Sci-Why? F.U! - The Tragic Tale of Voyagers!

In one of the last episodes of the series we take a hard look at Voyagers!, the 1982 time travel series that barrels from setup to action in seconds. If you’ve ever loved Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, Back to the Future style causality, or TVA style “sacred timeline” drama, this one is a missing link worth revisiting.

Transcript

Voyagers Promo And Catchphrases

SPEAKER_03 0:00

We travel through time and help history along. Give it a floating words needed. It means history's wrong. I would just have to get everything back on its way.

SPEAKER_04 1:11

Imagine having time in the palm of your hand to be able to team up with the greatest heroes and make love to the prettiest heroines.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Anybody knows women?

SPEAKER_04 1:20

So jump in on the action. Adventure. At the time of your life with Voyagers, Sunday to 7, 6, Central of Nothing on NBC.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Voyagers.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Bats breath. Oh, Batsbreath. Is it the worst?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Catchphrase?

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yeah. Exclamation catchphrase.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Um. I mean, of all time? Probably not. Of stuff that we cover? Uh, it's not great.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

I feel like it makes the least amount of sense of all of them that I can think of. I don't know. There's plenty of comic book ones.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Yeah, I mean Great Caesar's Ghost.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Oh my stars and Garders.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

That's a good one. But see, those make sense.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yeah. I don't understand where the Bats Breath comes from.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

I don't know. It feels like that should be an ingredient in it in some sort of elixir that he's cooked up.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

I feel like if he was Merlin's protege, you know, in some cheesy King Arthur thing is like, oh, Bats Breath. It evokes a gothic, medieval, mystic arcanery. Not pseudo future possible aliens time travel. I don't know, but we can get into those specific details. Eye of Newt! Is that Newt from Aliens? Are you taking her eyes?

SPEAKER_00 2:38

I don't know if I want to go down this path, actually. That seems uncomfortable.

What Dispatch Ajax Is Covering

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Well, welcome back to Dispatch Ajax.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Like you hear about in the street. This is uh the that dispatch Ajax.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Yeah, right there on the tip of everyone's tongue.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

We are doing a show that no one watches. I think we're about to talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

What that's crazy. I'm Skip, and Yeah, I'm Jake. Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

We are voyagers together on this podcast through time.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Man, I went down a crazy rabbit hole trying to find some stuff for this, and I had very little luck, but I know there is periphera that exists around it. There were junior novels extending the universe.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

I could see that.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Yeah, couldn't find any. I looked real hard.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Just in reference to what we're talking about, which you have no point of reference, uh, this is the latest in our Psy Y F U series about shows that were on the Sci-Fi Channel, why they were unique, interesting, and ultimately failures, almost all the ones that we speak about, and how that fits into the totality of the sci-fi channel's oeuvre. And today, Skip is taking us on a voyage.

The Voyagers Premise And The Omni

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yes. Far out in the cosmos, there exists a planet known as Voyager, where the mystery of travel into space and through time has been solved. It's inhabited by a race who call themselves Voyagers. Not just a clever name.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Is that true?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

That okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

And I'll explain this in just a moment. I gotta finish this monologue.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Okay. I was just surprised that that Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Their purpose is to keep constant surveillance on history. Oh, like they're a palantir. These people have a time machine device, the Omni, which will take them into the past, present, or future. Yeah, alright. As each Voyager graduates, he is given an Omni and a guidebook. One such graduate, Phineas Bogg, who is assigned as a field worker to operate in certain time zones. So that comes from later in the show, after it had been cancelled, they tried to bundle a bunch of the episodes together that they had left into a movie of reverse Battlestar Galactica. And so they created this narrator guy that doesn't appear in the show and it isn't a person, just an omnipresent narrator, to explain what they were trying to get to in the latter parts of the season. But since he got canceled, okay. This is very much like a lot of our Highland raps said.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

It's a good painting.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Yeah, it's pretty good. May not be through the greatest means, but is that AI, that first that top picture on the top of the page? Uh actually, no, I think it's just more Photoshopped. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom, the copyright ended in 2020. So they didn't really have a lot of AI stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Alright. Yeah. Yeah. What is it we're talking about?

