xiratania
Does anyone remember Seaquest DSV?
Stephanie Beacham, Roy Scheider, Jonathan Brandis
I shipped Dr. Kristen Westphalen (Beacham) and Captain Nathan Bridger (Scheider) so hard!
I also had a huge crush on Jonathan Brandis. HUGE CRUSH!
This show also made me realize I wanted a pet dolphin.
rotaryshakes
God yes. Bridger + Westphalen were my first OTP, first fic I ever wrote. I really wanted them to marry and adopt Lucas.
petermorwood
Oh God. We wrote the novelization of the pilot, and changes were going on at such a rate that we winced every time the fax went off because it meant ANOTHER REWRITE.
(BTW, Darwin the talking dolphin in “Seaquest DSV” (1993) wasn’t related - except by species - to H’wiii the talking dolphin in “Deep Wizardry” (1985) but the coincidence of characters caused a certain amount of amusement.)
Based upon the teleplay…
Nnngh. In fact it was based on about a dozen drafts of that teleplay; there was some office politicking going on at the Universal end and people wanted to prove they’d been in the office earning the right to their parking space. Best way to do that in a hurry was to change the script, which meant changing the novelization, which meant the fax going off again.
(Incidentally they never did grasp that LA is eight hours behind Ireland, so the fax started going off at about 4 pm our time, and could continue to go off until the early hours of the morning. Oh joy.)
AFAIK the practice now is to name a particular draft as the official source for novelization purposes, why is why The Book of the Show sometimes reads differently to what’s on-screen. Things that appear in the novel often get as far as the finished script, even get filmed, then get removed again during editing.
There was also a fair amount of secrecy about the sub design. We never saw clear images (why a few pre-production shots weren’t just airmailed we never found out) and our little thermal-paper fax did its best, but that best didn’t include subtle nuances of shading. We finally decided that the Seaquest looked squiddy at one end and sharky at the other. It turned out to be close enough.
Memo - get hold of a copy of the book. We’ve signed enough of them at cons, but the production company never sent us any and for some reason it’s never been at the top of the must-find list…
the-august-one
@petermorwood I bought that book at a school book fair, I believe and I absolutely loved it. I read it several times and it go worn creasing down the spine as a result. (I still own but its in storage with pretty much all of my other books atm). It was a big deal for me bc I was not very fond of reading at the time. So, know that you provided a much need escape for a middle schooler who disliked reading and was growing up in an unstable environment at home.
Gosh, thanks for saying that! I’m glad the book was there for you.
I’ll pass this on to @dduane, who gets similar comments about the “Young Wizards” and “Tale of The Five” novels, though a lot less about her tie-in work.
It’s certainly a first for me. (Exit stage left, blushing…)
dduane
I’m glad that book was useful to you, too, OP. :) …It gave us all kinds of grief, but at the end of the day, memory says it was fun to write.
