'Grey's' Isn't Going Anywhere
'Red Widow' Gets The Axe
Short-Lived Shows: Voyagers!
The cool thing about portraying time travel, whether it be in books, movies, or television, is that no one has figured out how to do it in real life so you can pretty much just make it up as you go along. It's not as if there are people at home who have actually time traveled yelling at the screen: "Damn it! That's not how we did it when we went back in time and used Marie Antoinette's head as a soccer ball!" That is, however, a line from my new screenplay about time travelers who go back in time for the sole purpose of kicking around severed heads. It's called The People Who Go Back in Time and Kick Severed Heads Around.
Where was I? Oh yeah, there's a series I remember from my youth called Voyagers! about a man and a young boy who would jump to different periods in history to make sure history stayed on course. The man, Phineas Bogg, originally used a history book to help him along, but soon a young boy named Jeffrey, whose father was a history teacher, becomes his new guide. The team are guided by a small device called an Omni, which flashes red whenever history has gone wrong, and turns green when everything is okay again. Yellow means proceed with caution, and blue means there's a sale in linens. But I kid.
The episode that sticks with me the most, and keep in mind I was only six when it aired, is the one where they find baby Moses. I guess this means the time travelers were on biblical time, which means they had much less time traveling to do than if they followed an evolutionary timeline. Or maybe I'm overthinking things a bit. Either way, it was a fun show, at least to my much younger self, and it certainly had some educational value to it, such as teaching me that a show with this premise will only last one year.
A bit of trivia, thanks to Bob, the man who remembers everything about TV: Actor Jon-Erik Hexum, who played Phineas Bogg, died in 1984 after jokingly placing a prop gun to his head on the set of the CBS series Cover Up. The wadding from the gun struck his temple and killed him. Also, Meeno Peluce, who played Jeffrey, is the half-brother of Punky Brewster herself, Soleil Moon Frye.
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