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Well, we were talking today. Oh man. Let me preface this by saying I wanted to do this series specifically because this is a show that I I only knew of its existence because of the early sci-fi channel. This is a show my dad remembers watching live and was super excited when it was on the sci-fi channel. Because there was almost no outlet for these types of shows that were cancelled. And so for me, this show was kind of like one of the consummate sci-fi channel purposes. Shows that that no one would have seen otherwise. Maybe didn't get the full life it deserved. But now it'd sort of be forever seen by newer audiences. When the sci-fi channel was still what it was intended to be. This show is boy, it's uh it's part of Quantum Leap. It's part Back to the Future, especially Back to the Future 2, it's part Doctor Who, it's part time bandits, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

A little bit of sliders in there.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

A little bit, a tiny bit of sliders. It's all about causality, it's all about the idea that there's something wrong with history, and somebody has to go back in time and make sure everything goes the way it's supposed to. I find that premise more and more hard to embrace as the world sucks more and more. Why are you fixing these things? It might have been way better than it is now. Why? Don't do that.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

There's literal questions about they jump into timelines that are quote unquote wrong. But do those timelines blink out of existence? Or are they just drawn back to previous strings and they've just branched off? If only they had time. But there wasn't for Voyagers.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

No, not for Voyagers. Even with let's take Quantum Leap, for example, there's at least an underpinning of the structure in the way that his you know like the guidance for his actions went. It seems like there was oversight and things like that. But they explain them. In this show, the guy that's a Voyager who travels back in time has a pseudo-pocket watch. What it is doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it is technically his time travel device. And I feel like if you need to change nuances in time, I think that you would probably have a better device than a pocket watch that just has a picture of whatever continent you're on, and then a red or green light.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

This is simpler times.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Well, Sound of Thunder came out a long time before that, so I feel like maybe you could be more complicated with that. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Well, but I mean, let's be honest, this was made for kids.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Even though the reason it got cancelled is because it went against uh 60 minutes on Sunday nights.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

I mean, what are you gonna do with

Pocket Watch Logic And Timeline Rules

SPEAKER_00 8:16

that?

SPEAKER_01 8:16

You should walk us through what the show is.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Essentially, there's a swashbuckling ex-pirate turned time traveler, recruited by whom? No idea. Answerable to whom? No idea. But is charged with making sure that the timeline plays out in a, I guess, favorable way to Western society. The way the time is supposed to work. So any incursions in that he sent back and has his nonsensical pocket watch that shows whether or not he's fixed the timeline or if it's still messed up. It's not all that detailed, it really is just kind of that blunt. Uh in the first episode, our protagonist, for lack of a better word, Phineas Bogg accidentally lands in the apartment of a child. He's an orphan, he's like living with his aunt and uncle. Even though it's in a in an amazing fucking high-rise apartment in New York, so I don't feel that bad for him.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Well, I think they don't love him or want him, so no, they hate him.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah, he's very Dekenzian, but in like a weird reverse environment, you know. He's not living in a workhouse, he's not living like Tiny Tim. No, he's living in a giant penthouse apartment.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

In the show, I have never seen another film or show that dives directly into the plot and action faster than this. First 10 seconds. Within the first two minutes, they have explained that he's an orphan, his aunt and possible future uncle-in-law, they don't want him. They're trying to like find a way to get rid of him. Then Phineas shows up and voyaging ensues. They just run with it after that. There's no time for exposition, there's no time for character. Nope. It's just it just go.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yeah, it really does feel like this was the sizzle reel that they sold the studio. And then they're like, well, now we have to tack on the rest of the episode.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Yeah, stop drilling you, hit gold. Go from there.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Done and done. You're right. I mean, it's it's straight off the bat. There's no lead up to it. It reminds me a lot, and we'll get into this, but it reminds me of Time Bandits in that sense. Where this outside presence comes in, changes the little kids' reality about time travel, and they just go. It goes full bore, super intense right off the bat. One of the reasons I really was interested in doing this is because it does seem to I don't know if it directly inspires a lot of stuff later, but it has so much in common with so many other shows and movies and properties that come later that you have to wonder. So Phineas Bogg, who is played by John Eric Hexham, and this is gonna be a very interesting and dark turn all of Misfits of Science, he's a member of a society called the Voyagers, aided by the character Jeffrey Jones, Rutrow, played by Mino Pellucci in 1982. The entire concept is that the quote-unquote Voyager, the John Eric Hexon character, carries around a quasi-pocket watch, which is supposed to determine whether what time period he's been sent to um is aligned with our quote-unquote correct timeline. So if there's an error in time, he's supposed to be there to fix it so that things go kosher for the rest of the timeline.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

