"The Time Tunnel" Devil's Island (1966)

Director:

Jerry Hopper

Writers:

Irwin Allen (creator)
Bob Duncan (writer)

TV Series:

"The Time Tunnel" (1966)

Original Air Date:

11 November 1966 (Season 1, Episode 9)

Genre:

Action | Sci-Fi

Plot:

Doug and Tony are transported to 1895 to the French penal colony of the Devil's Island, a prison where...

Plot Keywords:

Titanic | Historical | Cult Favorite | Cult TV | 1910s

Cast

James Darren	...	Dr. Tony Newman
Robert Colbert	...	Dr. Doug Phillips
Marcel Hillaire	...	Boudaire
Oscar Beregi Jr.	...	Commandant (as Oscar Beregi)
Theodore Marcuse	...	Lescaux (as Theo Marcuse)
Whit Bissell	...	Army Lt. Gen. Heywood Kirk
John Zaremba	...	Dr. Raymond Swain
Lee Meriwether	...	Dr. Ann MacGregor
Steven Geray	...	Perrault
Alain Patrick	...	Claude (as Alain Patrice)
Peter Balakoff	...	Capt. Alfred Dreyfus (as Ted Roter)
Robert Adler	...	Gaunt Man (as Bob Adler)

Runtime:

60 min

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound Recording)

Filming Locations:

20th Century Fox Studios - 10201 Pico Blvd., Century City, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Irwin Allen Productions

Trivia:

The title references the English name for the notorious French prison located about 6 nautical miles off the coast of French Guiana. Opersating from 1852 to 1946, the small island (35 acres) of Île du Diable was the home for 80,000 political and criminal prisoner's whom mostly were never heard of again.

Shining Tunnel Command Centre Bits

Tony and Doug are sent to Devil's Island, they explain to the number one man that they don't belong in this place, but he does not listen to them and he treats them as criminals of the island.

This episode is only just saved by a short sub-plot where a prisoner is sent to the Tunnel complex by mistake. At one stage when the prisoner is talking to Kirk we hear stock John Williams music (the music heard in End Of The World when Tony appears in the desert above the Tunnel complex).

This sub-plot does not play a great role in the hour, in fact, it was probably added to remind viewers that The Time Tunnel was a sci-fic/comic strip series and not just a history lesson.

As a history lesson, this hour probably works rather well if you find the subject of Devil's Island rather interesting. I don't. Part of the problem is that the studiobound island in question seems to resemble Gilligan's Island too much. The voices echo on the soundstage and I don't really feel like I am on an island at all.

But TV shows of this period all looked like that, I hear you say? Wrong. Time Tunnel was one of the few shows that was let out of the soundstage and onto outdoor location filming. If fact, the outdoor filming was a big part of the series, as Robert Colbert once pointed out in The Fantasy Worlds Of Irwin Allen (1995).

So on a production level, the episode does not compare to the standard of the other episodes. The guest stars? None of them really stand out, which is unusual since so many quality guests appeared in this series.

But more importantly than all this, I just get the feeling that Irwin Allen was busy on another sound stage during the making of this hour. Irwin Allen once told a Land Of The Giants writer (when he requested ugly creatures appear on the land) to keep everything clean and nice looking. If tidy presentation was so vital to the look of most Irwin TV, why was Devil's Island used in the series?

To me, Devil's Island is not in keeping with the general look of Irwin Allen productions, the series can get down and dirty sometimes (such as the underground miners in End Of The World), but when nearly the whole hour is donated to Devil's Island (or Gilligan's Island), it is just too un-Irwin for me.

Many will not agree, many will not even know who Irwin Allen is, but if you want my opinion, I would just picture search your DVD to the shining Tunnel command centre bits.