My Sea Hunt Memory

A longtime buddy posts about the Sea Hunt comics put out by Dell in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sea Hunt was a TV show that ran from 1957-1961, and longer in reruns (which was where I encountered it). It featured Lloyd Bridges as a scuba diver; I seem to recall that one or two of his sons also appeared on the show occasionally.

I don't have any recollection of any specific episodes of the show itself, but in 1964 my mom took me and my sister to the New York World's Fair. My best memory at that fair was seeing a guy wheeling several baskets full of strawberries. Being a little wise-ass I asked him if he had any free samples, and no kidding he gave me a humongous strawberry! Better still, when my sister demanded that I share it with her, Mom said that since I was the one to ask for it, I could have it all.

Anyway, there was a Sea Hunt exhibit at the World's Fair and since I'd seen the show on TV, I wanted to check it out. It was basically a scuba diver in a giant glass tank, with Lloyd Bridges (on tape) narrating the story of a dive that suddenly went awry. A giant octopus attacked him!

Well, in the tank, the diver grabbed a very fake-looking plastic octopus and pretended to grapple with it. The whole thing was very cheesy. Okay, big deal, right?

Except that even as I was griping how fake it was, I realized that only a year or two earlier I would have been enthralled, and oddly that made me feel a little sad. Not at my earlier self for having been a credulous little kid, but at my (then) current self for being unable to suspend disbelief. It was an odd thing; I realized I was growing up and getting just a tad more sophisticated, and it was a little dismaying.