TV & time travel

By Terry Richards

VDT View — I won’t write this column until Oct. 15, 2396



As I sit here in the 24th century and telepathically dictate this column to my mind-reading robot typist, I pause and reflect on how far man has come in his mastery of time. Why, kids, I can remember when humanity could only travel forward in time, one second after another.

For those of you who may be in the 21st century reading this, I’m not going to divulge my secret method of time travel, since you’re obviously not ready for it, other than to say the device that makes it possible is buried at the bottom of my office filing cabinet’s lower drawer, the one that doesn’t have a handle, which is why I keep an old-style paper fan from a funeral home jammed in the way so the drawer doesn’t close completely, leaving me unable to open the drawer and make my escape through history.

But you 21st century Earthlings should be at least familiar with the basic concepts of time travel, since there have been several popular 2-D noninteractive video dramas built around the concept:

• “Doctor Who.” This legendary, long-running British science-fiction series from the BBC debuted the day after the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and ran continuously for 26 years, until 1989. It followed the mysterious Doctor, an alien time traveler who battled the forces of evil across past, present and future in a secondhand — some say stolen — time machine called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions in Space), a spaceship which should be able to disguise its appearance wherever it goes, but has numerous breakdowns and is stuck in the form of a 1950s London police telephone box.

After it folded in 1989, “Doctor Who” resurfaced in 1996 as a one-shot TV movie from Universal Studios, a “backdoor pilot” for a new series that never came about. In 2005, the BBC restarted “Doctor Who” as a weekly series which has become very successful internationally.

• “The Time Tunnel.” This one-season wonder from Irwin Allen aired in 1966. It centered on Project Tik Tok, a massive Manhattan Project-style U.S. government secret effort to build a working time machine. When two of the project’s chief scientists (played by Robert Colbert and James Darren) use the tunnel, they become lost in time; the Tik Tok command staff can push them from one time period to another but can’t seem to get them back home.

Shoved about through the centuries, the two travelers board the Titanic, deal with Lincoln’s assassination, fight various alien invasions and even try to sabotage an Eastern Bloc scientist’s efforts to build his own time tunnel a full decade before the U.S. effort.

• “Voyagers!” Another one-season wonder, this time airing in 1982 and aimed at the kids’ education audience. “Voyagers!” followed Phineas Bogg (Jon-Erik Hexum), a member of a secret society of time travelers who move about through the centuries making sure that history unfolds properly. He’s assisted by Jeffery Jones (Meeno Peluce), an orphan and history buff he meets when Jeffery’s dog chews up Bogg’s history handbook.

Their travels are made possible by the Omni, a small time machine about the size of a fat pocket watch. If a red light on the Omni is flashing, they know history is off course (such as the Russians beating the Americans to the moon) and our heroes have to work to undo the damage, bringing about a green light on the Omni, signaling success.

• “Quantum Leap.” This series, which ran from 1989-1993, was very much an updated take on “Time Tunnel.” Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) tests his experimental time-travel system, only to find that some “higher power” has hijacked the thing and is “leaping” him into other people’s lives throughout recent history, giving him a chance to set right things that once went wrong.

The only friend he has along the way is Al (Dean Stockwell), a Navy admiral working on Project Quantum Leap whose holographic image is beamed to Beckett through time.

• “Peabody’s Improbable History,” a segment of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” from the 1960s. In this cartoon, the superintelligent dog Mr. Peabody takes “his boy” Sherman on adventures through time and bad puns with the aid of the WABAC machine.

Well, I’ve gotta go. Got some unfinished history business to attend to. It comes to my attention that the Braves never won another World Series after 1995, and the Omni’s flashing red.

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