Man from Atlantis: Scavenger Hunt

My last post about Doctor Who was perhaps an indication of how I have been thinking about Atlantis and other mythologies as treated in the cult TV world. Of course Doctor Who has been able to make remarkably free with any mythology of earth or created for another planet, but here w have a show also drawing on the mythology of Atlantis, just about the supposed last man from Atlantis. In fact Atlantis as far as I can see doesn't really occur in it at all, except as a pretext for a man being remarkably aquatically able. I had somehow managed to get to this great age without actually seeing an episode of The Man From Atlantis, a lack which has been remedied by the purchase of a boxed set from amazon.de. The title translates as Der Mann aus dem Meer in German, btw, and if you have region 2 equipment and are in Europe, the German edition is much the cheapest way to buy this series. The boxed set - with alternative language tracks in German and English - comes in at under £17 when paid for in sterling, and the same set costs more than £30 on amazon.co.uk. Region 1 releases are also more expensive on amazon.co.uk.
I haven't watched it all the way through yet, but I have watched a few episodes, which are enough to give me an impression - and of course an opinion. And I have placed Man from Atlantis in a completely new category of television, which I have just coined in my own head, that of supermen. I'm afraid it is largely supermen, although of course there was Wonder Woman as well.
My tentative genre of TV entitled supermen is the fulfilment of the sort of dreams of progress we often see in the TV of the era I write about here. While the warnings of the dangers from human perfidy or just weakness came thick and fast, there was also a sense that the future would be bright...if we would be careful how we approached it. The impetus was completely on humans to take responsibility for how we create our future. Is it therefore any wonder that come the 1970s there were a whole series of TV programmes featuring people who were (at least mostly) apparently human or else looked human in a dark room, who were gifted with literally superhuman abilities? It is as if the warnings of dangers found in technology in the sixties have morphed into having examples of superhuman strength or virtue held above us. I wanted to mention the Incredible Hulk but his gifts are rather ambivalently for the good (although what boy has dreamt of turning green and growing big muscles when he becomes slightly cross?). I mean rather shows such as the Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman... I'm sure lots of other shows will come to my mind when I actually publish this post!
In The Man from Atlantis the idea of an apparently human person (whose gifts in this case are completely aquatic along with being a generally kind person and all round nice chap) meet the totally 1970s obsession with lost cultures in that he just happens to have been the only survivor of Atlantis. Merging super men with lost civilisations - could that have happened in any other era? This show is actually the one which for me brings home the real nature of these super men shows - the super abilities are things which I can never aspire to. The reason is I hate swimming! In theory I can swim, but it's only ever a leisurely doggy paddle, and I'm never comfortable going out of my depth. I'm also never likely to get better at it since somebody told me about an eye infection he contracted in a swimming pool. That has made the possibility of getting good at swimming unlikely in the extreme. For me this is one of the strange things about TV - we watch other people's lives, captivated by them whether they are much better or worse off than ourselves. It can't simply be that we like to be comforted, since I'm watching this show and the super powers shown will never be mine. They don't cause pity or envy in me... he is just a super man who I will never be, and thus this tentative genre of cult TV's main function is to make its viewers feel inadequate.
If not downright jealous. There is another thing in which Mark Harris will always be ahead of us. You may say it's rich coming from me with my approach to clothes, but Harris gets a pass to walk around in yellow swimming trunks quite a lot of the time. This is whether indoors or outdoors, and I imagine it's just purely because he's odd. The rest of us don't get that, and it once again places him in a rather enviable position. Come to think of it, I'm not doing that good a job of making this TV show sound entertaining to watch, am I, since I'm making it out as designed to create envy in the viewer. I actually wasn't going to write about this show at all, because I didn't want Harris's pecs to show my own nonexistent ones, but I bit the bullet and realised that that jealousy was part of the thing of the show. That's the point, that we don't look like him and unless we commit hours in the gym or swimming, we never will.
The episode I have chosen to write about is Scavenger Hunt, and my reason is simply that it features Ted Cassidy, the actor who played Lurch in The Addams Family. A brief search on the interent has indicated that he had a far broader career in film and TV than I was aware of, and in fact guested in many TV shows of this age. His great stature makes him the natural leader of a Polynesian nation.
And that's where this episode of Man From Atlantis begins to go wrong...well, frankly the titles haven't even finished when it goes wrong. I will confess that I have been very influenced by the hilarious (yet fond) review of this episode at the Retrospeculative TV blog, which was what made me realise why the natives on the Polynesian island look all wrong. They're not even one ethnicity. It's a random collection on Hispanics and Asians and other non-white people. I have a feeling that that would have been done differently nowadays - but I also have a feeling that it would have been more acceptable and less noticeable in the culture of the time.
The other wonderful thing about this show is that if you wanted to, in addition to the above bloop, you can pick absolute holes in it. The plot has more holes than my grandmother's lace tablecloths. The contents of the cylinders is never noticeably explained. The pearls are rather obviously not pearls. The monster is very obviously a man in a costume.
I love the dodgy spiv character of Muldoon. You can tell he's a con man because he wears clothes. I know that's being rather simplistic because so do the people who work for the United Nations, but part of the point of this show is the good guys don't need the facade given by clothes, whereas Muldoon so obviously does. He also rather obviously fibs - isn't it obvious that the Man from Atlantis can breathe under water?
If you haven't seen this show, the production values are very much of the time. It moves at about the pace of a Columbo.
The fact that this show is so open to criticism does not explain the reason it is still available forty years on. I think the key to that can be found in escapism, and the sort of super-hero dynamics I talked about above. Some of us liked our TV to be unreal even in the 1970s, and Man From Atlantis is about as unreal as it gets.