After The Gemini Man bombed, a replacement show also with a science fiction theme was hastily slotted in the schedules. Now if The Gemini Man had failed to engage viewers with its admittedly slim premise of invisibility via digital watch, one couldn’t accuse its replacement of lacking imagination. For The Fantastic Journey very much took a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. And so we had a series that featured time travel, the Bermuda Triangle, aliens, pirates, psychic powers and Atlantis!
The series kicked off as was usual for the time with a gesture length pilot in which a group of folks on a boating jaunt who failed to heed Barry Manilow’s warning and blundered into the Bermuda Triangle. And indeed they did disappear, vanishing is a glowing cloud and finding themselves trapped on a mysterious island. And it turns out that this island featured different overlapping pockets of time and space, which the plot dubs Time Zones, linked by invisible doorways. They meet a man from the 23rd century, a stranded time traveller called Varian, played by Jared Marti. And with him they set out to find a particular Time Zone, named Evoland, that can get them home again.
When the pilot was optioned a series, there was a little rejigging of the cast, with most of the passengers being sent back to their own times. So in the series proper, we still had Fabian, who became the group’s leader, plus we have Scott Jordan (played by Ike Eisenmann) who was the sort of kid character TV execs seem to think we will like but often don’t, and Doctor Fred Waters (Carl Franklin) who is young, hot-headed and streetwise, all flared trousers and jive talk. In the second episode they are joined by a lady who is half Atlantean and half alien, Liana (Katie Saylor). Thanks to her extra-terrestrial parentage, she possesses super powers, but to be honest she was mostly there to deliver what used to be termed “something for the Dads”, and hence ends up doing more standing about in short skirts than feats of super strength.
Joining the regular cast in a later episode was slightly suspicious scientist Dr Jonathan Willoway played by the legendary Roddy McDowall. Willoway was a scientist from the 1960s who initially is something of a bounder in the a Dr Smith from Lost in Space mould, but quickly mellowed and joins forces with our happy bandy of temporal wanderers. Oh and there also was Sil-El, Liana’s cat who she could talk too telepathically because, well, why not throw psychic pets into this heady mix too.
Of course hopping to a different Time Zone every week meant different guest stars, and so episodes were graced by the likes of John Saxon, Cheryl Ladd, Mel Ferrer and Joan Collins. Plus a young Ian McShane appears as the 17th century ship’s captain in the pilot episode!
Behind the scenes, Star Trek veteran DC Fontana led the writing team, and she recalls they did not have long to turn around the scripts before filming began, which explains a good deal about the somewhat eclectic nature of the plotting. Apparently the original concept would have seen our merry band traversing various Time Zones and having more historically based adventures, however the Powers That Be soon ordered that aliens and futuristic stuff was to the order of the day, and so episodes regularly featured more science fiction orientated fare with various Time Zones effectively standing in for alien planets.
In that respect, The Fantastic Journey was very much mirroring the tonal trajectory of classic Doctor Who, which had begun with the intention of having educational adventures in history before monsters and aliens began to dominate the stories. However while classic Doctor Who took several seasons to morph into full blown science fiction, The Fantastic Journey managed it in a handful of episodes. Such is the power of memos from ratings hungry producers! However it would seem that Doctor Who was a key influence on the show, for Varian had an odd device that looked like a cross between a tuning fork and some stray Christmas decorations, called the Sonic Energizer…
Over the pond, the BBC picked up the show and started airing it on 4th March, just a few weeks after its US debut. The feature length pilot was shown on a Saturday night, with episodes of the series airing in an early evening slot on Fridays every week afterwards. The entire series would be repeated in December 1978, when it was shown on a morning as part of the Christmas holiday schedule, sandwiched between episodes of the 1939 Buster Crabbe Buck Rogers serial and assorted cartoons.
However the imaginative mix of scifi tropes and guest stars dressed in disco-galactic outfits never quite gelled, and ratings gold proved elusive as Evoland. While the concept promised a visit to a different exotic Time Zone every week, in practice this was a huge strain on the show’s budget and, to be honest, many of the sets, costumes and effects were less than impressive. Plus being scheduled up against the insanely popular Waltons didn’t help the show’s fortunes either. Hence the series was cancelled after just nine episodes, with a final tenth episode limping out a couple of months later. Somewhat ironically the axe fell on the show in April 1977, literally weeks away from a little movie called Star Wars being released, becoming an instant smash hit, and leaving TV execs hastily highlighting anything vaguely spacey to grab a piece of scifi pie…
Even more ironically, most of the folks who had worked on The Fantastic Journey found themselves making another hurriedly green-lit science fiction show which would also not last a full season…But that’s a story for another day. And what of Fabian and co? Well, that hasty cancellation meant their travels in the Time Zones just stopped, and so the poor sods are still trapped in the Bermuda Triangle…
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