Journey to the Center of the Earth – are you sure Jules Verne had a hand in this?

Follow along with me. It’s Saturday morning, you’re grabbing a bowl of Frosted Flakes and plopping yourself in front of the television while your parents get a late sleep. And right off the bat, one of the shows you watch features an episodic, formulaic science-fiction show that takes VERY literally the Jules Verne fantasy story from a century prior, filters it through a 1959 live-action science-fiction movie, and then tries to run with it – figuratively and literally – through its only televised season.

Yep. Journey to the Center of the Earth, a Filmation project – complete with the usual voice cast for a Filmation series (hey, that’s former WTEN newscaster and Mary Tyler Moore Show stalwart Ted Knight narrating the intro), the animation style for a Filmation series (breathtaking backgrounds mixed with VERY limited animation), and plotlines that lean heavily on exposition.

The series works like this – a long time ago, a famous explorer mapped out a trail to and from the center of the earth. An exploratory party tries to retrace those original steps, only to be thwarted by the usual Filmation bad guy who not only seals off the entrance, but traps the exploratory party – and himself – inside. So now everybody must go deeper and deeper into the chasms and caves to find a way back home. And, of course, since this is a Filmation series, the episodes can air in any order and no one will be any the wiser.

I should note that all seventeen episodes of this series are collected and curated on YouTube, so if you’ve got a bowl of cereal and about 8 1/2 hours to kill … have at it.