region 1 DVD: pub: 20th Century Fox B000BOH8Z0. 4 double-sided DVDs 768 minutes 15 episodes plus 2006 pilot, 'Time Travellers' film and extras. Price: $20.00 (US) if you know where to look). . stars: James Darren and Robert Colbert.

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It was rather weird watching the last three episodes of the original 'Time Tunnel' as I couldn't remember seeing them before. Looking at the copy I made off the TV in the 90s certainly didn't show them. More interestingly, they also featured aliens and the future and had the series made a second series might have been an indication where creator Irwin Allen might have gone to up the viewing figures.

These last fifteen episodes still relied on the formula of the two time travellers arriving at a new destination with the twist in that what you expected to be the adventure wasn't. A good example of that was 'Two By Two' where arriving under attack in World War Two, the story turns out to be on a more or less deserted island with the travellers against a failed Kamikaze pilot seeking an honourable death. The secondary story showing his father back at the Time Tunnel complex only willing to hand over co-ordinate information if his son could be brought to the present. The same could be said of 'The Ghost Of Nero' bringing a ghost in to spook the Nazis in another World War Two adventure in Italy.



This didn't mean that the series wasn't afraid to shake things up as with 'Chase Through Time' when an enemy agent (played by Robert Duvall no less) plants a bomb in the complex and escapes into the Time Tunnel. Using the set rules laid down, it turns into a remarkable story and finally uses Irwin Allen's old standby, plastic decorated live reptiles for dinosaurs in the past. Watching the stories all together like this, it does look like the scriptwriters were being allowed some freedom to shake the formula. 'The Kidnappers' has Ann MacGregor kidnapped by future aliens from the complex which appears to have been a trap to capture the two time travellers themselves.

There are also four interviews with actors James Darren, Robert Colbert, Lee Meriwether and the now late Whit Bissell which gives some insight into the working conditions, the clothes and Irwin Allen himself. Darren and Colbert sums it up rather neatly in that what other series could you have different historical settings and new cast every week at the time.

Watching it again today, 'The Time Tunnel' still holds up reasonably well and the mixture of adventures should even keep young Science Fiction fans interested than amused by what goes on.

To make up the numbers, this boxset also includes the 2006 revival unaired pilot starring David Conrad and Andrea Roth using the original names of the original two time travellers even if it meant turning Tony into Toni Newman. Considering in the intervening forty years there have been several time travelling TV series, it would have been harder to have stood out. From a production point of view, it's worth looking at. It's a shame that they hadn't kept to the original premise of them being lost in time. I know that was repeated in 'Quantum Leap' but the way it was done here was more like 'Stargate' with teams being sent into the past to resolve problems caused when a cyclotron sent waves and movements of people through time. With pilots, though, there is always the chance that such problems could be remedied had it gotten to series. If anything, the biggest flaw was calling the leads by the original character names. Had they chosen to name them differently and just had a series playing with the original premise so much the better. More so if present reality was shown to be constantly changing by any changes in the past keeping everything in a potential flux.

Irwin Allen did stray one more time into time travel adventures with the...er...'Time Travellers' 1977 movie starring Sam Groom and Tom Hallick with a guest appearance by Richard Basehart where they travel into the past to find the cure for an old illness surfacing in the present. In many respects, this wouldn't have been out of place in the original 'Time Tunnel' but like the 'One Hour To Doomsday' which Allen also produced it didn't really have anything radically different to make it stand out. Saying that, outside of this boxset, unless it appears in re-runs, I doubt if many people would have seen it, especially in the UK.

If your DVD player is multi-regional then you should have no problems with either volume of 'The Time Tunnel' and certainly be quicker than waiting for a Region 2 release at the moment.

GF Willmetts