TV Show Review: Scuba Diving Across the USA

Stars: 2 out of 5
Pros: Intro to two interesting takes on scuba diving

Cons: Too little info; poorly put together

The Bottom Line:

An old VHS

Not worth effort to find, watch

It's forgettable

Might Be Better as Part of a Series

"Scuba Diving Across the USA" is a thirty minute video is part of the Scuba World TV series. Produced in the late 80's, it appears to be a low budget half hour show that tried to spread the word about scuba diving. While normal episodes focused on popular vacation diving destinations, this one showed two different ways people scuba dive in the USA.

First up is a river race along the San Marcos River in Texas. The participants use snorkels to swim upstream. A popular activity in Europe, this was one of the first events of its kind here. The segment also features a two minute clip from a new documentary on the San Marcos River.

The second half focuses on ice diving in Minnesota. They highlight here is a demonstration of a "new" dry suit technology still pretty much in use today. There are a few shots of what it looks like underwater, but most of the time is spent interviewing people on the surface.

While there's some interesting information here, there is very little of it. They show about half their good footage during the opening teaser, so it found the actual segments rather boring, especially when they show the same footage three times in the segment about river racing. I know they didn't have much time to develop either of the activities shown here, but the segments really only scratch the surface. I feel like they could have done better if they had worked harder at getting interesting footage and editing things together better. I'm sure my feelings aren't helped by the fact that this video is really only twenty minutes long with ten minutes of ads for the rest of the series.

This video feels like low budget PBS. It's trying to be a decent documentary series, but it just feels like amateur hour. Considering they break for commercials (with are left out, all the ads come at the end), maybe this aired on local access channels or something.

I think my biggest disappointment is that I was hoping for more underwater shots. But since both shows show more what happens on the surface, it left me feeling very disappointed.

I can't judge the rest of the series by this one video. Maybe the episodes where they devote the entire program to one destination are better. Or maybe they are all this poorly put together.

Since the video was released in 1989, it's rather hard to track down. Even if the subjects interest you, there's very little information here to make tracking down "Scuba Diving Across the USA" worth while.