"The Time Tunnel" Reactions (Hey, Kids! Spoilers!)

[The Baron]

Rendezvous With Yesterday:

I haven't seen these in about 40 years, so, effectively, I'm seeing them as for the first time.

Yeah, even if his name wasn't on it, you'd guess this was an Irwin Allen show about a minute into it.

This is such a 60's show. I miss shows like that.

Whit Bissell as the General. Always good to see our Whit.

Cripes, they've got Altair IV down there! And they're gonna shut this huge place down, just because one senator says so?

I'd forgotten that Tony went back alone first.

Fun facts: Anthony Newman was born in 1938, and is from the year 1968. so, the show was set two years in what was then the future.

Andrew was right - Newman immediately tries to change history. "We're Americans, by God! None of this 'worrying about damaging the web of time' for us!"

The great Michael Rennie as the Captain of the Titanic.

And, they end up on a rocket....

Music by "Johnny" Williams.

Well, the special effects are alot better than Doctor Who of the same time period, and they haven't aged too badly.

Interesting that out of all of human history, they land someplace historically significant on their first try.

All in all, I enjoyed this alot. The disk set has an unaired expanded version of the pilot, I shall take a look at that next, to see what they left out of the aired version. Doug and Tony seem like reasonably likable 60's Americans TV heroes so far.

One wonders what the plan was for using the time tunnel once it was perfected - historical and archaeological research, of course - and perhaps a little judicious nudging of world history into directions more favorable to the USA? Hmmm?

[The Baron]

I just realized - James Darren is the same guy that played "Vic Fontaine" on Deep Space Nine. I knew I'd heard that name somewhere before.

[Doctor Hmmm?]

James Darren. Bobby Darin. Darren McGavin.

Man, those were the days.

[The Baron]

Rendezvous With Yesterday (Un-Aired Pilot Version): Really the only noteworthy difference is the ending. In the un-aired version, Doug and Tony are briefly separated in time, with Tony ending up back at the Project Tic-Toc base 10 years before he left, dealing with the fact that no one knows him yet. Then the guys back in 1968 pull some switches and he is reunited with Doug, back in Lizard With A Fin Glued To Its Back Dinosaur Times.

You know, watching this again, my brain starts trying fill in backstory. They have this secret underground city hidden in the desert. Doug says something to the effect that they have 12,000 people living in each of eight habitats. That's 96,000 people. The Senator says that they've been working on the project for ten years and have spent $7.5 billion dollars on it. (And that's in 1966 money.) That's very close to "Manhattan Project" money and personnel. That's not a casual commitment. That's something you do because

a)There's an extremely strong "felt need" to do it. (i.e., "The Reds are working on a time travel project of their own")

and

b)Someone has made an extremely convincing case that it can be done.

It also strikes me as extremely unlikely that some Senate committee is going to be able to shut down just like that.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

“Great minds run in the same channel,” so they say (or is it “Fools think alike”?). In either case, I had planned to start a discussion of The Time Tunnel TV show after having read the comic book, but Bob saved me the trouble. I had previously never seen even a single episode of The Time Tunnel, but I know what you mean: this show screams Irwin Allen (so far in a good way, but there’s a bad way to scream Irwin Allen as well, as I suspect we’ll discover further in). Even the opening credits and John Williams theme music give it that definitive Irwin Allen/1960s TV pedigree stamp.

The presence of Michael Rennie, I think, helps lend the show a certain credence in that he was in one of the best remembered and influential seminal science fiction pictures of all time (The Day the Earth Stood Still, if you’re not following me), and he’s got chops. He was also featured as “The Keeper” in the only two-part episode of Irwin Allen‘s Lost in Space.

The special effects were better than I expected for the time (color television is so unforgiving!). It’s an intriguing pilot. I’ve little doubt that the creators of Quantum Leap were inspired to make an updated version of The Time Tunnel, in much the same way the creators of Seaquest: DSV may have been inspired by Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. And, hey! Star Trek: Voyager even shares elements in common with Lost in Space now that I’m thinking about it. I wonder when we’re going to see that updated version of Land of the Giants?

I didn’t watch the unaired pilot and don’t intend to… not for some time, anyway. I “did the math” on that underground city, too, and concluded that Doug, nervous of losing his funding, simply must have misspoken. It could happen. 800 underground levels? Uh uh, ain’t buying it. 800 personnel? That’s a little more reasonable.

See you back here tomorrow for “One Way to the Moon”!

