|
Page A4 The Joan De Arc Crusader / Monday, July 20, 2009 Front Page A1 / Editorials A2 / Sports A3 / Crossword A5
Travelling back to “The Time Tunnel” By J. Bueker Look, I don’t care what anyone says. The TV shows of the 1960s, on balance, were the greatest of all time. It’s absolutely no contest. Hands down. If anybody cares to disagree, I will be more than happy to close my eyes, insert my fingers into my ears, and loudly chant “la la la la” for as long as necessary. That’s right, baby. Bring it on. Think about it now. “The Man from Uncle,” “The Outer Limits,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Star Trek,” “The Wild Wild West,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Mission Impossible,” “Get Smart,” “The Carol Burnett Show.” Hell, I’d even put “Gilligan’s Island” up against most of the cultural debris that litters the television landscape these days. Granted, the bar has been set awfully low in the age of “Wife Swap” and “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF,” but you see my point, I would imagine.
If you don’t, then let’s just consider game shows for a moment. The ‘60s spawned the perennially popular “Jeopardy!,” a program in which highly educated and intelligent contestants must combine the selective delivery of a greatly diversified knowledge base and thoughtful game strategy with lightning-fast reflexes in an intensely competitive environment. Compare this with the most popular game show of our current era, “Deal or No Deal,” in which contestants select briefcases at random and ask attractive young women to open them up and look inside. Good lord, what have we come to? Okay, it felt good to get that off my chest. Thank you. Today however, I’d like to focus on the ‘60s TV program that was my absolute fave when I was about 9 or 10 years old. It lasted but one season, and has since slipped into relative obscurity, yet is still in hindsight a remarkable creation: Irwin Allen’s “The Time Tunnel.” Allen was responsible for a series of cool sci-fi TV shows in the ‘60s that included such classic offerings as “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “Land of the Giants,” and the hugely popular (especially on Joan De Arc) “Lost in Space.” The man went on to score significant hits the following decade with feature films like “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno,” but there is little doubt that the Allen legacy rests primarily upon his panoply of ‘60s TV fare. Interestingly, Irwin Allen remarked on several occasions that his personal favorite brainchild of them all was “The Time Tunnel.” The story line of “Tunnel” revolved around Operation Tic-Toc, a top-secret experimental government program situated beneath the sands of the Arizona desert and committed to the goal of making possible human time travel. The show premiered in the fall of 1966 but was cleverly set in the year 1968, two years in the future for its original audience. Viewers were presumably encouraged to think, “Hey, who knows, maybe we’ll be able to do this stuff a couple years from now!” In the pilot episode, the feds are threatening the project with termination, due its lack of tangible results and cost of around a gazillion dollars. These circumstances prompt young project physicist Dr. Anthony Newman, enthusiastically portrayed by former teen idol James Darren, to risk all by making a premature journey through the Tunnel to demonstrate that the thing actually works. For some odd reason, after Tony disappears into the abyss, it is deemed a good idea to send a second Tic-Toc scientist, Dr. Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert), after him in an ill-fated “rescue” attempt. Thus begin the perpetual adventures of Tony and Doug, careening about in the boundless ocean of time. Each episode of “Tunnel” was constructed on the dichotomy of the time travelers’ fantastic adventures in time juxtaposed with the hand-wringing personnel watching back in 1968 from the Time Tunnel control room. The primary dramatic function of the control room personnel was to passively monitor the status of Tony and Doug and then transfer them to a different time period and location at the conclusion of each episode (although for some reason never being able to return them safe and sound to 1968). The three characters of consequence in the Tunnel control room were the military commander of Tic-Toc, General Heywood Kirk (Whit Bissell), and the two scientists in direct control of the Tunnel, Dr. Raymond Swain (John Zaremba) and Dr. Ann McGregor (Lee Meriwether). Dr. Ray soon developed the amusing habit of pushing Dr. Ann away from the Tunnel control panel and pushing the buttons himself whenever something important was going down. Uppity broad.
