Hypnogoria: ONE SEASON WONDERS Part III

We continue our series on short-lived science fiction shows that barely lasted a season and take a look at an early TV superhero. However this wasn’t a familiar costumed crusader from Marvel or DC, rather this was a hero spawned just for TV - Man from Atlantis!

Now like many of the series we are discussing in this series of articles, Man from Atlantis, which I am resisting the urge to abbreviate to MAF, first splashed onto our screens in a TV movie. Airing on NBC on March 4th 1977, Man from Atlantis had a mysterious man washing up on a beach This unfortunate fellow, played by Patrick Duffy, has anaemia and can offer no clue to his identity or home. However he had webbed fingers and toes, possessed above normal strength, could withstand great depths and high water pressure, and could apparently communicate with some sea life, mostly dolphins and whales. He also swam in a manner similar to a cetacean too.

He is placed in the care of scientist Doctor Elizabeth Merrill, played by Belinda J. Montgomery, and named Mark Harris. Ok, not the most glamorous name, but hey he could have been lumbered with Flipper or Gill-boy! Anyhow in this first adventure, his unique water-based talents are put to good use by the US Navy to locate a lost submarine. However he discovers an underwater lair built by the sinister Mr Schubert, played with gusto by Victor Buono, a scientific genius who has decided time is up for humanity and wants to wipe out the world and start over in a marine-based utopia of his own devising. And in a strange coincidence, this was exactly the same megalomaniac scheme that Bond villain Stromberg was attempting in The Spy Who Loved Me which came out later the same year. Perhaps they both went to the same Evil Villain school…

This TV movie was a huge hit, however a series did not immediately follow. Somewhat unusually, NBC commissioned not just one sequel TV movie, but three more feature length adventures for their newly-minted marine hero. And hence a few months later, on 7th May, Man from Atlantis rode again, well, swam again, in a new adventure called The Death Scouts. This had Mark and Dr Liz uncovering some aliens lurking the depths of the oceans checking out Earth as a possible invasion target. Mere weeks later, the third TV movie aired, entitled Killer Spores, and this featured, well, killer spores from space. But with the wrinkle said spores were intelligent And could possess people. And then in early June, the fourth aquatic adventure, The Disappearances aired, in which Dr Liz is, well you guessed it, disappeared, and the Man from Atlantis uncovers a plot to kidnap Earth’s top scientists and bugger off to another planet. And if you think that sounds a little too similar to the plot of the first TV movie, you would be right. And perhaps that was an alarm bell that the Man from Atlantis concept perhaps would have been better served staying as a TV movie or two.

However the ratings were good, and that summer the trips to the pool were well and truly ruined by dozens of kids splashing about emulating Mark’s signature dolphin kick swimming style. Hence NBC struck while the iron was hot and commissioned a series which began airing mere months later in September 1977.

The series pretty much picked up where the TV movies had left off, but with the added wrinkle that now Mark was in charge of the super-duper submarine The Cetacean and each week would pilot the craft into some new underwater adventure. Now on the face of it this seemed like a great idea. After all, Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had a similar concept and that show had run for four seasons between 1964 and 1968. Furthermore the set-up was not dissimilar to Star Trek, indeed the bridge of the Cetacean was suspiciously similar to the original Enterprise, and that was not a coincidence as the show’s producer Herbert F. Solow has been of the execs for original Trek.

However perhaps they should have taken a little more time developing the show’s concepts, for the series soon hit several snags. Firstly filming underwater sequences every week was fiddly and expensive. Secondly, and more seriously, the series struggled to invent a convincing rogues gallery for the Man from Atlantis, something essential for any budding superhero. While Mr Schubert would return several times, becoming the nearest thing Mark had to an arch enemy, the show failed to build up any real recurring villains or threats. There was a conman character named Muldoon - sort of like a marine based Harry Mudd - but having him appear twice within a half dozen episodes felt like the writers had no real idea what to do with Man from Atlantis.

This suspicion is supported by the fact that several episodes ditched any marine theme at all, with adventures that had Mark transported to an alien planet, thrown back in time to the Wild West, and even, somewhat bizarrely, turning up in Renaissance Verona to become embroiled with the events of Romeo and Juliet. Now possibly these out of the water adventures were a means to cut costs and use existing sets and costumes, but it felt like the show was running out of ideas fast.

