The Time Tunnel

I was an obnoxiously precocious little kid, and one of my early interests was history. Most children can't relate to history at all (as any honest social studies teacher could tell you), but I must have been born with the history gene, because it was all completely fascinating to me.

So in the fall of 1966, as I was entering 3rd grade, I was ripe for the premiere of the television series The Time Tunnel, a concoction of Irwin Allen's in which two strapping young scientists are "lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America's greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. [They]...tumble helplessly toward...fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time."

Tony Newman (James Darren) and Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert) always seemed to find themselves at a key historical juncture, just before a major event occurs, never after. The ground rules of the series won't bear close inspection: the scientists back at the Tunnel complex can watch Doug and Tony and can fitfully and imprecisely move them around, but the gobbledegook they spout has no internal logic (so don't even try to go there). Everyone that Doug and Tony encounter in the past speaks modern English, which is certainly convenient but is never explained. Really, the series is pretty juvenile overall.

And yet, it fired the imagination of this eight-year-old, so "juvenile" is not an entirely pejorative description. The series made decent use of movie stock footage to create large-scale ambiance. The predictable stops for Doug and Tony were fun (the Titanic before it sinks, Pearl Harbor before it is attacked, Krakatoa before it blows); but they were more piquant and offbeat destinations too -- the War of 1812, Devil's Island. There were also a number of science-fictional "future" episodes, consistent with the ability of the Tunnel to send travelers backward or forward in time. I wasn't as much into those, but the logic of the series demanded them.

The Time Tunnel, an expensive series to produce, only lasted a year. But it has continued to have a vigorous fandom, and is now available on DVD. Especially if you have children who might take the bait, it's worth a look.

The series hit another nerve for me, too. There was something vaguely homoerotic about these two young guys traveling everywhere (literally) together, and I think that registered with me in a subliminal way. I definitely developed a huge crush on Robert Colbert -- I wanted to be just like him. James Darren (fresh from Gidget) was supposed to be the heart-throb, but Colbert did it for me.



As if Colbert wasn't enough to make my heart go ping (kids are sexual, too, you know), there was a guest spot by Linden Chiles as Tony Newman's Navy father in the Pearl Harbor episode. I still think Chiles in uniform is about as handsome as handsome gets.



So The Time Tunnel was a formative experience not just for a history-minded boy, but a gay boy, too.