Bold Journey

This was one of a number of similar series of true adventure stories popular in the 1950's.It was hosted by Jack Douglas,who had previously hosted the similar "I Search For Adventure" series,even better, a few years earlier.This was also produced by Julian & Sol Lessser.Each week a different person or persons who had gone on some type of adventure,usually into a remote part of the earth would show the movies they had made of their trip,narrating while the host asked questions and made comments.The programs varied in interest,of course, depending on the type of adventure.Mountain climbing,skindiving to lost wrecks,raft trips,archeology,were some of the types of things that you saw. The variety, and the fact that these were REAL adventures,unlike the so-called "reality" programs of today, is what gave them lasting value.Let us hope that these series still exist and that some day we may be able to view them again.

I saw this as a young child and I swore mighty oaths that I would some day go see these exotic places for myself. I've been to many of them and if I could see the series again, I'd try to go to more of these places. One of the best shows involved Chichen Itza in the Yucatan showing the observatory, the ball court, and the sacrificial pool. I went there in 1995 and remembered the scenes well from seeing them on the show. As I remember it, this show only had maybe 15 episodes which they played over and over. It may have been that the show only lasted for a year, but the local TV station in Dayton, Ohio had the rights to run it for several years as I seem to recall watching it for longer than a year. UPDATE: Apparently IMDb has corrected the dates on this show as it now shows it being on for more than the 1 year they originally said. Makes sense as I remember it being on for several years.

I remember watching Bold Journey on television and was very much impressed by how many places outside the confines of my comfort zone there were and that travel was indeed possible. It was this program than opened my mind and dreams of foreign travel especially wild frontiers. I promised myself that when I grew up I would travel around the world, and when I viewed the 1956 motion picture AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS starring David Niven and Shirley McClain, my goal was confirmed. I have thus far toured the countries of Korea (Army), Japan, Spain, Mexico, Belize, Italy, Gibraltar, Morocco, Peru, China, Tibet, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and Austria. My most impressive adventure was the Amazon River and deep jungle tour on tree top swinging bridges. By the way, my favorite comic character is Walt Disney's Uncle $crooge, not only because he was rich, but because his adventures took him above and below the world all over.

This was a combined travelogue/adventure show in which the host, (John Stevenson, on the tape I saw, part of the "Classic Television" series from PBS), interviewed people who had been to some exotic part of the world with a camera and showed the results to the audience. This one was about skin-diving, spear fishing and water skiing in California and Mexico. It's kind of reminiscent of the home movie excerpts Jack Paar used to do of his travels on his shows or of the Errol Flynn documentary "Cruise of the Zaca". The preview of the next episode sounds better than this one: a some Chinese sailors sail a "junk" to Tokyo and on to San Francisco. The crew wasn't even experienced seamen.