Todd’s Movie Blog

I have been watching a lot of Hulu lately, Alec Baldwin and Seth McFarlane can eat my brain if they want, especially old episodes of that sometimes great, sometimes hokey show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.  As the new Star Trek revamp is approaching, the old show has been on my mind quite a bit and I began to notice many similarites between the two shows.  Number one, all of the Seaview crew wore different colored uniforms depending on their station, red for engineering, blue was for the bridge crew, while the command crew wore military kahki, ie yellow.  Number two, every time the Seaview is attacked everybody gets tossed back and forth around the bridge while large sparks erupt from most of the equipment, obviously the idea of a circuit breaker never occured to anyone.  And number three, only the most important members of the crew are to be used on missions, Admiral Nelson, Captain Crane and either executive officer Lt Morton or Chief Sharkey.    Now compare this with classic Trek.  Red tunics are enginieering and security, blue is science and medical, while yellow is for comand crew, the same spark flying, people tumbling scenes are used when ever the Enterprise is attacked, and the away teams are always made up of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and sometimes chief engineer Scotty.  Since Voyage was a top twenty show at the time Roddenberry was creating his “space wagon train” it doesn’t seem too far fetched that he might have “borrowed” some things from a popular science fiction program. I know it is blasphemy to even suggest that Trek was not completely original, but nothing is ever created in a vacum.