by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles finally got home from work I ran a half-hour
unsold TV pilot from 1958 which I’d downloaded from archive.org: Sea Divers, a pretty obvious knockoff of the successful
syndicated series Sea Hunt, which
had starred Lloyd Bridges as a freelance ocean diver who got mixed up in
various adventures. “Created” by Harold Minniear and Lamar Boren for their own
production company, written by Charles Maxwell and James Benson Nablo and
directed by old RKO “B” hand Leslie Goodwins, Sea Divers wasn’t bad. Alas, it wasn’t very good, either;
whatever interest it has now lies mainly in the absolutely gorgeous body of
series star Rhodes Reason as Tom Gorman, who spends most of the show blessedly
clad in nothing but a pair of super-tight swim trunks that show off a quite
enviable basket. Charles joked that had Minniear and Boren been able to pitch
it to a Gay TV executive, they
probably could have got it sold just on the basis that it featured a really hot
guy wearing almost nothing! Alas, Sea Divers was an all-too-obvious ripoff of Sea Hunt (a show that wasn’t any great shakes, either) and
the only really interesting aspect aside from Reason’s bod was the ambiguous
character of Hilda Thayer (nicely played by Joyce Holden), who gives a series
of increasingly preposterous reasons for wanting to hire Gorman and his boss
and business manager, Mike Gilbert (John Smith — not the same one as
Pocahontas’s boyfriend, surely!), to salvage a mysterious canister from the
wreck of a small boat called the Katy. (It might have had more of a name than that, but “Katy” is what we get
to see.)
At first she tells them her father was an oceanographer and had left
an important scientific secret aboard the Katy and she wants them to salvage it so he can be
properly credited with its discovery. Later she tells them her dad found the
location of the legendary wreck of the Spanish treasure ship San
Salvador and had started to salvage it when
the Katy sank (or was sunk by hostile parties also after the fortune) and
took him down with her. There’s also a fishing boat with its lines out where
there aren’t any fish to be had — obviously the inhabitants are spying on Hilda and Our Heroes
for some nefarious purpose, but we’re not told precisely what. Later it turns
out that Hilda and the two divers aboard the mystery boat are jewel smugglers —
though why Hilda felt a need to
hire two more divers to go after
the sunken loot when she already had two divers for that purpose is a mystery —
and Hilda tries to shoot Our Heroes with a gun they gave her for protection
against the bad guys (“Haven’t you guys ever seen a movie?” I joked. “You never give a gun to a morally ambiguous woman!”), but
they’re able to escape surprisingly easily and end the situation decently by
shooting a harpoon gun at Evelyn’s sleeve, thereby pinning her to their boat
and preventing her from firing her gun. (Huh?) There’s also a comic-relief
character named Marty (Jeanne Vaughn), an 18-year-old girl who specializes in
making herself obnoxious as she tries to horn in on the divers’ adventures and
drink alongside them even though she isn’t yet 21. Sea Divers takes place in San Diego and at least some of the
exteriors are quite recognizable (including the outside of the Bali H’ai
restaurant), which made the piece a bit more fun for San Diegans like Charles
and I, but mostly this is pretty dull, with lots of shots of divers chasing
each other either on the surface or underwater, and such is the nature of SCUBA
equipment that one deep-sea diver looks pretty much like another deep-sea diver
and it’s not always easy to tell who’s who or what side they’re on.
