At the bottom of the SeaQuest VAULT lies the story of the show from its inception until its untimely cancellation. In the days before internet fandom really took hold, the resource of choice for fans of sci-fi & fantasy were magazines such as Starlog in the US and Starburst in the UK.
By the early nineties, however, with ‘Cult’ themes becoming more prevalent in mainstream media, popular titles like Cult Times, Cult TV, SFX and TV Zone were flying off the shelves into the hands of fans keen to keep up with their favourite shows while enjoying retrospectives of the classics. TV Zone was in fact the world’s longest-running cult television magazine – publishing 231 issues between 1989 and 2008.
And indeed, were it not for issue 49 UK fans would’ve been none the wiser that they had literally not been given the full picture of the new underwater Sci-fi series from producer Steven Spielberg – and as John Ainsworth points out in his piece above, (click for larger) the cuts to the pilot episode detailed here may well have been to its overall detriment.
Although the show was already at a huge disadvantage, its acknowledged that there was much to enjoy, not least the performances and the SFX (made even murkier somewhere between the conversion to PAL from NTSC) and with the change of producer (signs of things to come!) the show was going to find its sea legs and become a serious contender. This is reflected by some unbiased reaction from the letters page (bottom pic) where fans are complimentary in the main and dismissive of the bad press – citing the early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a comparison…
MUCH more to come..!
ML