Was the underwater world so different durring "Sea Hunt"era?

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ScubaMarc

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So I ran out of YouTube/Netflix shows to watch, so now I am watching every episode of sea hunt. I know the show is mostly filmed near Catalina Island but I am amazed how the show shows portrays every dive in a lush, hilly topographic environment. My dive experience is in the North East/Caribbean/Philippines areas where miles of sand is all you sometimes see. Was the underwater world that different then /S ?

As for the fish life, I know that is (UNFORTUNATELY) very different today. Of course, Mike always had to defend himself from the Man Eating sharks on every other dive.
 
I don't think it was so much different back then. They pretty much had to "set a scene." If they showed a sandy bottom as far as you could see, who'd want to watch that? Besides, where would Mike Nelson or the bad guys hide so they could ambush each otehr? Of course, they never notice the bubbles coming from behind the other persons hiding place since they're, you know, a natural occurrence. :p
 
I know the show is mostly filmed near Catalina Island but I am amazed how the show shows portrays every dive in a lush, hilly topographic environment. My dive experience is in the North East/Caribbean/Philippines areas where miles of sand is all you sometimes see. Was the underwater world that different then /S ?

It depends on where you are what the environment will be. Around the islands is the kelp forest you see, if you were to go to some areas around there you will find also find sand but it is not the major feature. The Ca coast and islands have rock as a main feature, and the life that inhabits it.
 
According to Wikipedia, "Underwater sequences were often created during post-production from individual scenes shot at many different locations, including studio tanks and various underwater sites in California, Florida, and the Bahamas. Much stock footage was shot and later mixed with episode-specific character footage."

It also says Lloyd Bridges knew nothing about scuba before the show began, but by the end he was doing nearly all his own underwater stunts.
 
According to Wikipedia, "Underwater sequences were often created during post-production from individual scenes shot at many different locations, including studio tanks and various underwater sites in California, Florida, and the Bahamas. Much stock footage was shot and later mixed with episode-specific character footage."

There are single episodes of Sea Hunt that were filmed in all those places then cut/spliced/voiced-over, etc... Over half of the underwater footage for the entire series was shot in the main basin at Silver Springs, Florida. (That is the reason we hold the Sea Hunt Forever Event at Silver Springs.) Lamar Boren (the main cinematographer) liked to film in the kelp tank at Marineland of the Pacific in Palos Verdes. If you are familiar with the area you can recognize many topside shots taken in Palos Verdes, Malibu, Laguna Beach, and Catalina Island. The show didn't exactly have a very good continuity editor. It's fun to watch a single underwater scene and see Mike jumping in the water with double tanks, swimming along the bottom with a single tank on, then swimming behind a rock and coming out the other side with tripple tanks on. Many times his doublehose regulator switched between Voit cans, US Divers cans, and hybrid combination cans on the same dive. You can make a drinking game out of it :) My 2psi
 
I am ok with all the continuity issues, kinda fun to spot them. It could not be easy doing all the underwater work back then. It's cute to see safety divers in the clip when Mike is supposed to be alone or seeing the same fish and background pass in front of the camera in the same way, 5 minutes earlier.
 
The show was fun. You couldn’t rewind in those days, he might be switching gear between takes, but you had no way to check if was wearing a single or twin cylinders between scenes. The tanks he used on the boat were made out of balsa wood. The problem with producing a show like that is getting the dive conditions just right. A big storm could ruin in water shooting for a week or more. The springs in Florida made it much easier and since scuba and TV were both new, who cared or could tell the difference?

It would be great if someone could recreate the magic of that show, but modern viewers would rip it to shreds in hundred different ways.
 
Many of you who were born after around 1960 (about the time Sea Hunt went off the air) might not know that prior to that time humans could see only black and white. There was no concept of color - as you can observe with Sea Hunt and other TV shows of that era.

The evolution of human ability to view color was not to happen for a few more years. For those of us older folks who lived through the transition, diving became more popular because we discovered that reefs looks a heck of lot nicer in color. It also made food look at lot more appetizing. That's about the time I started to gain a lot of weight. I sometimes long for the simpler days of back and white, when I did not have to debate with my wife about whether the drapes in the living room should be fuchsia or magenta.
 
The show was fun. You couldn’t rewind in those days, he might be switching gear between takes, but you had no way to check if was wearing a single or twin cylinders between scenes. The tanks he used on the boat were made out of balsa wood. The problem with producing a show like that is getting the dive conditions just right. A big storm could ruin in water shooting for a week or more. The springs in Florida made it much easier and since scuba and TV were both new, who cared or could tell the difference?

It would be great if someone could recreate the magic of that show, but modern viewers would rip it to shreds in hundred different ways.

Not to mention that it's a heck of a lot easier to do a full day of shooting in a Florida spring or a studio tank than in the ocean off Southern California - the in-water cast and crew are less likely to be popsicles after a couple takes.

I actually just found the first season pilot episode (both in terms of order and plot) on YouTube a few weeks ago; it was admittedly hilarious to see him repeatedly bounce up and down from 60 ft when the premise was the trapped pilot reported he only had 15 minutes of oxygen.
 
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