[Luke Blanchard]

You might find it worthwhile to compare the movies The Time Travellers and Journey to the Center of Time - they're both reviewed here.

[The Baron]

Luke Blanchard said:

You might find it worthwhile to compare the movies The Time Travellers and Journey to the Center of Time - they're both reviewed here.

Interesting - The Time Travellers is included with the second disk set, so I'll watch that eventually.

[The Baron]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

I didn’t watch the unaired pilot and don’t intend to… not for some time, anyway.

As I say, essentially, it's the same as the aired version, with a different ending. You could watch the last five minutes, and that would be all the new stuff.

[The Baron]

One Way to the Moon:

I like Doug and Tony's "excessive g-force" faces.

We went to Mars in 1978?

You know, for half the episode, I thought that one guy's name was "Bizarro", and not "Nazarro".

I thought they did a reasonably good job with the whole "They're in the future, why can't Doug and Tony just have the astronauts call Project Tic Toc and verify their bona fides" issue. I'd wondered how they'd handled that.

I thought Tony was a little naive thinking that their project would be publicly known ten years later. I have to think that if the US government developed time travel, they'd never make it known publicly, if they could help it.

Is that a zipper on the "space suit"?

Of course, with all the spies running around, the project proably will be in the next week's newspaper...

So, at the end, 1968 Beard is free, and with knowledge of the Time Tunnel. Unless, of course, Doug and Tony ever get around to mentioning to the folks back home that 1978 Beard was a spy...

How convenient - the Time Tunnel takes the space suits off of them!

And....they end up in a mine cave-in...

OK, not too bad for a second outing.

[The Baron]

Oh, and harking back to "Rendezvous With Yesterday", sharp-eyed viewers will have noticed John Winston, "Mr. Kyle" from Star Trek, playing a guard.

[Eric L. Sofer]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

I “did the math” on that underground city, too, and concluded that Doug, nervous of losing his funding, simply must have misspoken. It could happen. 800 underground levels? Uh uh, ain’t buying it. 800 personnel? That’s a little more reasonable.

Well... the Time Tunnel itself was supposedly infinite in length if I recall properly. A technology that could build anything infinite in length would probably have no difficulty in making 800 levels of complex.

Of course, I wouldn't think most of those would be used. "Hey, Betty... wanna meet on level 634 tonight?" "Oh Doug, no one has cleaned that level in ages. How about we meet at the back end of the tunnel?" Doug (to himself): "How does Tony always manage to get 'em to meet him somewhere real???"

And what was the tunnel for? Isn't it obvious? Fast, home delivery in thirty minutes or less - guaranteed!

I remain,
Sincerely,
Eric L. Sofer
x<]:o){
The Silver Age Fogey

[The Baron]

Heck with that - "Delivery guaranteed one hour before you place your order!"

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Regarding the depth of the Time Tunnel complex, I speculate it must not be entirely in this dimension. Perhaps Doug also discovered the Negative Zone? Speaking of which, I wonder to what extent Jack Kirby was influenced by The Time Tunnel in creating the Boom Tube? He must have been aware of the show and probably watched it. He never even saw Planet of the Apes yet did his version of it in Kamandi.

We went to Mars in 1978?

Maybe not after Doug and Tony get through mucking about. Maybe we were supposed to have gone to Mars in 1978.

Regarding the 1978 astronauts contacting Project: Tic Toc, none of them had ever heard of it. My assumption is that it’s very hush-hush, top secret, need to know… if it even still existed by that time. They senator was planned to cut funding in the first episode, remember, and if the project fails to retrieve it’s two top scientists, what good is it?

I missed the zipper.

I’d have to watch it again, but didn’t the TT crew in 1968 observe Beard’s treachery (or at least suspicious behavior) in the future? In one scene he “accidently” disobeys a direct order. Wouldn’t things like this, known in advance, tend to keep one out of the space program?

This episode was simultaneously thought-provoking and ridiculous. The scenes one the Moon obviously occurred in an atmosphere, as the sound of storage canisters and shelves crashing to the ground reverberated loudly. The rocket ship had gravity because it was spinning, but unless it was spinning end over end they should have been walking on the walls. Will a conventional handgun even fire in a vacuum? And what is with those disappearing space suits? (Tracy speculates nothing from the native time zone Doug and Tony are visiting can be taken into the Time Tunnel.) Still, it would have been entertaining to see them trying to explain what those space suits are and why they’re wearing them in a mine in 1910!

I feel like Leonard Pinth-Garnell, lightly applauding and commenting, “Oh, yes! Very bad science! Extremely bad!”