TIME TUNNEL! - Where Are You? (2 Viewers)

[Steve...O]

I thought everyone got mail on Saturday also.

I've used the same sponsor before and have been pleased with their service. I encourage the HTF membership to give them a whirl if they have a chance.

Steve

 

[David_Blackwell]

I have been working on my review. I watched some of the 2002 pilot again (I saw a copy of it months ago originally) and all of The Time Travelers TV movie in addition to some episodes of the show I never saw. Too bad Encore Action just stopped airing the show. FOX could have used it to cross promote the DVD releases.

 

[Harry-N]

...and I will eagerly read it when available.

Harry

 

[David_Blackwell]

Thank you. It is just taking a while with all the other DVDs I have been reviewing.

 

[David_Blackwell]

my DVD Review of Volume 2

 

[Harry-N]

I wonder if the membership here can take a look at these two screencaps from the episode "Visitors From Beyond The Stars" as it appears on the new TIME TUNNEL VOLUME 2 DVD set.




While watching the episode, I detected a shift in the color balance from the pinkish side to the greenish side. It happens every few seconds in an almost pulsing fashion and does so throughout the entire episode (though I haven't confirmed it on the stock footage). So I grabbed the two images above from a static scene, where nothing is changing lighting-wise.

Notice the area between the middle alien and Tony, under the lamp. Can you detect that in the top picture, this neutral wood-like color looks a bit on the green side, but in the lower picture, a second or two later, that same area has more reddish components to it?

I realize that different people perceive color in different ways, and perhaps there are some here who won't detect a difference at all. I clearly see it, and the pulsing, though a bit distracting, isn't a fatal flaw or anything.

I'd also like to know from some film experts out there what would cause this. I'm assuming that Fox used some kind of master film elements to master these episodes. Is this a sign that this master had some damage to it all along, or is it something that's happened over time?

Thanks in advance for any information or comments that can be provided.

Harry

 

[michael_ks]

I do see the red/green color change quite readily in your screen captures. I haven't watched this particular episode, having just purchased the set yesterday at Best Buy. I did scan a few episodes and was surprised to see in one or two teaser segments the image is not as sharp as we're accustomed to seeing.

Also, in one of the latter alien episodes (the one with the insectoid heads) there is a scene taking place in a cave in the desert hillside where several vertical scratch lines are evident for several minutes, which is unfortunately quite distracting. They are so evenly distributed across the screen that initially I thought it was by design. Having been spoiled by the near perfect frame by frame transfer of volume 1, it's clear that this set is a slight step down from that one. The big disappointment to me is the softness in the transfer for "The Time Travellers". In fact production-wise coupled with the lack of image crispness makes this 1976 film ironically appear more out-dated than the original series.

 

[Mark_TS]

Gee, I wonder why our time travelers never ended up landing aboard the Seaview, or the Jupiter 2 base camp?
THAT would have been something, eh?

 

[Joe Kelly]

Just finished watching The Time Tunnel episode entitled "Town Of Terror", featuring Heather Young who portrayed Betty in the "Land Of The Giants" series. With the successful release of the entire "Lost In Space" series and the first seasons of "Time Tunnel" and "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" on DVD, hopefully sometime in the near future we will see a LAND OF THE GIANTS DVD release.

 

[phil*]

Aside from the pilot episode "Rendezvous with Yesterday", did Tony & Doug manage to change history in any other episode as a result of their time travelling?

 

[Harry-N]

A series crossover might have happened with VOYAGE...based on the fact that they were both on ABC, but not LOST IN SPACE on rival CBS. Actually, though, if you look carefully enough, you'll see Tony fighting on the Seaview's dock set in "Raiders From Outer Space", and in the Volume One set, at the start of "Revenge Of The Gods", Tony and Doug battle the Greek soldiers on the standing LOST IN SPACE rock set.

