Production
The entire Pacific Ocean naval base was built on the back-lot of Universal Studios. For many years after the show went off the air, the sets were used as an attraction on the studio tour. The portion of the Universal Studios tour involving Bruce the Shark attacking the tourist tram takes place on the part of the lot known as McHale's Lagoon, according to the tour guides.
There were three PT-73 boats. One was used for the shots at sea and two were converted 63' WW II Army Air Force Sea Rescue Boats which were based at Universal studios. The vessels used for shots of the PT-73 under way was a 72-foot type II Vosper MTB (Motor Torpedo Boat), a British design built under license in the U.S. for export to Russia. The war ended in August 1945 before the boat, the real number of which was PT-694, could be sent to the Soviet Union. The boat was then purchased by Howard Hughes and used as a chase boat for the one and only flight of his Spruce Goose aircraft. The boat was then sold to the studio — as there were few other real PT boats left in existence at the time — and some liberties were taken in reconfiguring it (machine gun turrets were added to both sides of the pilot house, and a mainmast was added just aft of mid-hull) to look like a PT Boat. Shots of the crew aboard the PT-73 were filmed on a full-scale mock-up in a sound stage.
PT-73's final appearance on television was in an episode of the 1970s show Emergency! ("Quicker Than the Eye," Season 4, Episode 8 — Aired: 11/9/1974). Station 51 was dispatched to a movie studio to rescue a man trapped beneath a boat. The boat in question was being moved from one end of the studio to another by truck and the wooden supports holding it had broken and trapped a man underneath. "PT-73" is clearly visible on the bow, appearing as if the numbers had been removed, but the image of them remained. The boat was also missing its pilot house, masts, and depth charges.
"PT-73" was later sold to the mayor of Hawthorne, California, Hal Crozer and was converted to a sport fishing boat. In 1992 the boat was destroyed when it broke loose of its mooring near Santa Barbara and washed up on the beach during a storm.
The real PT-73 was assigned to Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 13, which saw service in the Aleutians and in the Southwest Pacific theater. The real PT-73 did not have as illustrious a combat record as its fictitional counterpart. On January 15, 1945 it ran aground, and was destroyed to prevent it falling into enemy hands.
Read more about this topic: McHale's Navy
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)