Ladies and Gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed my personal recollections of Irwin Allen's 1960s sci-fi/fantasy television series. (I tried to make it sound as though Irwin himself were writing the wrap-up.)As a final statement, hopefully, I would like to point out the appeal of those shows to a 'little one' back in the day. Readers who were born years after Allen's series were made -- and even after the years of syndication -- might wonder what the big deal was.
The hooks in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants, really, were the respective show's toy factor. With the exception of The Time Tunnel, which did have the neato titular tunnel, they all had a cool vehicle. And ones with large sized perspex windows... windows to see what horrible creature (literally and figuratively) or 'phenomena' was lurking outside.
Keep in mind that television series in the 1960s were well marketed -- way ahead of their big-screen brethren -- so many had plastic model kits, toys, and board games tied in for we little people to enjoy. (The AMT plastic model kit of The Munsters car was a huge seller; as was, no surprise, AMT's kit of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise.)
Irwin Allen influenced many a little boy and, I'm sure, little girls. And some of them went on to work in the motion picture and television business -- to work on films shot in coffee shops.
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