Back in the early 70s, Hanna-Barbera made a short-lived animated series called “Sealab 2020” that faded into obscurity. Decades later, somebody got the idea of re-editing and re-dubbing the footage to make it a comedy series with the help of some original animation. Interestingly, this spoof is now actually way more famous than the original show and it ran for far longer too. I get what it’s trying to do but I just don’t think it’s very funny.

Set in a research facility on the ocean floor, “Sealab 2021” sees the whacky crew members get into all sorts of mischief. They seem to do anything and everything to do avoid doing any actual work and they absolutely love to irritate one another.

I’m not really familiar with the original series so I cannot really compare the characters here to the original versions. The characters here are just completely ridiculous and anything and everything goes here. The animation of the characters is your typical 60s and 70s Hanna-Barbera style. It’s very obvious what the makers of this show have done as you can often tell which the shots have new animation. However, I do think they did their best to try and match the style.

The idea of re-editing and changing the audio on old footage and combining it with new material is nothing new. Woody Allen did this in the 60s with “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”, Steve Martin’s “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” also featured this technique. Since “Sealab 2021” started, we’ve also had Kung Pow: Enter The Fist” doing the same thing. My main problem is that a lot of the jokes just fall flat. This is like something you would see on an internet video and not a series that actually aired on television. The episodes are very short but they seem to go on forever. I think a lot of that is because you are looking at the same thing with characters just stood around flapping their mouths so new and offensive dialog can come out of them.