The Time Tunnel - The Complete Series [DVD] [1968]

THE TIME TUNNEL is a wonderful offering from Irwin Allen (his favorite series). It's only flaws are inaccurate renderings of history and too many "alien" episodes. Yet it is well worth seeing, but NOT on this DVD set! Why? Because the episodes each have four minutes of story edited out with a running time of 46 minutes each instead of 50! What is missing is the entire end segments which shows the beginning of the next adventure. This has always been broadcast as part of the show including on the Sci-Fi Channel and U.K.'s Channel Four. This is the first time ever the conclusion of each episode has been cut off and presented on a "bonus" disc as "trailers". To add insult to injury, the trailers are not viewable individually, but as a two-hour-long mess. Another gripe is that the series is not shown in the correct order on disc one.

Forget this set and buy the "complete" episodes in the U.S. NTSC edition!

Time Tunnel is a classic series produced by Irwin Allen in the mid 1960s. It is one series of four successful shows. The others being Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. All of which have been released in America on Region one. 20th Century Fox Television released the classic three series of Lost in Space on DVD way back in 2003 to 2005 on Region 2, and it seems logical they would have released the other shows but it has taken them until this year 2011 for them to finally get on with it. So it has been a long time coming and a welcome release since Region one copies have been too expensive or difficult to play. It will be a great relief to many fans when they are finally released.
Dr Doug Phillips and Dr Tony Newman head a team working on a machine that can transport people back or forward in time. They work at a research centre, hidden beneath the Arizona Desert. They have perfected how to send something into time and locate their position but not how to bring it back. Time Travel is possible through "The Time Tunnel".
Doug and Tony need more time to perfect it but a government official arrives to inspect the progress of the project and decides that he may recommend closing down the project. Tony desperately enters the Tunnel to prove that it works. He finds himself transported back to 1912 on board the Titanic the day before it sinks. Knowing that they cannot bring him back, and that Tony is in danger, Doug follows him into the Tunnel. Every episode takes the pair to different and famous events in time.
The Time Tunnel was created by Irwin Allen in 1966. It was set two years into the shows future 1968. The series has a glossy big production feel about it even though it was made with limited studio sets and old cinema footage from the cutting room floor. Irwin Allen bought up these un used clips from big blockbuster historical movies and incorporated them into the action of the show.
It is a series of pure escapism and great fun. The historical stories can be a little informative when you forgive the added fiction of Doug and Tony's role in them.
There are other stories that are science fiction in origin with aliens from space and magical powers of Merlin.
Irwin Allen had a good run with other similar shows like "Lost in space", "voyage to the bottom of the sea" and "Land of the giants". It is a great action series with a taster of the next episode at the end of each story.
Some of the dialogue is a bit weak and is deliberatly simplistic so as to appeal to the whole family including the kids. For example things are often explained by some characters when it is very obvious what is happening anyway. But despite this element of the dialogue it is all a bit of fun. You cannot take any of it seriously. The beauty is that it is like that. It is just escapist fun.
Originally the episodes had a cliffhanger ending. At the end of each story our two heroes would tumble into the next adventure and we would get a taster of the story of next weeks episode. This would then leave us just as Doug and Tony were in terrible danger. However on these DVD releases those endings have been edited out. This is becuase the episodes have been put in production order rather than transmission order. Its a shame they have cut these episodes like that but these cliffhangers are available as extras.
There was only one series and this DVD version contains the complete series.
This is a good classic science fiction series that is pure indulgent fun.

Why oh why oh why? What *were* they thinking?!

It's one thing to bring us the episodes in production order as opposed to broadcast order. I have no problem with that at all. But I cannot for the life of me fathom why this means having to completely omit from the end of each episode the "teaser" for "next week's fantastic adventure" that was a much-loved feature of this series.

The logic behind this becomes even more puzzling when you discover that the teasers have been included separately as extras on the bonus disk. Surely it would have been just as easy (and would have made a whole lot more sense) to simply shuffle them around where necessary and tag them seamlessly onto the end of each episode to tie in with the production order. But apparently the thinking at Revelation was "why go down the sensible route when you can make such a ham-fisted dog's breakfast of it?"

On the plus side, the DVD transfers (based on the 5 random episodes I've watched so far) appear to be very good indeed. The picture quality is very clean and sharp, with excellent colour. I did notice some very faint, thin vertical lines here and there on "Raiders From Outer Space". But all in all an excellent effort indeed, especially considering that the source material is now almost half a century old.

There are some very nice extras too, principally in the form of the unaired but very promising-looking 2002 pilot for a new "Time Tunnel" show that the networks sadly didn't pick up (those idiot U.S. TV execs strike again) and the "Time Travellers" TV movie. But the butchered, teaser-less endings of each episode and the gimmicky (but spartan) lenticular packaging (not even an episode list on the cover, let alone a nice glossy booklet packed with fascinating factoids) mean that I can only give this package a three-star rating.