As the show makes its way back onto UK television, we take a look at the classic US telefantasy show THE TIME TUNNEL…
It’s often said that the past is a foreign country and, in terms of your carbon footprint, taking a journey to the olden days is far better for the environment, coming as it does through less jet-setting methods such as reading a book or watching Poldark. That probably wasn’t strictly true for the unfortunate passengers of The Time Tunnel, however, who were cast adrift in time by a machine, as it can’t have been easy on the National Grid.
The Time Tunnel, which aired for just one season of thirty episodes in 1966 and 1967, retains a cult appeal, not only for fans of Irwin Allen’s Technicolor brand of telefantasy but also as the first US prime time show to tackle time travel. By 1966, Irwin Allen was on a roll. After moving from directing theatrical pictures – he adapted Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World for 20th Century Fox in 1960, before bringing the Jules Verne stories Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Five Weeks in a Balloon to the big screen – into the booming television medium, Allen brought a TV adaptation of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to ABC in 1964. Using many of the sets from the 1961 movie, Allen’s show was an immediate hit, and cleverly used stock footage from other 20th Century Fox movies to pad out the adventures of Richard Basehart and David Hedison as they encountered lost civilisations on their journey into the abyss.
The success of Voyage led to Allen’s biggest hit, the ‘Space Family Robinson’ saga of Lost in Space, which began in 1965. Allen initially intended it to be a family show for prime time, and although it aired in that sought-after slot, it became something of a children’s show, centring on the adventures of young Will Robinson, his robot, and the wonderfully over the top Dr Smith.
With two hit shows in two successive years, Allen could write his own cheques, and he brought an idea based on the 1964 movie The Time Travelers to ABC, home of his other shows. The Time Travelers, written and directed by Danish B-movie auteur Ib Melchior, told of a government department who discover that their time window, built to spy on events in the past, can also be used for travelling to those times. Allen pitched a story of a government project – Project Tic-Toc – that has gone wildly over budget. In its ten years, it hasn’t produced any concrete evidence that time travel is possible, and so a US Senator arrives to demand results or the project would be shut down. Not willing to subject innocent people to an untested process, one of the project’s directors, Dr Anthony Newman, volunteers to act as a guinea pig, but he is turned down by his colleague, Dr Doug Phillips. Defying his friend’s orders, Newman sends himself hurtling into the time stream, and Phillips follows him, looking to return them both to the present day (which in the story was 1968, two years in the future).
For the part of maverick scientist Tony Newman, Allen went for an actor he’d worked with on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, James Darren. Darren was a reasonably big name in Hollywood at the time of his casting, having signed a seven picture deal with Universal in 1963, and was joined in the regular cast by TV journeyman Robert Colbert as Doug Phillips, and future Batman Catwoman Lee Merriweather and Whit Bissell as the project’s support staff.
Throughout the show’s run, Tony and Doug visited such notable historical events as the sinking of the Titanic, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the eruption of Krakatoa, and the Battle of Little Bighorn, and each time they tried to prevent or minimise the damage done by the event, seemingly without a care as to whether their actions might cause changes in the future. For the most part, they found that they were unable to have an effect on the past, and any steps they did take were course-corrected by the time stream, which was explained in the show as a linear narrative where the past and the future were just two stops along an already taken journey.
As with Allen’s previous hits, the show reused sets and stock footage from other productions and wasn’t altogether faithful with some of the historical facts it presented to viewers, but ratings were strong and everything pointed to the show’s renewal for a second season. Before the first season had ended, however, the team got the news that they would not be renewed for a second season; an ABC executive had his eye on their time slot for a show he was championing, The Legend of Custer, which took The Time Tunnel’s place on the schedule and did so well that it was cancelled after just seventeen episodes. The early notice of cancellation at least allowed Allen to wrap up the series in a way that few cared to do at the time. Each episode ended with Tony and Doug being transported away to another time and place, but the final episode saw them back where they started their journey in Episode One, on the deck of the Titanic, the implication being that they would never return home.
The Time Tunnel received all the trappings of a successful TV show of the time, including novelisations and comic books, board games and soundtrack album releases (the theme tune was an early work by John Williams), and Allen did attempt to bring another show with James Darren to screen – 1968’s The Man from Another Planet – but the show never sold, and the pilot aired as a TV movie. Instead, 1968 saw the boilerplate formula used for the first two hits rolled out with Land of the Giants, which stretched its premise for fifty-one episodes across two seasons.
The end of Land of the Giants in 1970 brought Irwin Allen’s brief TV empire to a close, and he moved into movie production, specialising in disaster pics like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. A combined ten seasons (and two TV movies) of telefantasy had ensured that his legacy would not be forgotten, however, and his work gained new fans over a series of repeat showings during the 1970s and 1980s.
The Time Tunnel was the American Doctor Who, except that they never really travelled in space, and so would only have needed a TARDI. Its approach to the big moments of world, but especially the US, satisfied an audience looking for escapism and loosely-accurate historical recreations, and the upcoming TV screenings will once again thrill fans of its heady mix of education and light peril, delivered by a charismatic cast. US TV continues to attempt the time travel TV show – Legends of Tomorrow is the best example of the genre in recent times – but you never forget your first, especially if you are doomed to live it over and over again.
You can catch THE TIME TUNNEL on Horror Channel as part of the Sci-Fi Zone.