Amazingly, Tony and Doug would invariably materialize each week in the exact date and location of some momentous historical event. One would think that, at least once in a while, the boys would arrive in some time and place where nothing much is really going on at the moment. Then for some reason, as soon as the pair appeared in their new setting, they would immediately be attacked by whatever folks happened to be standing around. If you watch the show, you’ll see that these two circumstances characterize virtually every single episode. And no matter what traumatic ordeals our heroes endured in the course of a given adventure, their clothes were always magically cleaned and neatly pressed as they were suddenly whisked away by their control room colleagues and sent along to their next destination. The scientists who built the Tunnel evidently had the foresight to incorporate a laundry service into the time travel mechanism. Incredible technology. As silly as certain aspects of the show were, the production values were fabulous for the time and the writing was, on occasion, quite good. Many critics regard the pilot episode, wherein Tony and Doug attempt to avert the sinking of the Titanic, to be about the best of the lot. This initial installment established the convention that the time travelers would never be able to change recorded history as we know it, but could occasionally act in ways to help bring it about (and thus were part of history all along). I personally became fascinated with the saga of the Titanic after watching this episode and proceeded to check out every library book Sahuaro School had on the subject. A few episodes of “Tunnel” were set in the future, although this was a plot device the show’s writers wisely avoided for the most part. These shows tended to be characterized by bizarre, disjointed story lines and the appearance of silver-skinned alien types who apparently wander in off the “Lost in Space” set. Much safer and easier to mine the past for stories and use studio stock footage as frequently as possible. Occasionally the writers experimented with strange historical anachronisms like the appearance of Machiavelli at the Battle of Gettysburg, and the conflation of myth and history with Robin Hood at the signing of the Magna Carta. They at least endeavored to keep things interesting. “The Time Tunnel” quickly emerged as a favorite playtime activity on the street, of course. The very feature of the show that lent it so much variety and flexibility --the freedom to portray a radically different time, place, culture and situation each week -- also made it a marvelously versatile play activity for Joan De Arc kids. Hell, it was even educational to some extent. I personally identified with the charismatic Tony, whose overt emotionalism and hip wardrobe (which included Beatle-like boots) appealed to my pre-adolescent sensibilities. The more staid and stoic character of Doug was played at various times by my brother Charles, Chris Dickey and Mark Wells, depending on who was available to participate on a given day. It seems to me that we de-emphasized the control room characters in our play, with the important exception of the lovely Dr. Ann McGregor, whose role we occasionally coaxed Julie Mitchell into taking. We really had a great deal of fun with this show. “The Time Tunnel” gave our imaginations free reign like no other program of its time, and that’s saying something. Not many “Tunnel” toys or games were produced due to the relative brevity of the series’ run, but I did devotedly procure whatever show-related items I could get my hands on. Gold Key Comics produced exactly two issues of “The Time Tunnel” comic book, both of which I snapped up at the Westown T.G. & Y. The pin-up photos from those two books graced my bedroom door at 3219 for years thereafter, long after the Scotch tape had attained a deep yellow hue. At the Low Cost grocery store at 35th and Bethany, I located the official Time Tunnel coloring book, and somewhere along the way we also came across the excellent Viewmaster slides of the show, at which we peered through our old ‘50s Viewmaster viewer. Those slides kept me going for a couple of years until the show finally went into syndication.
Like so many Joan De Arc stories, this one inevitably leads to the nexus of Chris-Town Mall. I reached the conclusion by that summer of '67 that I could properly portray my hero Tony Newman in our “Tunnel” play only when wearing his trademark turtleneck sweater, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. I scoured the various department and clothing stores at the mall and at last found a suitable garment in the men’s department at Montgomery Ward -- a black cotton turtleneck sweater. (It was only years later that I was finally able to view the show in color and realize that Tony’s turtleneck was in fact green, not black). Why they were selling turtleneck sweaters at Wards in the middle of a central Arizona summer seems a bit of a mystery now, and I’m unsure exactly how I persuaded my mother to purchase one for me, but this was indeed what transpired. In all probability the thing was on sale, a circumstance that always has and always will greatly increase dear Mother’s willingness to make a purchase, regardless of the merchandise involved. While a little large for my nine-year-old frame, the sweater was more than adequate for the purpose. I spent the rest of that summer gleefully running around Joan De Arc Avenue in 112 degree heat wearing a black turtleneck sweater, traveling through time with my little companions on our splendid little adventures. Yes, I sweated like a pig, but it was well worth the considerable dehydration involved. Hey, I felt just like Dr. Tony Newman. That’s all that mattered. Around this same time, Charles and I decided to re-create the fabulous Time Tunnel control room in our garage, and spent the better part of a day immersed in the project. We constructed a central control panel out of a large cardboard box and some notebook paper, with Charles devising a clever cylindrical wheel to act as a gauge that would indicate various significant historical dates (a mechanical device he was to employ again a few years later to create a scoreboard for the Joan De Arc Cowboys football team). We simulated the Tunnel itself using the family’s outdoor Christmas lights, arranging them in a roughly circular pattern on the interior of the outside garage door. All in all, it looked pretty dang cool. Shortly thereafter our father encountered our handiwork and then everything was promptly taken down and neatly put back away. We had been hopeful the man would see the value in using the Christmas lights for something other than attaching them to the house for a mere three weeks out of the year, but no. He did not. It’s unclear even now why “The Time Tunnel” aired for only the one season. Its Nielsens were actually very good, and several scripts were prepared in anticipation of season number two. The most popular theory is that the mercurial Mr. Allen got into a heated dispute with ABC over the show’s substantial budget, and finally threw up his hands and pulled the plug. What a shame. All thirty episodes of “The Time Tunnel” were released on DVD in 2006, and the show maintains a remarkably loyal following all these years later. I occasionally watch an episode myself, and inevitably feel the urge to travel back in time to that quaintly remote realm of Joan De Arc Avenue, circa 1967. Hmmm… I do wonder. Might one still purchase a black turtleneck sweater at Christown Spectrum Mall? _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________JDA
|
