A good example is Operation Undersea, which was made to serve several purposes in one compact package. First, it's one of the earliest episodes - the seventh - shown on Disneyland in its first season, when the show was working hard to make a winning impression on the public. Second, it's a nicely produced general-interest documentary about the technical and geographical challenges of filming an epic production set largely on and under water. Third, it's a making-of infomercial that gives tantalizing glimpses of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which opened in theaters two short weeks after the program aired.
And fourth, Operation Undersea is a not-so-subtle promo for the whole Disney company, scattering Disney emblems and the Disney name throughout its 53-minute running time. Commercial items from other businesses are shown and named at various times - the Mitchell motion-picture camera and the Leica still camera, for instance, and Aqua-Lung diving gear - but if these moments are product placements, the entire movie is a product placement for Disney itself. That goes especially for the finale, which is a preview of what turned out to be a crowning achievement of the Disneyland series: the legendary episodes about Davy Crockett, the Tennessee fighter, politician, and folk hero who died defending the Alamo in 1836. Disney's three-part portrayal sparked one of the first and most colossal youth-market crazes of the baby-boom decades.
Infomercial or not, Operation Undersea is quite enjoyable. Disneyland episodes were always slotted into one of four categories - Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Frontierland, or Adventureland - and while Operation Undersea would seem to be a natural for Adventureland, the realm of nature documentaries, it's presented under the Fantasyland label, probably because the movie it's about, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is a science-fiction movie.
The documentary begins with an in-person introduction by Walt Disney, who displays a fancy-looking copy of the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, whose books had inspired filmmakers since the silent era, and whose Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) became hit movies for other studios soon after Disney scored big with his underwater adventure. Then a second host, Winston Hibler, takes over. If his voice sounds familiar, it's because he narrated a long list of True-Life Adventures, as Disney's nature documentaries were called.
Here we see Hibler as well as hear him, introducing a delightful animation that gives an overview of undersea exploration through the ages. According to the cartoon, it all started with attempts to breathe air from the surface through a straw, which doesn't work; then came claustrophobic diving bells, cumbersome diving suits, and finally the Aqua-Lung with its portable breathing tube and tank of compressed air. This device was only a decade old when Operation Undersea was made, but the basic idea is still around, now called scuba, an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. The animation symbolizes humanity's yen for deep-water journeys by picturing a fetching mermaid chased beneath the sea by a very un-fetching guy. It's an amusing touch, and for me this cartoon is the high point of Operation Undersea.
There's more to come, focused mainly on location shooting done by director Richard Fleischer for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in the Bahamas, where some of the world's clearest water could be found. One portion shows the filming of a funeral on the ocean floor, and later there's a scene that took on unexpected tension when an uninvited shark swam into the area. The cameras kept rolling and their footage ended up in the finished film. Many of the other fish in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were put in place by handlers, who carried them in bags and released them into camera range when the time was right. Fans of photogenic sea dwellers - squids, groupers, manta rays - have plenty to look at in Operation Undersea, which also explains the technical challenges of the production, where underwater scenery had to be weighed down and shooting sessions were kept to less than an hour for safety reasons.
If fish alone don't have enough star power for you, Operation Undersea gives close-up glimpses of actors at work: James Mason as Captain Nemo, a mysterious mariner piloting a nineteenth-century submarine through the ocean depths; Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre as a scientist and his assistant investigating a series of unexplained shipwrecks; and Kirk Douglas as Ned Land, a rough-and-ready whaler who becomes the story's hero. You can't always tell who's who in the undersea scenes, where everyone wears the clunky equipment that Verne's novel describes - and it would be even harder if the movie crew hadn't laid carpets on the sea bottom so the camera's vision wouldn't be obscured by stirred-up sand. When the actors are above water, of course, everything is crystal clear.
Operation Undersea was a great success for Disneyland, winning the Emmy for best original show of 1954 and attracting even more viewers for its rerun than for its first airing. It's a persuasive commercial for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and an appealing entertainment in its own right.
Directors: Winston Hibler, Hamilton Luske
Producer: Walt Disney
Screenplay: Winston Hibler, John Meredyth Lucas, Ted Sears
Cinematographers: M. Laverne Pederson, Jack Whitman
Film Editing: Lynn Harrison, Grant K. Smith
Music: George Bruns
With: Walt Disney (himself), Winston Hibler (himself), Kirk Douglas (Ned Land), James Mason (Captain Nemo), Paul Lukas (Professor Pierre Aronnax), Peter Lorre (Conseil)
BW-53m.
by David Sterritt
