User Reviews

Only one person has commented on this modest one year animated show so here are my thoughts. I wonder if anyone else out there shares them.

This show was run in repeats Sunday mornings growing up in Boston, MA along with the more successful (and generally better) Fantastic Voyage (which also featured Ted Knight and Jane Webb) and the animated Hardy Boys mysteries (also featuring Jane Webb and directed by Hal Sutherland, who also directed Fantastic Voyage). It was definitely the weakest of the cartoons available on a sunday but given that the only alternative was warmed over davey and goliath claymation on CBS, I usually wound up watching this show and probably eventually saw almost every episode.

Almost everything else from my childhood memory of the show is now lost to misfiring neurons but I do recall one particular episode which was miles ahead of the rest and featured some sort of intelligent insects or alien life forms which inhabit statues and make them come to life. To this day some thirty years later I'd LOVE to see this episode again, which I have a vague suspicion is one of my all-time favorite cartoons. Anyone else recall it?

One other observation: Jane Webb sure got around in the voice-over business but in fact she got her start in the 30s in several movies before incubating some TWENTY NINE years before getting back in the business as an animated voice for countless cartoons for the following fifteen years. That has to be one of the longest layoffs in cinematic history and what a comeback!

Journey to the Center of the Earth found a home not only on the large screen, but was adapted for television as well. It first came to television as a Saturday morning cartoon during the 1967-69 seasons, when ABC aired a sequence of 17 animated films under the series title JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Directed by Hal Sutherland, these were produced by Louis Scheimer and Norman Prescott for Filmation (helping to launch the studio) in association with 20th Century-Fox Television, with the plot based on the studio's 1959 movie. The narration of the prefatory sequence set the premise and mood:

Long ago, a lone explorer named Arne Saknussemm made a fantastic descent to the fabled lost kingdom of Atlantis at the Earth's core. After many centuries, his trail was discovered, first by me, Professor Oliver Lindenbrook, my niece Cindy, student Alec McKuen, our guide Lars and his duck Gertrude. But we were not alone. The evil Count Saknussemm, last descendant of the once noble Saknussemm family, had followed us, to claim the center of the Earth for his power-mad schemes. He ordered his brute-like servant Torg to destroy our party. But the plan backfired, sealing the entrance forever. And so for us began a desperate race to the Earth's core, to learn the secret of the way back. This is the story of our new journey to the center of the Earth.

This preface, with many of its visuals repeated over the closing credits, situates the series as simultaneously an alternate version of the 1959 movie, and a possible sequel, and is open to either interpretation. There are clear similarities and differences; this time the Lindenbrook expedition included the Professor and Alec, but Hans becomes Lars (given a humorous Swedish accent), and Cindy takes the place of both Jenny and Carla, but is the love interest of no one. Gertrude, too well remembered by young viewers of the movie, had to be revived from her ignominious end as Count Saknussemm's last meal.

However, unlike the careful plotting of the movie, the series is geared strictly toward children, with cheap animation. The characters's catch phrase, "No stopping--we've got to keep moving," could have been the motto of the series, and its logo was a silhouette of the four main characters running, with Gertrude flying just ahead. They search for Atlantis, somewhere in the center of the Earth, as the spot that will show them how to get back to the surface. Each episode consisted of repetitious incidents relating the momentary menace of a monster or some other peril, such as a man-headed spider. The escapes are no more probable than the danger, such as fleeing a volcanic eruption by riding a wave of lava surfboard-style. With such incidents placed back to back without pause, there was no attempt at logic or development; endemic of this style was the lack of any opening or ending episodes to the series.

However, there is more derived from the novel than might be expected in a series of this type; in the episode Revenge of the Fossils, a race of prehistoric men are discovered by Lindenbrook and accidentally revived only to become distinctly menacing, while in Creatures of the Swamp they journey via raft. A few incidents survive from the novel and film; in Trail of Gold, they find a false Atlantis, and escape by floating in a mine tram up a shaft and away while the city's molten gold wells up around them and eventually covers the city and its inhabitants. Yet at the same time, the series, with its motifs of Atlantis and a storyline dominated by children, seems to have made a deep impression on those who saw it, and served as the true source of inspiration for many filmmakers who would tackle the story in the 1980s and beyond, perhaps having been seen at a youthful age when the series could make a profound impact. Voices were provided by Ted Knight as Lindenbrook and Saknussemm, Jane Webb as Cindy, and Pat Harrington, Jr., as Alec, Lars, and Torg. Lindenbrook took over the duties of first person narration from Alec. The sequential episode titles included Land of the Dead, Living City, Creature World, Ocean of Destruction, Perils of Volcano Island, Frozen Furies, Caveman Captives, Arena of Fear, Sleeping Slaves of Zeerah, Return of Gulliver, Labyrinth Builders, Moths of Doom, Trail of Gold, Revenge of the Fossils, Creatures of the Swamp, The Living Totems, and Doomed Island.

In 1968, Whitman published a series tie-in coloring book as well as a volume in the Big Little Books series as No. 26. Adapted by Paul S. Newman, this version of Journey to the Center of the Earth was subtitled The Fiery Foe, and tells how Saknussemm traps the Lindenbrook party in the realm of the Reergs, a strange underground race. The next year, Whitman Junior Guild issued a round jigsaw puzzle (no. 4426) with 125 interlocking pieces, 20 inches in diameter, illustrating a scene from the series.