I hate the way people poke fun at Doug and Tony generally landing in a mjor historical event. After all you couldn't have them embarking a "fantastic adventure" as the narrator called if they simply landed in somebody's dining room during Sunday dinner could they?
shareWell maybe if somebody got food poisoning.
shareWell maybe if somebody got food poisoning.
Not if it happens ALL the time. What were the odds of landing on Krakatoa at the very brink of the SOLE occasion for which that island is famous? 'tis not as if they landed in Rome, a city that has seen thousands of historical events.
God is subtle, but He is not malicious. (Albert Einstein)
What are the odds of that sort of thing happening all the time?
I'd say about the same as the odds of:
- Captain Kirk and crew facing a deadly threat to their ship (or the entire galaxy), all the time.
- The folks in the Vegas crime lab having a difficult and complex murder case to solve, all the time.
- An elite spy team having a major international crisis from which the world must be rescued, all the time.
- A criminal defense lawyer finding that his clients are innocent, all of the time.
- A doctor finding that all of his patients have not only serious medical problems, but personal/family crises that only he can solve, all of the time.
I can go on and on, but you get the idea. That complaint is silly because (1) all dramatic series are unrealistic in that regard, and (2) the alternative is for Tony and Doug to end up nowhere in particular and do nothing interesting for an hour. In effect, they're complaining that the show isn't sufficiently boring.
If they really want boring, there are plenty of other shows to watch. I'd suggest that one on PBS where the guy shows you how to paint mountains and trees on every single episode.
You don't have to warn me about public TV; I discovered long ago that its only interesting show is MASTERPIECE THEATRE.
As for historical events, why do Doug and Tony have to make landfall exclusively at moments of crisis and peril? Meeting famous people is dramatic enough; a very sweet and poignant episode could be made of D&T showing Dickens the appalling conditions in which orphan children live, thus inspiring him to write OLIVER TWIST.
God is subtle, but He is not malicious. (Albert Einstein)
Maybe they could have brought Jack Wild over to play whatever person inspired the Artful Dodger. I actually liked the painter fellows. I liked Masterpiece Theatre better when the shows were video taped and rather set bound looking. It looked like going to the theater. I liked that old show Mystery for the same reason. I watched the Good Neighbors, Bless Me Father, 'Allo, 'Allo and that show that Pauline Collins and John Alderton used to do. I occasionally watched All Creatures Great and Small. I watched some of that Irish series that was on a few years ago. I can't remember the name.
shareYou watched UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and THOMAS AND SARAH? That's CAPITAL! Right now I'm trying to put together enough of the latter to buy the entire collection of U, D and T&S.
God is subtle, but He is not malicious. (Albert Einstein)
No, I never really got into Upstairs, Downstairs and I've never heard of Thomas and Sarah. The shows with Pauline Collins and John Alderton that I watched were No, Honestly which was a sitcom about newlyweds, where they sort of introduced each show and the other one was based I think on the Wodehouse stories, it was a different show every week and all of them were set in the 20s or 30s and they played the leads. The one that was filmed in Ireland was filmed in the village of Athlone and I only watched some of the episodes. I watched I, Claudius when they reran it.
shareagreed dtmuller!
shareBut in your examples there is no proof that every episode happens in the same alternate universes as all the other episodes.
I believe that in series fiction literature and movie series and and fiction television shows, almost every episode should happen in an alternate universe from all the other episodes.
You can expect that there are a million timelines where series Hero A never has even a single experience interesting enough to make a series episode about for every timeline in which he does have one exciting experience that gets into the series as an episode.
So that would make The Time Tunnel just as realistic as any other action series. Except that each episode seems to end with Tony and Doug disappearing from the scene of theirr adventures, floating though the time vortex, and appearing in the scene of next episode's adventures.
This makes it appear that they live though one episode a after another for the whole series.
But if there is even a single dissolve, fade, or cut from one shot to another shot while they are floating in the time vortex, that one cut might be used to transition from the alternate universe in which the episode that just ended did happen to a totally different alternate universe when Tony and Doug never experienced the previous adventure and are about to have next week's adventure - which may be the first adventure which they had since the Titanic in the first episode.
Yes, it would be boring if they landed in the middle of the desert with no one around for miles. And all they did was struggle to find water and finally get shifted to another time. The whole point of the time travel is to experience something of interest. It's like vacation, no one packs the family up in the car, drives for 4 hours to have dinner at a McDonald's in another town and then turns around and drives back home. Well, not anyone who brags about such things. :-)
It also got me interested in looking up whatever historical event they landed in. At least some of them. Especially, the Titanic.
shareI had never heard of Krakatoa before watching Crack of Doom. When they first realized that's where they were, my initial reaction was, "Yeah. So?"
And I had only barely heard of Devil's Island before seeing that episode. At least I knew right away that it wasn't the place you'd really like to be.
I remember reading somewhere that a possible explanation for why they always ended up just before some major historical event is probably because the Time Tunnel's location computers and probes were already programmed to hone in on major historical events and so when Tony and Doug did end up getting caught in the Tunnel trap they ended up getting transported to these locations which were already 'under observation'.
shareThe "historical programming" bit is a partial explanation, but doesn't help for "One Way to the Moon" and "Town of Terror", both set at important events in the future, nor for "End of the World", which is actually a quite obscure event in the past, nor for "The Death Trap", where the specific location (unrecorded in history) was just as important as the time, nor for "Revenge of the Gods", where the exact date was critical but also not a matter of historical record. So it helps, but still leaves a lot open.
shareThere actually WERE episodes where nothing terribly important was going on in history at that exact moment. Consider "Chase Through Time" where three different epochs are visited and NONE of them are terribly important events in history. They land in 1547 near the Grand Canyon, then a million years in the future chasing spy Nimon, and then back to into pre-historic times to be chased around by giant lizards.
In "Kill Two By Two", our heroes land on an island in the Pacific where nothing terribly momementous in history is going on, but they get chased around by the two remaining Japanese soldiers left there.
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even as a kid, i would think: "Stock footage!" 90% of the time; Also, I wanted some stories to take place in the complex itself other than Ann and the gang at the console wringing their hands over Doug and Tony's plight each week. Also after the first couple episodes, you never see that infinite side view of the tunnel complex as it stretches into infinity, or the BACK console clusters-just the front of the tunnel and the main console and computer (with the 'power towers' looming over it all)
I couldnt handle silver aliens in the olde west, however. show became boring
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Also after the first couple episodes, you never see that infinite side view of the tunnel complex as it stretches into infinity,
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Actually, episode #14, "Night Of The Long Knives" contains that same matte-painting shot used in the early episodes.
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I couldnt handle silver aliens in the olde west, however. show became boring
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And yet everyone will likely flock this summer (2011) to see the Spielberg movie COWBOYS AND ALIENS with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Say what you will, but THE TIME TUNNEL was there first!
I will wait for the word of mouth, since I feel that science fiction and the Western are simply not compatible.
There is a scifi movie with Fernando Rey in its cast in which a spaceship lands in medieval Europe; I'm afraid that movie conclusively proved that scifi does not mix well with medieval swashbucklers either.
God is subtle, but He is not malicious. (Albert Einstein)
TT was a great show, the concept was really hard to pull off back in the 60's..As a first run watcher, I must say it was as good, if not better than a good percent of what was on at the time....As far as them always dropping in "at the moment" it was pretty much that way in all the shows, and still is....I can live with it...
You Have a Hard Lip, Herbert..
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