Now considering Marvel’s Submariner and DC’s Aquaman had been having undersea adventures for years at this point, and as we mentioned, on the small screen Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea clocked up four seasons and over a hundred episodes, there was really no excuse for struggling to find suitable thrilling stories set beneath the waves.

Similarly the characters weren't very well served either. Mark's mysterious past was never really explored, missing a huge opportunity for stories building up the lore of lost Atlantis. Schubert quickly became a generic baddie rather than a proper themed villain. But worst of all, poor old Dr Elizabeth’s role was often reduced to standing around on the bridge and very little else. In fact she was getting so badly served by the scripts, Belinda J Montgomery called her lawyers to get her out of her contract, and hence last left the series in episode eleven. A new female lead was cast, Dr Jenny Reynolds, played by Lisa Blake Richards, but by this point the ratings were sinking fast, and the show came to an abrupt end with episode thirteen which aired on 6th June 1978. Unlucky for some indeed.

And it was a shame, for Man from Atlantis clearly had captured the public's imagination. The first four TV movies were novelised by Richard Woodley, and released as a paperback series, while Marvel comics released a monthly Man from Atlantis comic. And this was no cheap cash-in either. To begin with on art duties were with Frank Robbins and Frank Springer, but providing scripts was the great Bill Mantlo had written for most of the classic Marvel heroes, plus produced two comics based on toy lines - Micronauts in 1977 and Rom Space Knight in 1979 - which became big hits in their own right. However the comic only began in early 1978, and the title was scuppered after seven issues when the TV show was cancelled. In a similar vein, there was a range of toys planned from master action figure makers Kenner, but with the cancellation of the series meant they never got out of the prototype phase.

The series has also been a hit around the world. In the UK, ITV acquired the TV movies and series and began airing them on a Saturday tea time, in competition with the scifi juggernaut that was Doctor Who, then in its fifteen season and still with Tom Baker helming the TARDIS. Stiff competition indeed. And yet for a few weeks Man from Atlantis won the ratings battle with the venerable Time Lord.

In February 1978, ITV’s own children's magazine, Look-In began running a Man From Atlantis comic strip drawn by Mike Noble. But of course, like its Marvel-ous sibling, the strip ended in June 1978 when the series sank beneath the waves. However there was a Man from Atlantis annual for Christmas 1978. Plus, again mirroring events over the pond, a range of Man from Atlantis toys from Denys Fisher was planned, but never made it to the shops thanks to the TV show getting cancelled.

Considering there were books, ongoing comic strips and planned toy ranges on both sides of the Atlantic, one can't help feeling that perhaps NBC was a little hasty in scuttling the show. It's true there were problems with the scripts and the series hadn't found a solid direction. But there have been many shows that had similar woes in their first season but found their feet in a second. And unlike most of the other one season wonders we are discussing in this series, the Man from Atlantis wasn’t axed after a handful of episodes aired. Indeed, counting the quartet of TV movies, the show had clocked up seventeen adventures and had run for practically a full season, rather than being cancelled before Christmas like so many other short-lived scifi series.

Its true ratings were down, but might it have been wise to let the show rest, develop some stronger concepts and scripts and come back hopefully bigger and better for a second season… And maybe, just maybe, they could have - shock horror - given the show a bit more money? Considering there was plenty of merch out there, clearly other folks still believed Man from Atlantis had legs. Or fins. Whatever…

As it was, the Man from Atlantis was not to return to our screens, but Mark would eventually resurface again, albeit many many years later and in print. For while Patrick Duffy had gone on to bigger and better things, starring in Dallas and so forth, he clearly still had an affinity for the character. For, in June 2016, he published his own Man from Atlantis novel, which picked the action up many years after the events of the TV series. The book’s blurb outlined Duffy's grand ambitions for the book -

Not needing to confine his imagination to the special effects limitations of the 1970s, he has fleshed out an incredible life history of not just Mark Harris but of his entire Atlantean race

And apparently it was going to be a trilogy, but as of yet no further books have surfaced. Whether their publication was nobbled by the villainous Schubert or just poor sales, I will leave for you to decide…