The Time Tunnel
Volume-One DVD

Two lost scientists bounce helplessly through the past and benefit from the dry cleaning of history

	The Time Tunnel Volume-One DVD
	Starring James Darren, Robert Colbert and Whit Bissell, Lee Meriwhether
	Created by Irwin Allen
	20th Century Fox
	Four-disc set
	MSRP: $39.98

By Adam-Troy Castro

he Time Tunnel is the most highly guarded secret of a hidden U.S. government installation, buried in the desert of the American Southwest. Hundreds of feet deep and employing thousands of official-looking types scurrying back and forth across suspended walkways, it seems a hell of a buy for $7 billion, even if only to compete with the James Bond villains of the day in the all-important international "white coats with clipboards" race. But that doesn't stop Sen. Leroy Clark (Gary Merrill) from threatening to shut the whole thing down as a costly boondoggle. Who needs to spend that kind of money for a bridge to past historical eras? Now, if it led to a remote Alaskan island, that would be different.

To prove the Time Tunnel works, Dr. Tony Newman waits until everybody else has left the room, and sends himself back to a random destination, which naturally turns out to be the deck of the Titanic on the day before its fateful collision with an iceberg. He has no particular plan for returning to the present day. Neither does his colleague Dr. Doug Phillips (Colbert), who goes back to rescue him. Ship's captain "Malcolm" Smith (Michael Rennie), who has changed his first name for the occasion, naturally refuses to believe their warnings of an iceberg, and so it's sad, sad, sad when the great ship goes down.

As the series progresses, the Time Tunnel's support staff, led by Lt. Gen. Heywood Kirk (Bissell) and Dr. Ann MacGregor (Meriwhether), struggle to recall the two time-hopping scientists, but succeed only in bouncing them from one historical crisis to another. Somehow the scientists never land on a quiet, unfateful day when nothing happens. And Phillips never gets pissed off enough to snap at Newman, "This is all your fault."

Dull people visit cheap history

The years have not been kind to Irwin Allen's one-season wonder. The production values are just the most obvious of its many problems. Like those of many TV shows from this era, they're clearly poverty-row by today's standards. The various eras visited seem sparsely populated, except in establishing shots pilfered from contemporary costume dramas. And protagonists Newman and Phillips must begin and end every episode wearing the same set of clothes, therefore allowing the show to reuse the same not-very-impressive shot of the pair tumbling uncontrollably through a brightly colored timestream. (We need a reason those outfits don't reek.) But none of that is fatal.

Nor are the various anachronisms and other script idiocies, like ancient Greeks who considerately speak English our heroes can understand, a Civil-War-era time bomb built in a section of pipe with visible machine fittings, a steep hill overlooking the Alamo, a manned rocket to the moon that strains credulity on more levels than we have room to elucidate here and (in one episode) would-be presidential assassins who change their minds and are last seen happily returning to their prior lives even though the authorities already know their names and where they live.

No, what makes these old shows so hard to take, nowadays, is the episodic-TV aesthetic of the time, which all too often didn't see any reason to give action protagonists like Newman and Phillips any inner lives, or personalities beyond the stolid determination they needed to proceed from one situation to the next. These guys don't have sense of humor. They don't have any quirks, or any warmth. They don't have lives they miss back home. They don't get irritated with one another, they don't succumb to feelings of hopelessness, they don't ever say anything interesting, and they don't ever give us a reason to care. The closest they ever come to emotion is a sort of vague, generic tension, less a function of their own performances than the impression left by the ersatz sweat sprayed on the actors' foreheads between takes. Maybe that's why those outfits don't start to smell. These people are plastic and have no pores.

The show does boast one simple but dynamic visual element: the Time Tunnel itself, a series of concentric white rings narrowing to infinity. (I don't need the shooting sparks to buy it as a time machine.) And the shows have some historical value, as the episodes provided here feature appearances by Rennie, Ellen Burstyn, a very young Tom Skerritt and (following his years as a difficult young star, at what must have been the nadir of his time banished to the Hollywood wilderness), an uncredited Dennis Hopper. But the series does not hold up. It's woefully lame.