Sealab

Like Bizarro in Sealab 2021, I thought I was helping by sending a few Swarm of Flies spells into the ring.

Early-era shows like “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” “The Brak Show,” “Home Movies,” “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” “Cowboy Bebop,” and “Sealab 2021” quickly found cult followings, and critics praised the network for its absurdist, can’t-do-that-on-television shtick.

The Sealab program included one real-life astronaut, Scott Carpenter, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts and the second American to orbit the earth.

Six hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast, Chief Warrant Officer Bob Barth struggled to get inside the Navy’s new Sealab 3 habitat.

Mr. Cannon’s death marked the end of one of the great programs of naval exploration, one that had begun with a dry-land test called Genesis and had moved through three versions of the Sealab underwater habitat, from the late 1950s to 1969.