Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Every time VTTBOTS plays on TV I have very carefully checked out the image quality in the area immediately surrounding the (then) 27-year-old Barbara Eden. It looks good! I remember watching this one at the theater when I was 11, and paying a quarter for admission to a matinee. The well-endowed Eden was a goddess to an 11-year-old boy.

About the DVD quality I cannot comment. The film is typical early color stock (kind of grainy) and the OAR is 2.35:1. Unfortunately when shown on TV it is most often cropped to 4:3.

The Cold War was barely underway when this was new, and the Cuban Missile Crisis had not yet happened. Later that same year we all became aware of the true use of those nuclear submarines, which had only been publicly acknowledged for 5 years. The year before this film at the UN a little fat bald man had taken off his shoe and pounded on the desk and threatened to bury us. The tension racheted higher until relieved by a wonderfull movie called Dr. Strangelove.

Watch for several cast members in the movie who subsequently played in the spin-off TV series.

Gary

HDNet Movies has telecast it in 1080i HD OAR. That's the way to see it.

I think I saw this on in HD on UHD or INHD a while back. "global warming edition"? Too funny. Barbara Eden was most definitely #1 when I was a kid in her genie outfit. Didn't miss a show.

larry

What's up with that? The next thing you know they will be coming out with Airport (Terrorists Edition). Let the hysteria continue.

Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 4.0), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround).

What the heck is DD 4.0? Never heard of that one before.

That is in fact the original soundtrack mix. It was a 4-channel format made for the theaters back when audio was delivered from vacuum tube amplifiers. The theater I saw VTTBOTS in had four huge Altec Lansing "Voice of the Theater" speakers, high-efficiency horn designs that filled a theater when driven with 10 watt tube amplifiers.

VTTBOTS was mixed in four channel sound on what was called the "Westrex Recording System", essentially an analog multichannel system manufactured by the cinema sound division of Western Electric. Cinemascope distribution prints were available in two main formats, 35mm with optical sound (for older theaters) and 70mm with magnetic sound (the preferred format).

I like the fact that we got the original soundtrack mix on the DVD. When one records a 4.0 channel format into a digital system that supports 5.1 or better, the missing channels are simply zeroes, and the sound compresses nicely. Very likely they simply used some dynamic expansion to reduce the audible hiss from the analog master tapes.

Gary

Gary nailed it quire nicely, but for those still a little foggy on the 4.0 sound format, this indicates four discrete channels of audio, being the left/center/right/and mono surround track. While the channel configuration is identical to Dolby Surround/Pro-Logic, having the tracks kept in their original discrete (no cross-mixing) 4-channel form provides superior separation over the previously used matrix encoded Dolby formats.