Akiva Goldsman, the writer and producer involved with myriad film and TV projects including the recent Star Trek shows, Doctor Sleep, I, Robot, and Batman & Robin, is setting his eyes toward Irwin Allen’s 1960s sci-fi television shows Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, and The Time Tunnel.
According to Deadline, Goldsman is working with Legendary Television to create “a unified vision for these stories, bringing modern sensibilities to their timeless appeal, and expanding upon his success in revitalizing the Star Trek universe.”
Allen worked on these shows (and also hired a little-known composer named John Williams to score at least The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants) in the ‘60s around the time he also produced Lost in Space. (Goldsman, I should note, also wrote the 1998 film adaptation of Lost in Space, though that series is not part of this current project.)
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as its title suggests, focuses on the underwater adventures of a nuclear submarine, while The Time Tunnel is an adventure series through time rather than water. Both of these blended stock footage of different times/places with newly shot material. Land of the Giants (see above for an image of the cast) was set in the faraway year of 1993 and follows the crew of a spaceship who—oops!—inadvertently gets shrunk.
Given Goldsman is helming the creation of a new IP universe, it’s not clear how many shows and/or feature-length TV specials are in the works. Given what Star Trek has done in the past few years, however, it seems likely that the number of projects will be more than one and probably more than three. All of this is conjecture, of course, and we’ll have to wait for more news to see how Irwin Allen’s Extended Sci-Fi Universe (or IAESFU for short, let’s make it a thing!) will evolve.
