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Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Time Tunnel: An Irwin Allen Megadungeon of Unspeakable Horrors


The Time Tunnel was a 1964 TV Series produced by Irwin Allen.
Here's an excellent introduction:


The Internet Movie Database site provides a decent overview of each episode of The Time Tunnel. There's more detail in the episode guide made available at The Time Tunnel site, including details on the FIVE made for TV movies that recycled some of the episodes, and it gives you an idea of which episodes were recycled into which made-for-TV-movie out of the five that were made.
You can see more Time Tunnel images over at the Irwin Allen Vaults.
You can find a lot of Time Tunnel stuff over at the Irwin Allen News Network site which also features an animated tour of the Time Tunnel complex. You might want to play the Theme Music while you check out the tour. It helps.

You can find episodes of The Time Tunnel at Xfinity, or at TVdotCom, or you can watch a few episodes of The Time Tunnel at Hulu. Including the unaired original pilot episode: Rendezvous With Yesterday, which they allow folks to embed on their blogs, so here, grab some popcorn and watch it for free right here.



The Time Tunnel is probably one of Irwin Allen's best shows. It at least had a major impact, considering that it only ran for one season. 30 episodes. Five Made-For-TV-Movies were eventually edited and compiled from recycled sections of some of those episodes, but really all this show was able to put out was 30 episodes and an unaired pilot that you might have just watched above. And still it haunts people. Those of us who grew up in the Seventies got to watch re-runs of this show. It must have some weird mutagenic effect, because it affects a lot of people. It was dorky, corny, cheesy and all the usual stuff that goes along with Irwin Allen's stuff, but it remains fascinating nonetheless.

The Time Tunnel isn't just a honking big set of nested alloy rings that hums away with electrical power coursing through it--it's part of a massive U.S. Government ultra-secret underground complex -- a super-scientific Megadungeon that owes more than a little to the Krell complex on Altair 4. Perhaps there was a clandestine expedition to Altair 4 back in the Sixties? Could the U.S. Government have received the secrets of Time Travel from the Krell? Each of those buried towers have 800 floors and they hold 12,000 personnel per tower, and there's much more to see below. This is a big, big place. And it costs a lot of moolah to keep it going. But how do you keep a place that big, with that many people working in it any kind of a secret?



Mind Control. Brutal, efficient, and probably alien-derived or reverse-engineered from alien technology, possibly from that crash that never happened in Roswell? That'll let you control all those thousands of government employees and civilian contractors. Might keep them from forming unions or asking for pay-raises as well. Hmmm...what other types of projects are these people working on down there under the desert?

Maybe they just insert parasites into the workers to keep them in line. Like that'd be any less creepy.

Maybe...

...oh, wait a moment.

Yeah. This place, this massive buried complex with the Krellish blinky-lights and the Time Tunnel and all those government personnel are out in the middle of a desert.

A Desert out in the American Southwest.

Didn't August Derleth write about some sort of desert dwelling species, like in The Gable Window?

Yeah.

He did.

And he claimed H. P. Lovecraft co-authored the story.
“Then out of one of the caves came a Sand-Dweller, rough-skinned, large-eyed, large-eared, with a horrible, distorted resemblance to the koala bear facially, though his body had an appearance of emaciation. He shambled toward me, manifestly eager.”

The Gable Window, by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth
What a goofy-sounding description. A Koala Bear face? Really?!?

That's about as scary as some of those creatures that have been featured through out all of Irwin Allen's TV shows, and especially the guys in silly silver hats, or silly silver face paint like in The Time Tunnel...

Could there be some sort of connection between the koala bear faced sand dwellers and Irwin Allen's production company? Was Irwin Allen secretly under the influence of ridiculous-looking Mythos entities who sought to use his TV series to desensitize humanity to their intrinsically silly appearances? Not all horror comes from revulsion or disgust. What if a nefarious bunch of evil aliens found themselves getting laughed at every time they tried to pick up a few lonely hitch-hikers for a little light vivisection?

They'd get royally steamed.


They would.


You know they would.


Perhaps even now these little gritty douchebags are sitting in their linoleum-lined cavern-offices, smoking imported cigars and planning out the next round of what programs will get greenlit for American TV.


They may not look like much, but these little bastards are scary...