There's a second item that he needs as well.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

A guidebook. I'll uh back to the future too. This is very much the sports almanac. Every Voyager is given a guidebook, which gives you exactly what happened in history.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

The Voyagers are kind of like the time variance authority in that show.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

And there's the ultimate timeline, the golden timeline, whatever. The way that the TVA would go in and prune things that weren't supposed to be there.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Yeah, the Voyagers go in and they readjust the timelines. I mean, it's almost identical to Quantum Leap, though a good ten years before. Because it comes out in 1982, uh, and surprisingly, I think it does have a lot of influence on a lot of stuff that comes to the book. To continue the premise, um, Phineas Bogg, Yon, meets Jeffrey Jones, cringe, when uh when Bogg's Omni malfunctions and then takes him to 1982. Now I don't know why this is the case, but the premise of his time jumping is that he's not supposed to be able to go past the year 1970?

SPEAKER_01 12:33

For plot reasons.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

For reasons, I guess. But it malfunctions, and so then he goes into 1982, he lands in the skyscraper apartment of our young Jeffrey Jones, not the child molester.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Jeffrey Jones is Well, maybe he'll grow up to be that. We don't know.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Well, considering Jeffrey Jones was in Howard the Duck in 1986.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

What if he grew through time as a Voyager and then came back older and then nobody just knows where he came from? I mean, I'm just saying it's possible.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Yeah, you're saying it definitely is possible that the premise of this show is that the child version of a pedophile goes back in time and joins with a guy that travels through time so that he can not molest children.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

No, no, no. That has to happen. It's very important to the timeline.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Oh, okay. Anchored in time. Immutable events.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

This is one of those SA uh timelines that needs to happen.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Yeah. Maybe it was that Lovecraftian alien ray that comes in in Howard the Duck that possesses him.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

It's the pedophile alien ray.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Anyway, not that Jeffrey Jones is what we're saying. Just some kid. Played by Mino Fellucci. In the first episode, Phineas Bogg and Jeffrey meet when Bogg's Doctor Whoish MacGuffin malfunctions and takes him to 1982, lands him in the high-rise apartment of Jeffrey Jones, who lives with his aunt and uncle, not at all like Harry Potter. And Bogg's guidebook, the thing that explains all of history, gets grabbed by the dog, taken off, and then essentially lost forever. They do a uh time bandits essentially, they fall through a window, they start traveling through time.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

They travel through time because Jeffree's about to die. And so to save him, he activates his Omni and sends them somewhere in history so they don't die then. So they land in I think it's Egypt.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

You know, they're like, Who are you? And you're like, um, Phineas, you shouldn't be here. You're a scram kid. And he's like, You brought me here, what's happening? They run to a baby in a cradle floating down the river. Phineas doesn't give a shit about the kid, he doesn't know what's going on, but Jeffrey's like, what year is it? It's blah blah blah, BC. Just like, oh, this is Moses. And then Phineas is like, Well, I thought Moses is a tall dude with a big beard and a staff, an idiot. And Jeffrey's point is no, this is Moses. He's gonna get found by the Pharaoh's daughter. We have to send Moses down the river so that history unfolds the way it's supposed to. And this is turning Jeffrey into a new MacGuffin. He is the prototypical boy genius, kind of uh Mr. Peabody and Sherman. Yes. Hello again, Peabody here.

SPEAKER_04 15:18

Where are we going this time, Mr. Peabody?

SPEAKER_01 15:20

But you're just flipping that. So in this, Jeffrey's kind of the dog who knows all about history. Yes. Uh, and will be the tag along. So he's gonna take the place of the guidebook and be able to explain where they are in history, why this is important, who these people are, because I guess his dad was a professor, and through osmosis, Jeffrey absorbed all of human history into his brain. Of course. As Alex Jones would say, it's epigenetic memory that has has put all of that in there.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

But please buy my boner pills.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Uh gay frogs.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

If you look at the uh quantum leap archetype, he's playing Al in Ziggy. His ephemeral knowledge of all of world history or whatever. Which you're an American kid in the 70s, I don't really think you have a real grasp on it, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

I mean, maybe better than you do now. I I you know, who knows?

SPEAKER_00 16:10

I think now.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

When is now? Is now now?

