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The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen |
List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $13.49 |
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Reviews |
Features:
Description:
If you had a baking soda-powered Seaview submarine when you were a kid, then you're probably a fan of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, either the movie or the TV show, where that high-tech sub originated. And therefore you're probably a fan of that show's creator, producer-director Irwin Allen, the subject of this documentary. Allen is probably best known for starting the disaster film craze in the '70s with hit movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, where he earned the title of "Master of Disaster." But perhaps he's best loved for the string of TV series he made in the '60s: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and the bizarre Land of the Giants. The documentary glosses over Allen's film career, rightly spending more time on the TV shows, revealing Allen's penchant for monster costumes and using stock footage. We find out that Allen often filmed some sequences for black-and-white shows in color so he could use them later as stock footage. Also, when he needed to shoot a sequence that was supposed to be inside a whale, he saved a fortune by using leftover sets from Fantastic Voyage. The format of the documentary is corny, hosted by Bill Mumy and June Lockhart, along with "The Robot," all from Lost in Space, all hamming it up. But there is such a wealth of behind-the-scenes footage that any fan of Allen's TV shows will want to own this disc. Especially noteworthy is a bonus 55-minute featurette of series proposals, including lengthy footage of two shows that didn't make it, City Beneath the Sea and The Man from the 25th Century. That's worth the price of the disc. --Jim Gay
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