initiated by nita on September 06, 2008 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723779/)
Silver suited aliens appear in Mullins, Arizona in 1885, they want food to take back to their alien world and will kill to get it! Tony and Doug try and stop them but Doug gets taken over by the aliens.This episode must of caused a few raised eyebrows when first screened! Aliens! Then again, a dozen or so weeks before this, Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had also gone spacebound, so more
Silver suited aliens appear in Mullins, Arizona in 1885, they want food to take back to their alien world and will kill to get it! Tony and Doug try and stop them but Doug gets taken over by the aliens.This episode must of caused a few raised eyebrows when first screened! Aliens! Then again, a dozen or so weeks before this, Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had also gone spacebound, so maybe the more in tune viewers just called out..."Irwin has done it again!".The Time Tunnel began with some really solid episodes - the pilot to Revenge Of The Gods - but after this it got into dull areas and Visitors From Beyond The Stars saved the day for this series!The teaser of this episode makes a musical connection to viewers. When the heroes are first seen in the alien craft, we hear a bit of John Williams pilot music (heard when Tony reveals his birth date to the Captain of the Titanic), I think this is the director's way of saying "Hey folks, something really strange is going on".Later in the episode, when the fire house explodes and the town cop grabs Tony, we hear some Bernard Herrmann music lifted from Garden Of Evil (1954). The music plays an important part in these Irwin Allen shows, many don't know this, which partly explains why his shows are so mis-understood.But away from the music, this episode has things of interest. John Hoyt steals the hour as the alien leader (Hoyt had played a bitchy General in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode Hail To To Chief).And the general look of the show. The photography of the silver skined aliens standing in open fields of grass is something you don't see in more studiobound alien encounters in other Irwin shows.But I have to be honest, this hour has a serious problem, Jan Merlin's slow, slow, slow, talking style as the alien. My god! This episode would of been five minutes shorter if he spoke normally!Another problem is that Whit Bissell as General Kirk gets too little to do and say. But all in all, not a bad beginning to the spaced out version of The Time Tunnel, however, the best spaced out Time Tunnel was yet to come...Chase Through Time would screen in a few weeks!Chase Through Time is one of the three best episodes of the whole series, it has a pull-out-all-stops sense of wild action and adventure, with more than a hint of Irwin-ish disaster story telling, it goes from the space age to the stone age, a mind-blower of a story, so well acted by all, and helped along by stock music from John Williams and Bernard Herrmann (the two best composers of all time!).
