I liked Time Tunnel too. The concept seems limitless: pick points in history, try to change them, but only find that the time travelers were already written into the history. It failed for an unexpected reason: lack of support material to re-create the past. They relied on clips from existing movies and were thus limited. That's why the later episodes seemed so lacking. Production was costly because cut/paste arrangements and re-creation of sets was difficult. Modern blue/green screening could have kept the show going for years.
SF film & TV without "Star Trek" or "Star Wars"?
- Thread starter phx1138
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All it really needed was a producer who wasn't a notorious cheapskate. Better writing would have helped, because once you've established they can't actually change anything... It starts to look like like "ST" (with the landing party always having their communicators, & so their ability to just beam away from trouble, confiscated) or "Sliders" (always losing the timer...). That limits how long fans will put up with it.
marathag
Banned
I liked _Timeless_ on NBC, where history could be changed, in ways they didn't expect
I don't think an Irwin Allen production would be that original
I thought "Timeless" was a wonderful idea, except for everybody changing sides all the time...& the historical errors & the usual stupidity of people remembering a history they couldn't possibly remember. (If you grew up in a history that had been changed before your birth, how do you remember the one you {originally} came from? "Frequency" fell down on that, too.) (For the record, AIUI, "Timecop" got around that by having the travellers "outside" the timeline that changed; I'm not clear "Timeless" did that.)
The historical mistakes they could have ended up explaining by having small changes in the show's OTL, so it wasn't (strictly speaking) ours.
I think you're right, Allen wouldn't have gone for it on his own--but he might have been sold on it. He might also have been sold on a "Timecop" idea, where the TT team are trying to prevent changes--or maybe they get accidentally sent back, only to find somebody else trying to change things & have to stop it? (I don't think the idea of the multiverse existed yet, so people from alternate timelines would have happened.)
Making a time travel show could have been really interesting--but is it cheap? IDK. Many (all?) the costumes could effectively be "off the rack", & there wouldn't be need for any appliances; a sequence (or two?) activating the Tunnel every show might be the only effects shot they'd need, so that's stock footage, not a new cost--& no FX shots for space combat; no ship miniatures. Anybody think US$100K an episode is too high for 1965? (Figuring a typical "ST" episode ran around US$300K, & "TT" is 30m, & less costly.)
marathag
Banned
Like the Pertwee episodes on Dr Who, it's cheap shooting when exiled to Earth, and don't need to raid the excellent BBC Historicals wardrobe department
I'm thinking, there's cheap & there's skinflint.
What I had in mind was, no need for designing or making anything completely new, not limiting stories to 20th Century.
(I have a sense the "TT" budget was somewhat higher than BBC's for "Dr Who", which was about the catering budget for a show like "Miami Vice". )Nephi
Banned
I think you'll see more fantasy shows which honestly Star Trek and Star Wars kind of are.
Tonight I was discovery thinking about that, Romulans and Vulcans are space elves, I suppose Klingons are dwarves, Ferangi goblins. On this particular episode they went on a downright quest to a magical monastery with magical time crystals all while spending the season looking for an angel. That's a fantasy with space undertones they threw science right out of the fiction for that episode.
So more dragon's, knights, castles, less space ships.
Tonight I was discovery thinking about that, Romulans and Vulcans are space elves, I suppose Klingons are dwarves, Ferangi goblins. On this particular episode they went on a downright quest to a magical monastery with magical time crystals all while spending the season looking for an angel. That's a fantasy with space undertones they threw science right out of the fiction for that episode.
So more dragon's, knights, castles, less space ships.
"ST" & "SW" both fall under fantasy thanks to FTL, if nothing else. They're much harder than Tolkein or Howard ever imagined.
That said, you make me think it's possible "ST" (at least) is replaced by something closer to "Dark Shadows" or "Kolchak": "Supernatural" two decades early?
Doing anything as ambitious as "LotR" is impossible with period appliances & SFX. (Recall the Gorn in "Arena", & the ape masks in "PitA"
were groundbreaking for the period.)There'd be a much smaller fanbase to support any show that got made, & much smaller pool of SF TV writers (which is a pretty small pool to begin with), meaning the average quality of any show made is liable to be depressingly low compared to OTL (& OTL was, generally, pretty abysmal).
If there is a stronger fantasy bent (which I won't rule out, though I'd oppose it; I'm on the Heinlein side of the fence, myself
), it's likely to look a bit like live-action "He-Man". It's just possible, tho, we see something very interesting: Muppets doing drama. Henson was always looking to expand horizons--& I can't help recall, "You've got a little demon in you."FTL is not the only aspect of fantasy. Each fantasy space adventure employs RV-sized space ships that defy gravity and zip from planet to planet. Most don't realize how defiant of science and physics these concepts are. Look at a Saturn V rocket. Pictures are easy to find. You can see one at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A full scale model stands in Huntsville, Alabama. Remind yourself that this is what it took to send three men to the moon and back for a week. Thrust is created by expelling matter from a spacecraft in the direction opposite of payload travel. It's simple physics of force, mass, acceleration and kinetic energy. Matter expelled into deep space is lost; not recoverable by known technology. If any alien society has overcome these limitations, physics is literally rewritten, and I don't mean like the addition of relativity to the battery of science.
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