Hungarian-born Ivan Tors emigrated to the United States shortly before the Second World War. He began his Hollywood career as a screenwriter, with standard fare such as In The Good Old Summertime. As he moved towards producing films he gravitated towards fact-based science fiction. His 50s films such as Gog, Riders To The Stars and The Magnetic Monsters are solid no-nonsense studies of the near future that are decidedly sober compared to the sort of sensational B-movie approach to SF of the time.
Moving into TV he made Science Fiction Theater, which was a weekly dose of the sort of nuts-and-bolts speculative tales as his notable films were. With Sea Hunt he went off into a more unique direction: the wonders of man confronting nature. This series, starring Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson, was a huge hit. It pulled the Tors fascination with our frontiers into an even more tangible realm than his SF efforts. The amount of underwater action and outdoor filming made the series stand out. The series helped popularize skin and SCUBA diving.
When Tors returned to feature films it was with Flipper. As I mentioned before, the focus on man respectfully encountering nature not only led to greater depth and success in Tors' work, it helped adjust the consciousness of the families his shows were aimed at.
Tors' devotion to the subject matter in his work was real. He helped fund Dr. John Lily's work with dolphins while producing the Flipper movies and show. He worked for conservation of wildlife in Africa, very much in the spirit of the characters in his Daktari. The animals in his shows were trained with Ralph Helfer's "affection" method. And he was open-minded and adventurous in many other ways, even personally experimenting with LSD while it was still legal!
The sort of man Ivan Tors was can be felt in his work- he was a deep-thinking man of adventurous spirit. Not typical of Hollywood, that is perhaps why he may have built his studio on the other end of the country!
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