This Forgotten '60s Show About Time Travel Featured A Future Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Actor

The premise of the 1966 sci-fi series "The Time Tunnel" is alluring and fun, and can most certainly stand as a predecessor to the hit 1980s series "Quantum Leap." "The Time Tunnel" starred James Darren and Robert Colbert as a pair of scientists who fell into the titular time tunnel and found themselves randomly lost in the annals of history, unable to return to their point of origin. They could jump around through the past and the future, but never managed to exit in the year 1968 from whence they came (and, yes, the series took place two years in the future from its 1966 debut date). 

In the lore of the series, the time tunnel was a time travel experiment hidden underground, secretly funded by the U.S. government. Thousands of scientists are working on it, and it's somewhat successful, but, in the pilot episode, they haven't yet tested it on humans. A concerned senator informs the scientists that the project will be shut down unless they begin human trials post-haste. Dr. Tony Newman (Darren) volunteers and throws himself into the tunnel. Dr. Doug Phillips (Colbert) follows him, forcing them to get lost. The series ended before they could find their way home.

James Darren's name might be familiar to multiple generations of readers. For some, he might be best known as Moondoggie from the original "Gidget" (1959), "Gidget Goes Hawaiian" (1961), and "Gidget Goes to Rome" (1963). TV viewers in the 1980s might know him as Officer Jim Corrigan from the William Shatner cops series "T.J. Hooker." Fans of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" will recognize Darren for his role as Vic Fontaine, a sentient hologram of a 1960s-era Las Vegas lounge singer.

Darren was well-known for his singing as well, having released multiple records in his career going all the way back to the 1950s. Darren's "Deep Space Nine" role, then, was a strange amalgam of his sci-fi acting career (represented by "The Time Tunnel") and his crooning. Some fun trivia: Darren provided the silken singing voice for Yogi Bear in the 1964 film "Hey There, It's Yogi Bear," and he voiced the prehistoric version of himself, Jimmy Darrock, on "The Flintstones." He also appeared in many hit TV shows, including "S.W.A.T.," "Police Woman," "Charlie's Angels," "Hawaii Five-O," and, of course, "The Love Boat." 

Darren starred in all 30 episodes of "The Time Tunnel" in one of his rare leading roles. "The Time Tunnel" was also a pretty great series, even if it's kind of obscure today. The show's premise allowed for some whimsical historical adventures, seeing Dr. Tony and Dr. Doug visiting the sinking of the Titanic in the pilot episode, and then visiting the near-future Mars mission in the second. They witness the attack on Pearl Harbor, and meet Ulysses during the Trojan War. They meet Captain Dreyfus in the midst of the scandalous Dreyfus Affair. Some of the adventures are downright fantastical; in the show's final episode, our heroes essentially find themselves in the middle of a body-snatching alien invasion. 

Despite the broadness of the adventures, though, I also recall the series having a more serious tone than the premise might dictate. The series only lasted one 30-episode season, running from September of 1966 through April of 1967. The series was popular enough, though, to live on in other forms. In the early 1980s, pairs of episodes were edited together and presented as full-length TV movies, for instance. 

According to the Iconic Rewinds YouTube channel, "The Time Tunnel" was a notoriously expensive show to produce. It was a full-color show, and the network wanted something large and daring. The time travel conceit, however, required giant sets and a lot of recreations, which made the budget somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000 per episode. The pilot alone cast $4 million, which was more than most networks would spend on a whole season of TV. The show was reportedly very popular, but the numbers still weren't high enough to justify the cost. 

Because the show was so expensive, ironically, some of its cost-cutting measures became noticeable, making things look cheap and expensive at the same time. Single actors had to play multiple historical figures, for instance. A lot of large-scale historical events were supplemented with stock footage from popular movies. Producer Irwin Allen seemingly wanted to make "The Time Tunnel" an epic, but he didn't have the money to make it feasible. Speaking of epic, the opening theme song was composed by a young John Williams, who also did the theme for "Lost in Space" and the unused theme for "Gilligan's Island." 

The dream of "The Time Tunnel" didn't quite die with its cancelation. According to the special feature on the "Time Tunnel" DVDs, there was an intended reboot of the series by Fox in 2002, but it wasn't put into production to make room for Joss Whedon's flop "Firefly." There was also a TV movie in 2006, but if you actually saw it, you are a rare human indeed. 

These days, one can buy "The Time Tunnel" on Apple TV and on Prime Video, so it's easy enough to find. It's also a pretty fun show, worth your curiosity.