Here is the script to the show:
Cast Member: Welcome to The Living Seas. Ocean exploration has come a long way. We now have a better understanding of our involvement with the sea. How did it form, when did it form, and what possibilities lie ahead? Possible answers to these and many other questions are about to surface in a dramatic film simply entitled "The Sea." Please remain seated and refrain from smoking and flash photography during the show. And now, the beauty and splendor of "The Sea."
The lights dim and on the screen a galaxy of stars appears. This is followed by a closer look at planet Earth.
Female Narrator: Try to imagine, just for a moment, that somewhere in the endless reaches of the universe ... on the outer edge of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns ... deep within a cluster of slowly forming planets, a small sphere of just the right size lies just the right distance from its mother star ... cooling in the coldness of space. Try to imagine.
A volcano loudly erupts and the lava quickly flows down its sides.
Female Narrator: Now that sphere's creation continues as countless volcanoes spew clouds of gas and steam into the sky of melted mineral formations.
Steam rises from the hardened lava on the ground.
Female Narrator: And then that cloud covered planet waits ... and waits .... and waits ... until finally those clouds of gas and steam condense and rain upon that planet.
Lightning strikes, thunder roars, and the rain pours. It hits the hot ground and more steam rises.
Female Narrator: Rain upon that planet Earth. And they rain ... and rain ... and rain. The deluge.
Rain continues to pour and then we see large amounts of water falling off a large waterfall (most likely Niagara Falls).
Female Narrator: A deluge of such magnitude that the world's greatest waterfalls flowing together for more than a million years would only just begin to approach its results. For when it finally stopped, ... the seas had been born.
The water stops, a few drips fall into a puddle, and then the camera pans up to see the ocean with the sun setting in the background.
Female Narrator: Seas that would make this planet unlike any other within the realm of our knowledge. For it was there, sheltered from cosmic radiation that the means to support life on Earth was able to emerge. Tiny single celled plants - fidoplankton [pictures of the organisms appear on-screen]. They capture the energy of the sun and convert it into the most basic of life sustaining elements, oxygen, creating more than half the Earth's supply. But more than that, those same seas interact with that same solar energy and the Earth's rotation to serve as the engine that drives all the world's weather.
We see a blue sky and a palm tree followed by a beachfront. Then, using time-lapse photography, dark clouds quickly move into the beach area and then disappear.
Female Narrator: Yet these phenomenon occur at only the first few hundred feet of seas that average greater than two miles in depth [shot of choppy water]. And it is there in those depths in an endless night, darker than the darkest light on land, that we are just now beginning to explore an amazing world. There, amid raging underwater storms and firey underwater volcanoes, mountain ranges that dwarf the Himalayas and gorges four times deeper than the Grand Canyon. There two miles deep in that darkness - an amazing world.
At this point, the screen goes completely black and every few seconds it lights up showing a new shot of the deep ocean floor. Each time it lights up, a sound similar to that heard on a submarine is heard. We see strange organisms and plants, rocky formations, and vents that erupt gas and steam.
Female Narrator: A world where the cold sea pours deep into the mountains' warm core through immense cracks in its surface and then rises back to the ocean floor as a super-heated, mineral-laden fluid emitting what to us would be lethal concentrations of poisonous chemicals. Yet, incredibly, around these strange vents, exotic life forms flourish.
Life forms that have astonished biologists by finding the needs for their survival, ... not in photosynthesis and the sun, but in the chemicals of the earth itself. Chemosynthesis. An ecosystem like none other on earth. Until now, scientifically inconceivable. Yet there, nevertheless, deep beneath the sea waiting for our discovery. Waiting in a world where we've spent less time than on the surface of the moon. A world we've only just begun to explore with tools we've only just begun to imagine.
A manned submersible glides through the water studying the depths of the sea.
Female Narrator: Tools with which we'll go where no one has gone before. Searching these seas for the knowledge they conceal and the resources they hold, for answers to our past, and keys to our future. What kind of future will it be?
A computer generated "base" appears and the camera zooms in closer and then through a door, into a large research room, down a hallway, into another room where three video images of undersea creatures appear on small screens. The camera zooms right to and through the third one.
Female Narrator: Try to imagine, just for a moment, a future of amazing technological creativity ... a future of incredible adventure and discovery ... a future of remarkable awareness of understanding.
We now see a computer generated view of three doors. The computer graphics change to a shot of the real doors that are the entrance to the Sea Base hydrolators.
Female Narrator: Try to imagine. For we welcome you now to take the first steps into that future. We welcome you to The Living Seas. We welcome you to Sea Base Alpha.
The doors to the side of the theater automatically open. Signs above the doors illuminate and read "Hydrolators to SeaBase Now Boarding."
Male Dispatch 1: Sea Base Alpha to surface control. All hydrolators pressurized and prepared for boarding.
Male Dispatch 2: 10-4, Sea Base. Hydrolators now boarding for departure to Visitor's Center at sub-level 5. Control clear.
Male Dispatch 1: 10-4, Control. Sea Base Alpha clear.
(Courtesy of Intercot.com/EDC)
