I once heard 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' actor Davis Hedison offer an interesting tidbit of popular-culture trivia. Appearing on the Mike Douglas Show--that will tell all you other aging baby-boomers how far back I go--Hedison told a delighted crowd that...at the height of the Irwin Allen sci-fi series' popularity...the Flying Sub was getting nearly twice the fan mail that any of the hard-working human actors did.
One of the most iconic bits of 'fictional tech' from the very-creative decade of the '60s, the Flying Sub comes behind perhaps only the starship Enterprise and the Batmobile in terms of immediate public recognition. And in a show that was--to be honest--pretty much a 'seaweed monster of the week' format , the appearance of the combination jet-plane and submarine...in the banana-yellow shape of a UFO...was as eagerly-anticipated in each episode as that of any 'speaking' character.
When Moebius released their new-tool Seaview some years ago, geeks like myself were thrilled to see that the company was canny enough to release the 1/128 scale Flying Sub as a separate kit: I didn't give a whit about the big spade-shaped u-boat...and the impressive big-scale Flying Sub was more than I wanted to get into...but it was great to have a hockey-puck-sized version of 'junior' to play with. Also included in the latter kit were a slick 'in-flight' stand for the flying flapjack, and two other lesser-seen auxiliary vessels from the show...the diving bell 'Apple One,' and the 2-man submersible mini-sub.
Being too small to add much detail to, I satisfied myself with 'dressing up' the three with some custom markings. The show's originals were largely 'blank'--one presumes so that stock footage could be reused over and over again with no troubling conflicts of continuity--but it seemed reasonable (and more fun) to assume that 'in service' craft would be marked with the same designators and service stencils as any craft, anywhere.
I gave the Flying Sub itself a 'Modex' number and even a name. (Several of the Flying Subs were depicted as destroyed during the course of the show's run, so it seemed obvious there would be a fleet of them.) Markings need a neat logo...so I tapped the show's 'backstory' for a notion. The show's writers had the Seaview and her crew operating under a partnership between Admiral Nelson's eponymous 'Institute for Marine Research' (NIMR) and a US government agency posited as the 'oceanic' counterpart to NASA: the Federal Bureau of Marine Exploration (FBME). For the latter's seal, I 'borrowed' the striking graphic used by a certain 'real world' agency with a similar mission...changed the lettering and switched the colors slightly...and had a visually-interesting 'meatball' to decorate my craft.
The diving bell and mini-sub are, oddly enough, essentially 'real world' designs in use even now. For the penny-sized (literally) bell, I used the 'traditional' show scheme with a few added stencils. For the mini-sub--which I confess I had to 'look up' online, to recall any details--I started with the show's boring all-red scheme, and added some trim stripes and NIMR nameplates on the sides.
(Never has occured to me before...but the mini-sub has a certain 'Gerry Anderson' quality to it...like something out of 'Stingray'!)
