an icepick through the keyhole

I have the Complete I Dream of Jeannie DVD set, which comes in a cardboard case shaped like her bottle.

And in answer to your inevitable question: Sexy blonde parading every episode in a harem girl outfit, wants to cater to your every desire, and calls you "Master" all the time. What's not to like?

So I bought the complete two seasons of The Time Tunnel from Amazon.com. I wasn't really intending to get the second season set, because that was when it went horribly horribly wrong as Irwin Allen series tended to do when he started introducing aliens and monsters into the mix.

However, what prompted me to get the set was two things. One was the Time Travelers TV movie from 1976 which I remember watching as a kid, about two men who are trying to cure a plague in the present, and have to find the cure in the past before it's destroyed in the 1871 Chicago Fire. The younger man falls in love (naturally) with a girl back then, which leads to a line that has stuck with me for 30 years, when the older man yells at him to leave her, "She's a ghost from the past, while you're just a phantom from the future!"

Okay, maybe you had to be there. I thought it was pretty cool when I was 10 or so.

The other thing that prompted me to get the set was the unaired pilot for a proposed revival of The Time Tunnel that was produced in 2002. Apparently it was axed because it was too similar to Stargate SG-1, which actually is a little unfair, because aside from a gate-like thing and a troubleshooting team, it wasn't anything like it — at least, not that you could tell from the pilot.

The premise of the new show is very different from the original. We open on a title sequence that shows us that history is changing: people vanishing from pictures, a headline of PEACE turning to WAR and the United States only having 49 states. As we're introduced to Doug Phillips (David Conrad), an investigator for the Department of Energy, we also find out that Boston's baseball team is the Yankees and that red means go in traffic lights. Doug, a nice guy with a wife and two kids, is approached by an old friend, Flynn (Kavan Smith, the guy who plays Major Lorne on Stargate Atlantis), who tells him that he has a job that only he is suited for.

Eight months before, a Department of Energy project to initiate hot fusion through a long tunnel tore a hole in time, creating a storm. It took them four hours — 240 minutes — to lock down one end of the storm in the present, but by that time, the "240" had created random changes in history. Only those at the core when the accident happened were protected, and remember what it was like before the 240. The interesting part is that they're not trying to fix history: what's done is done. They're trying to prevent any more damage.

The other end of the storm is still whipping around, and creating time ripples whenever history is in danger of being changed. When this happens, they try and figure out what's about to happen, send a team back and stop it from happening. Flynn approaches Doug because right now, the time storm picked up someone from 1546 and dumped him in 1944 in the middle of the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Doug, for reasons that become apparent, is an expert on the course of the battle and the terrain, and so he's pulled into this world and placed on the team, which includes the beautiful but deadly serious Toni Newman (Andrea Roth) and ex-CIA operative J.D. (Tawny Cypress, who's now Simone Deveaux on Heroes). Among the people overseeing operations back in the present, I even spot Alessandro Juliani (who's Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica).

It's actually quite good. This is a series I would have watched. The effects aren't amazing, but they're not shabby, there's a nice dark tension to the show, and the acting is enough to carry the premise through. The idea that they're not interested in fixing things as such (and in fact, Doug has a good reason not to want to fix things) is a cool concept on its own. Although they can only go where the time storm takes them, this doesn't have the "lost in time" concept, which is again a good thing because it's not a retread of the original but a re-imagining, taking the name "Time Tunnel" and just running a whole new show with it. And this, a couple of years before Ronald D. Moore. It's a damned shame that it never went to series.

So if you're looking into avoiding the Time Tunnel season two set because the season was crappy, these two things might be worth the price of admission.

Okay, so I don't have the classic Dino De Laurentis Flash Gordon on DVD, but what I do have here is the complete 1979-1980 Filmation animated series of Flash Gordon which I eagerly devoured week after week as a wee bairn. The DVD also includes the pilot for the disappointing Defenders of the Earth semi-sequel, but it also has two collector art cards illustrated by Gene Ha and Frank Cho, which ain't shabby.

The music came back to me almost immediately, as did the designs for the ships and the robots which I do remember learning to draw at that age. The animation alternates between mildly impressive and sucky — Filmation was really really into reusing animation within a single episode, the voices range from adequate to cheesy, and the writing is full of plot holes, but... aw, I can't help it, I'm a sentimental sap. I'm loving every minute of it.

And man, Princess Aura was one hot chick.

"What we do is important. We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves."

As of two nights ago, I finished watching all 7 seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street on DVD. I'm waiting for a copy of the Homicide TV movie to wrap it all up.

It was a damned good series, with characters I genuinely cared about, even if the last season was showing the distinct signs of wear. I miss it immensely. I need to dig out my copy of David Simon's book from my boxes and read it again.

Al Giardello, Tim Bayliss, Frank Pembleton, John Munch, Stan Bollander, Steve Crosetti, Meldrick Lewis, Kay Howard, Beau Felton, Megan Russert, Mike Kellerman, James Brodie, Paul Falsone, Terri Stivers, Laura Ballard, Stu Gharty, Rene Sheppard, Mike Giardello - an ensemble cast like no other... here's to you, guys.

Been quiet for a while - nothing much going on this week, just trying to get past work and heading for the long weekend. I had the sudden urge to rewatch the most excellent BBC adaptations of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Smiley's People", and I always marvel at how absolutely compelling drama it is, for little to no action and scenes consisting entirely of talking heads. Alec Guinness's quiet, gentle portrayal of George Smiley holds such hidden steel that you're constantly drawn to him just to see if you can pierce that veil of mystery, the hint of the wheels turning inside the ultimate spymaster's head. I don't think such an adaptation would even be contemplated for today's modern audience by network executives, who would probably demand that Smiley shag Madame Ostrakova, or Peter Guillam be played by Ben Affleck, or something.

Makes me want to dig out my Sandbaggers DVDs next.