Plot
The show centered on two brothers, Johnny (Johnny Whitaker) and Scott Stuart (Scott Kolden), who discover Sigmund (Billy Barty), a friendly young sea monster who had been thrown out by his comically dysfunctional undersea family for refusing to frighten people. The boys hide Sigmund in their clubhouse.
Plotlines were very simple and straightforward, usually some variation on the idea of Sigmund doing something silly to arouse attention, and the boys working to prevent him from being found by Sigmund's brother monsters, Blurp (Bill Germaine, Larry Larsen) and Slurp (Fred Spencer, Paul Gale). The brothers also worked to hide Sigmund from their overbearing housekeeper Zelda (Mary Wickes), elderly neighbor Mrs. Eldels (Margaret Hamilton) and Sheriff Chuck Bevans (Joe Higgins). Zelda was the boys' housekeeper while their parents were away on vacation. The parents were never seen on the show, nor did they return home by the end of the series.
The episodes included songs as part of the plot development, the character(s), generally Johnny, would sing a song about what he was thinking or feeling about something going on in his life, from things that made him happy to anxiety about girls.
While filming the first episode of Season Two, a hot light fell and started a fire. No one was injured, but the fire destroyed all of the sets and much of the costumes and other props. Most of Season Two was filmed with minimal sets. Rip Taylor joined the cast as a magical 'Sea Genie' named Sheldon who lived inside a sea shell. Unfortunately, Sheldon was a bumbler, and his "whammy" spells seldom worked properly. Soon Sheldon's nephew, Shelby (Sparky Marcus), a small sea genie boy, joined in on the fun. Also in the second season, Zelda was replaced by a new housekeeper named Gertrude, played by Fran Ryan. Gertrude was a tough USMC drill instructor.
Read more about this topic: Sigmund And The Sea Monsters
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)