It's all about creating "the public image".
If you ask the man-on-the street to name a SCUBA diver,
if they are old enough, they might recall Cousteau. Might.
The only one to have successfully accomplished this was JYC.
Lloyd Bridges may have had similar impact, but
the intended end-effect of his media product was not as was that of Cousteau's
Silent World.
To keep diving, JYC needed money. The carefully crafted & generated media image was the source of funding.
There are a whole lot of
vidiots out there who are getting good imagery, but have no idea of what it takes to "make a TV show". PBS prolly has a special phone line, just for them. (Go
raise your own money, produce your 26 minute show, maybe we'll have a look, but before we'll buy it, we'll need 5 more shows and a lot of changes)
Cousteau's media presence was 80% his own cult following (plus 18% harrowing danger, 2% SCUBA is interesting), so he was a "celebrity". Being parodied on SNL and Zissou (the closing credits disclaimer notwithstanding) confirmed this.
There are no SCUBA Celebrities, at least on the mass market scale, because no-one else has figured out how to make it work financially.
Doubilet (who?) is eeking out a living. Any others? Giddings who? (He even tried Supermodels in wet rubber suits. Fail.)
How many can you (or your non-SCUBA friends)
name? http://www.scubahalloffame.com/main.html
In a micro scale, look at all of our associates who are avid u/w shooters, all the way from old Ektachrome guys, to our fellow airline passengers with Pelican cases full of SLRs and GoPros.
Everybody is
going to be famous.
As much as we here get around in the industry, people only remember my traveling companion,
SCUBA Barbie (#2 from the left)
The guy on the left has had substantial impact on
many hundreds of readers here, impact as in: they have met him and entrusted their lives to him. Celebrity?