Beginnings

One of the newest social networks is Pinterest. I joined and then sat for a while trying to figure out what it was good for. You just post pictures. I had trouble with that. I’m a writer. That’s why I blog here. Blog on Tumblr. Post statuses on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace before that went to crap.

But just post a picture? What was the point? Well, to be honest, I’m still not sure what the point is, but I have several boards with several pins on each and others must like what I’m pinning because it’s getting repinned.

This, however, isn’t a blog about Pinterest. It’s a blog about beginnings. Pinterest merely stimulated it. And my reading of Ray Bradbury’s “Bradbury Speaks” stimulated it further.

Where did I get my love of all things geek? When did I become interested in Sci-Fi? And when I was pinning a few pictures, I knew. I was able to track it back to the beginning.

Before Star Trek (the original series, by the way,) before Lost in Space (Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!), there was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (I probably could go even further back, maybe Astroboy or something, but let’s not dig too deeply into the dark recesses of my memories. There’s creepy things in there. Memories of a little critter getting run over by a car and a clawed hand puncturing a tire. The zanti misfits from the Outer Limits episode of the same name, which were Chihuahua-sized ant-like creatures with creepy human faces that gave me nightmares for weeks.

So we’ll stop at Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. What about it lit a spark in my young mind? First, the Seaview. 

For 1964 (for the television show or 1961 for the movie with Walter Pidgeon), the Seaview was stunning. At the time, subs were either the WWII style triangular shaped subs or the newer round torpedo style nuclear subs. But the Seaview, now that, that was a futuristic shape. With that awesome front shape with manta ray like wings and the glass viewports in the front. Of course, most of us didn’t know that this style wouldn’t have survived the crush depths they pretended (a round hull is more efficient in that regard, forget the glass) and the winged nose and flat surfaces of the Seaview would have created turbulence that would have made it easy to find with sonar.

But it looked so damned cool! I can’t tell you how many Seaview type submarines were scribbled in the margins of all my work at school.

Season one was filled with espionage, many about Admiral Nelson’s NIMR (Nelson Institute of Marine Research) against an evil consortium of totalitarian foreign governments. Yet there were smatterings of aliens (portrayed by a young Robert Duvall), giant sea plankton, and even dinosaurs. And then, in season 2, they went to the monster of the week format, but more than that, they brought out the Flying Sub!

In the immortal words of George Takei, “Oh, my.”

I had this model, along with a foot long model of the Seaview. Let me tell you, this thing was awe-inspiring to an 8-year-old in the early 1960s. A flying sub! Granted, I don’t think I ever knew how this thing flew, I just took it for granted it did. It was like a space ship.

And speaking of space ships, this Irwin Allen production led to another (fanfare please), Lost in Space and the Jupiter 2.

Oh, sure, the flying sub had a cool shape, was sports car yellow, it could fly, but even though it looked like a space ship, it wasn’t. The Jupiter 2 was a space ship. Lost in Space was the first television show to leave the Earth. A full year before Star Trek’s Enterprise. So it had a full year to influence me, to fill my young mind with thoughts of the stars, robots, monsters, space walks, lasers (long before the phaser).

If the margins of my notebooks and papers had been filled with drawings of the Seaview, now they were crammed with Sergio Aragones Mad Magazine-like images of spaceships, submarines, flying subs, Jupiter 2s, spacepods, monsters, planets, and space battles.

It was 1965 and I was mesmerized.