Harry

 

[Mark_TS]

was mostly a joke reflecting on the fact that they always just "happened" to land in the middle of some great historical event, rather than say, in farmer Browns barn in 1948 Kansas, as he is milking his cows...where he puts them to work bailing hay or shovelling Cowsh*t out of the barn...then setting down to a hearty, old fashioned Chicken dinner with all the trimmin's...though near the end, I guess they used some non-historical stories...

 

[Harry-N]

Understood - but your question was actually a good one. And many fans wished for just such a crossover between the Irwin Allen series, but they never occured. I suspect there's a lot of fan-fiction out there with crossovers of these shows and probably LAND OF THE GIANTS too.

And you're right, the latter episodes had more of a sense of randomness about them. "Kill Two By Two" plops them on an island in the Pacific where nothing historic was happening other than the playing out of the end days of World War II. The alien episodes tended to occur at insignificant moments in history as well, with "Visitors From Beyond The Stars" taking place in Mullens, Arizona in the 1880's. "Town Of Terror' places them in a New England town in 1978 where nothing of import is happening. Of course these two fictional tales make it seem that the alien threat IS historically significant, but you won't find these battles in any history text. "Chase Through Time" transports our heroes to three different insignificant moments in the time continuum - 1547 Grand Canyon, 1 Million A.D., and 1 Million B.C.

But your feelings echo that of many as to why they weren't put into more random and quieter times and places. With the randomness of the tunnel's mechanisms, one could wonder why they weren't dropped into an ocean (the Earth IS 3/4 water, after all!), or in a frozen tundra somewhere.

Harry

 

[phil*]

No. The series tended to maintain the idea that Doug and Tony were a part of history.













But they did manage to change history in the pilot episode, did they not?

 

[Mark_TS]

actually it seems Allen never thought of this, but if you think about it-the tunnel was not dissimilar to the STARGATE; While SG 1 seems to play out in the present, but in different dimensions and galaxies, Time Tunnel was almost always earthbound. Too bad he ddnt have a bigger budget for the show

 

[Mark_TS]

actually it seems Allen never thought of this, but if you think about it-the tunnel was not dissimilar to the STARGATE; While SG 1 seems to play out in the present, but in different dimensions and galaxies, Time Tunnel was almost always earthbound. Too bad he didnt have a bigger budget for the show

 

[michael_ks]

In viewing the first four episodes of the Vol. 2 set I'm struck by the extent to which several film scores ("Garden of Evil", "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "Journey to the Center of the Earth") are used in the background scoring. This set does seem to be the Bernard Herrmann edition of TT. I'm not sure if this continues through the remainder of the series, but seeing as how space aliens are often depicted, music from TDTESS seems quite effective, especially so I thought in the opening titles of "Visitors from Beyond the Stars" where the main title from the film is used. It dramatically gives viewers a sense of the harrowing danger aliens will unleash (though little actually follows, at least in this segment).

 

[Bill>Moore]

I still haven't had a chance to dig into my vol. 2 DVDs. Between friends visiting from out of town and a daughter visiting, there just hasn't been time. I may one day get the kid interested in Time Tunnel, but there are so many other things she hasn't seen that she wants to get into.

On the plus side, I damn near finally convinced the girlfriend to give TT a shot. She LOVED Quantum Leap, so I keep trying to sell her on the similar jumping through time theme.

 

[Harry-N]

I guess that depends on your point of view. The Titanic still sunk and Captain Smith still went down with his ship. The only character who's life might have been changed by Tony (and Doug's) presence and "meddling" would be Althea Hall. Tony gave her a 1968 wristwatch (in the unaired version of the pilot) and urged her onto the lifeboat.

Since she's not a historical figure, we have no way of knowing if she would have survived or perished in the sinking anyway, so her ultimate fate doesn't really mean anything either, in the sense of known history.

In the original draft of the story "Peter Phillips" was to have saved his own grandmother.

Harry

 

[phil*]

Yes, the Titanic went down with Captain Smith at the helm, but apparently,as a result of Tony & Doug's time travelling, Captain Edward J. Smith did not board the Titanic, and turned command of the vessel over to his cousin, Captain "Malcolm" Smith, who had the misfortune of guiding the ship into the iceberg...