearing more mundane and run-of-the-mill. Not appearing wholly implausible, the gadgets did provide a temporal break between the contemporary timing of the series and the slightly futuristic aesthetic, something which did not happen with Bond fi lms in the 1960s as they were explicitly tied to a British imperial and colonial agenda.

Without a doubt, as M. Keith Booker (2002: 46) describes, U.N.C.L.E. ‘tended much more toward the ludic, displaying a superfi cial (or even campy) interest in style that marked [it] as far more distinctively postmodern than' the UK's James Bond or Danger Man. Jon Abbott's (2006: 8) following description of Irwin Allen appears blunt and yet is a statement with which many would fi nd hard to disagree: ‘Allen was no storyteller . . . he was into spectacle.' The creator of the renowned 1960s pulp science fi ction television shows Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space (1965-1968), The Time Tunnel (1966 -1967) and Land of the Giants (1968-1970) is seen by some critics as an aberration, someone always keen to aim for the fantasy and kid's TV audience rather than the perceived ‘serious and highbrow' audience who might have watched The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Star Trek.

Yet Abbott points out there was space for both in the TV schedules, that audiences could handle political science fi ction and colourful spectacle: ‘But when we need to escape from the misery of the news broadcasts, or the tyranny of historical or scientifi c fact, that is when the door to the wacky worlds of Irwin Allen and his colleagues in sheer, unadulterated fantasy seems so inviting' (4). Oscar De Los Santos offers a helpful discussion of Allen's series, bringing attention to the debates surrounding more juvenile science fi ction television and its more sophisticated counterparts. He delineates between science fi ction and what he calls ‘sci-fi ', positing that science fi ction in literature and visual media uses ‘scientifi c principles and exponentiates them to concoct its "what if ?" scenarios'. On the other hand, ‘Sci-fi ' is a ‘sketch that doesn't work very hard if at all to explain its science and technology', and is concerned more with ‘dazzling the audience with spectacle than credible ideas'.

Indeed, according to De Los Santos (2009: 26), ‘Sci-fi is closer kin to the fantasy genre.' In terms of the Allen series, this is a plausible framework through which to understand their popularity with audiences of all ages and the television networks keen to cash in on the genre. However, looking at the genre in this way does tend to replicate debates fi rst raised around earlier visual examples such as Flash Gordon which positioned the science fi ction serial as childish in orientation, with little concern for the genre's potential to offer social critique.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the fi rst of Allen's series, saw him return to familiar ground by adapting his own 1961 fi lm of the same name. Sea-based fi lms and TV proved popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and Allen was keen to cash in on this trend. The story followed the adventures of the Seaview, a super submarine, and its crew, who explored the ocean, running into various villains and sea creatures that posed a threat to the Earth and the peace that existed between the superpowers.

Familiar espionage stories from contemporaries like Get Smart often crept into the series, no doubt infl uenced by the tense political situation created by the Missile Crisis, and the submarine was often dispatched by the American government to broker deals and offer military muscle to prevent new confl icts. However, in an effort to stimulate audiences and create spectacle Allen introduced garish and colourful sea creatures and aliens from the second season onward, thus giving the show a somewhat undeserved reputation as only offering parades of monsters rather than detailed characterisation and political intrigue.

The series did also highlight Allen's penchant for recycling footage, props and sets from his previous projects, therefore confi rming to critics that he was merely concerned with the look of his shows. Nevertheless, Gerald Duchovnay (2008: 73) argues that the recycling of his own material, taking footage from the fi lm version of Voyage and reusing scenes already shown in previous episodes, excited viewers and network executives because ‘Allen had brought his fi lmic sense to television by combining that already proven adventure plot with the aesthetic experience of wonder that marked the best science fi ction cinema'.

Reworking formula and recycling footage would continue in his follow-up series. Lost in Space, a Swiss Family Robinson (1812) in space, had over-the-top alien creatures attack the young Will Robinson, Dr. Smith and Robot week after week. Some of the monsters even made the leap from deep sea to outer space, with Allen using the same sea creature costumes for his extraterrestrials. Of course, the spaceexploring format tied in neatly with the decade's fascination for rockets, astronauts and space travel, and Allen was keen to tap into the Space Race craze in America at that time. However, the bizarre monsters and fantastical stories eventually wore thin, and Allen moved onto his third and fourth series, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants, which differed from the man-in-a-monster-costume look of the fi rst two. The Time Tunnel harked back to the popular science fi ction theme of time travel, with H. G. Wells being the most familiar proponent of such stories, and fi tted in with Allen's fi lmmaking background as he had already directed adaptations of classic science fi ction literature. The series' premise was basic, with two scientists travelling back in time using a secret government time machine, and the ability to use 20th Century Fox's back lots and sets to produce his show meant its budget was kept under control. With the time travellers going back and forth between different periods in Earth history, the sets could be easily dressed with existing props, and stock footage from different fi lms from the studio's archive could be used to offer historical contexts. Seemingly cutting corners to save money, Allen's decision to reuse and recycle again gave his series a cinematic quality, just as cinema was about to astound audiences with 2001.

The expansive merits of Allen's creative work would be fully realised in The Land of the Giants, with audiences once more revelling in seeing the juxtaposition between gigantism and miniaturisation popular in B-movies of the 1950s. Similar to the plot of Planet of the Apes, a mixed crew of scientists and military personnel veer off course and crash land on a planet that resembles Earth. However, the planet is populated by a race of gigantic humans who see the tiny humans as a threat ironically positioning the characters with whom the audience sympathise as the invading alien aggressor. Appearances were not to be trusted, and the line between right and wrong was blurred; such lessons were typical of science fi ction during the 1960s, and Allen did not hold back on visualising this through large sets and colourful costumes. It is true that the genre has allowed space for both story and spectacle; Jon Abbott (2006: 1) sees the work of Georges Méliès (as we have seen, one of the fi rst fi lmmakers to experiment with screen science fi ction) as an example of how the genre could be presented as a work of ‘showmanship and special effects.' However, many critics have dismissed so-called childish science fi ction, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Captain Video, Allen's series and so forth, as pure fantasy, products of an unscrupulous Hollywood industry that cared only for profi ts not politics. Yet what these criticisms often forget is that science fi ction of this type fi lled a specifi c need and had a particular role in the survival and development of the science fi ction genre on both the big and small screens. Without Flash Gordon serials in the 1940s, which enticed audiences to go to the cinema regularly, the genre may have died out and we might not have seen the classic fi lms of the 1950s such as Invaders from Mars or Forbidden Planet. Without Captain Video and the like on television in the early 1950s, which carved out a permanent place for science fi ction in people's homes, we may never have felt the need or got the go-ahead to produce The Twilight Zone and its progeny.

Likewise, without the Allen productions regularly featuring in 1960s television schedules, the genre may have receded into relative obscurity with only cerebral series such as Star Trek attracting a determined but marginalised audience.