And if riparian entertainment just happened to be your thing, surely your man would have been Ivan Tors (born Ivan Lawrence Tors, 1916). The Hungarian emigre whose mission to bring you the seaquarium straight to your living rooms would go quite swimmingly. The first of these aquatic adventures was the Lloyd Bridges (his first casting after his HUAC rap) fronted series that debuted in 1958, it was earlier that year that Tors was the front line and center CinemaScope style with Underwater Warrior (Dan Dailey, James Gregory) which was distributed by the mighty, mighty MGM.
The Budapest born producer was quite the formidable factotum a winning journalist, he wrote for radio, was a playwright, a screenwriter and an animal trainer all in a day's work. It was his unwavering love for the animal kingdom in fact that was his overarching agenda. In the South of Florida, Tors famed studios would be erected, it was spatially the most impressive one in the state's history. It was noted at the time that when it came to family entertainment Tors would give Walt Disney the man, the myth himself, an unquestionable run for his moolah.
In 1964, there would be a televisual annexing of Arthur Weiss's Flipper, a 1963 feature film that depicted a most unusual concept of the son of a fisherman (Chuck Connors) adopting a pet dolphin straight out of the Atlantic waters and into the hearts of all that clapped eyes on the brilliant bottle-nosed one they called him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning, (Sing along all!)
Flipper would grace the waves for three seasons and Ivan Tors would continue to bring the natural world to the screens with Gentle Ben and the film Rhino which he also directed and if he could talk to the animals -- well he surely did, Ivan Tors passed away in Brazil ,1983 doing what he absolutely loved best, producing yet another, yes you guessed it - animal-themed series.