User Reviews

Surfacing at the South Pole following a long mission, the crew of the Seaview are horrified to find the sky has changed colour - it is literally on fire! A meteor storm has apparently ignited the atmosphere of the Southern Hemisphere. The world looks doomed.

At the United Nations, Admiral Nelson ( Richard Basehart ) proposes to launch a missile, thus blasting the burning gases out into space. A small group of U.N. officials travel in Seaview to see whether the plan is viable. Most are in favour, but Weber ( David J. Stewart ), a rival of Nelson's, is adamantly opposed to it, and resorts to murder to stop it going ahead. He also drugs the crew into inciting mutiny...

A no-frills remake of the 1961 'Voyage' feature film, clearly produced as a 'filler'. All the shots of blazing skies were lifted from said picture. Unlike the movie, here only the bottom half of the world is in trouble ( presumably to excuse the footage of F.S.-1 soaring through clear blue skies ). Nelson's plan was rejected outright originally, whereas in William Welch's version it is given serious consideration. David J. Stewart is suitably creepy as 'Weber', though why he kills only the men from the U.N. and not Nelson himself is strange. Also in one scene he uses his specially-drugged signet ring to inject a large number of crewmen - just how much drug can one small ring contain?

Interesting to hear Richard Basehart's 'Nelson' saying lines originally uttered by Walter Pidgeon. Despite the familiar scenario, this works reasonably well in its own right. Shame we don't get Barbara Eden swinging her hips though.

WARNING: THERE IS A SPOILER AT THE VERY END OF THIS ARTICLE The earlier criticism of this episode as a "shameless" rip of the original feature film is a bit unfair on a couple of levels. For starters, LAND OF THE GIANTS was hardly taking up Irwin Allen's attention as yet, as this is an early 1966 episode of VOYAGE, obviously shot in 1965 . . . . For another matter, the series had yet to go completely nuts with its plots (we hadn't yet seen the plethora of aliens, and not too many monsters from the deep, either, and the werewolf episode(s?) had yet to air.

As to it being a blatant remake of the movie, Irwin Allen's stock-in-trade since the end of the 1950s had been, essentially, remaking movies (or, at least, doing his own "takes" on the plots of various movies) of all kinds, whether it was DeMille's THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH transmuted into THE BIG CIRCUS, or Mike Todd's AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS spawning FIVE WEEKS IN A BALLOON. Now given that history, how (and why?) would, or could he not remake his own creations, such as they were, with a burgeoning work load of on-going series stretching the talents of his best writers, and the switch to color filming stretching his budgets? Additionally, as a remake/reconsideration of the original film's story, this is not a bad effort, and with a cast that's not quite as threadbare as one might expect -- there was no room (or budget) for the likes of Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre et al, but Robert H. Harris was an established New York stage actor, as was David J. Stewart, and he made a much more sinister presence than Henry Daniell in the latter's limited appearance in the original film.

As a side note, I should point out that I seem to remember from somewhere that in the original script, this was to have been Chief Sharkey's swansong, as Terry Becker's initial tenure on the show had not worked out as planned.