The beauty of the Spindrift

Irwin Allen's designer(s) had a certain timely sensibility.  Despite the crafts' future use, the designers imbued them with style, color, and grace.  The functionality was still there, it wasn't all form without function; there were intake grills, antennae, engine space.  My favorite of all the ships was the Spindrift from Land of the Giants.  My second was the very similar Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

My prize possession as a child was the Aurora model of this ship.  It was about 1/10 the size of this promo model (see photo).  The model had a removable top so you could see into the cabin and cockpit.  This was my favorite kind of model, one where you could look through a window and actually see the interior.  The smooth lines and curves were both sexy and seemingly aerodynamic.  In the television series, the ship was nothing more than a taxi which would skip along the upper atmosphere, just barely into space, in order to make quicker-than-airplane-voyages.  The people on board were only supposed to be there for an hour or so.  Then they hit a strange ionic storm and ended up in the Land of the Giants.

In the first season the Giants spoke some strange Slavic or Russian sounding language which the Spindrift passengers couldn't understand.  However, by the second season the Giants spoke English and there was a strange totalitarian government in place which was seeking the Little People for a variety of reasons.  One reason was to study them, but another was to get rid of them and keep the citizenry in check.  They viewed the Little People as agitators.  This theme was in keeping with the sixties and seventies anti-establishment mood.

I think that movies like 2001 and eventually the Star Trek series and of course the Star Wars saga seemed to follow our own NASA methodology of bleaching every bit of color from the vehicles.  I guess in space there's no reason to have anything other than white.  However, I loved the Spindrift's reddish orange and the Flying Sub's bright yellow.  While the Sub's interiors were a dark gray-blue, the Spindrift used bright red and black upholstery and a beautiful "glow in the dark" greenish white (for the walls) and a dark green carpeting.  So much color and style!

Gawd I love that ship.