SPEAKER_00 16:13

There's a light that never goes out.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Oh, where's that bus at?

SPEAKER_00 16:21

If you had an ejector seat on a podcast, this would be the time to push it. Bail out.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Turn it off. So this sets them on the path that they will follow the rest of the series, which is essentially

Pilot Episode Speedrun And Setup

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Jeffrey and Phineas join together because Phineas is the only way that Jeffrey could possibly get home using his magical time travel advice, but because it's not set to go past 1970, he can't possibly get him back home just using it. So they go on adventures, and because they can't get back to 1982, where the book is, Jeffrey needs to be the resource for getting them out of inexplicable and extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in each episode to make things right and keep the timeline chugging along smoothly. And of course, they form a relationship, a father-son thing, because he's an orphan, and Phineas like grows to respect and kind of love and admire the child in a fatherly way, even though he's cast as a sexy rogue adventurer. A little fish out of water as he takes on that. And the I guess it's supposed to be a nerdy kid, becomes an adventurer himself, which is something, at least at the beginning of the first episode, it's something he dreams of. As you have a dream sequence where he plays a pirate who saves the day, saving his mother and father, but he can't live that life, so he does something approximate to that. And they go on adventures episode after episode, jumping to different timelines and saving the day by using knowledge of history to make that happen. As opposed to other sci-fi shows that are kind of designed for adults. This one is kind of designed for kids to be like an action adventure uh learning hour.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

That's true.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

And pre-early 80s and mid-80s selling things to kids and then needing to make it valuable and enriching by hey, here's your PSA for the day. Don't take candy from strangers or whatnot. This is kind of a PSA to like, hey, if you like history, if you found stuff about Cleopatra or the Wright brothers or or Babe Ruth or Thomas Edison, you found it interesting, you can find more out about it at your local library, and you should go read about it.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

Take a voyage to your nearest public library. It's all in books.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

It's a nice sentiment. Absolutely. There are worse things to do. It feels weird to place that sentiment and that type of show in the time slot. Yeah. Not generally where you find that type of programming. And it's interesting that was this NBC? Yeah, it was NBC.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Yeah. It was an extremely popular show, surprisingly. But because it was going up against 60 minutes, it really had no chance. And so at one point, David Letterman did a skit.

SPEAKER_05 19:36

I just want to finish in time for my favorite show of Voyagers.

SPEAKER_02 19:40

Voyagers. Um, Jimmy, what do you say we go for a a little walk, all right? Well, we can talk about that outside, okay? You know what it means for a show to be canceled. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Because at the time, 60 Minutes was thought to be in some trouble, and the ratings were declining a bit. Voyagers was in its time slot opposing. NBC thought they're vulnerable. If we put on a show similar to 60 Minutes, we can overtake them and get that audience. So they made a news magazine program called Monitor.

SPEAKER_04 20:29

I figured it took a lot of restraint not to kill it. Wife beating. If you think it doesn't happen to anyone you know, think again. I'm gonna kill you. First camera, Sunday.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Which everyone remembers now.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

It failed miserably.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Miserably.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

And so they kind of lost both Monitor and Voyagers, which was doing well.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Yeah, especially for what kind of weird show it was.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Yeah, if anything, you don't want to put on exactly the same thing. If you have a wrestling show, you don't put a wrestling show against that wrestling show because you're just gonna divide your audience. And the one that has either either the the one that's better, you know, even if it is better, you have to mine from that other audience, and you're battling history, people's you know, natural inclinations. What is their pattern of life? They've always watched this thing. Why are they gonna change to this new thing? It's ideally you do something different for a different audience. The people that are gonna watch 60 Minutes were going to watch 60 Minutes. You don't want to break that up to try to do another new show at the same time slot. You do something completely different. So the people that wouldn't watch 60 Minutes, they might watch this, whether it's a sports program or an action show

Kid Sidekick As The Living Guidebook

SPEAKER_01 21:40

or a kids program or something. You would think that's how it would work. You would think. I mean, obviously, they thought, oh, 60 Minutes is is ripe for overtaking. If we play our cards right, maybe we can be the dominant news show, but they just ended up sacrificing two shows for that one and got nothing out of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

60 minutes is Still 60 minutes. Eventually they do hit gold with dateline because they do it on different nights. You know, if you had just not done it the same night, it probably would have been okay. Yep. There are only 20 episodes of the show, and you can see when the writing's on the wall, there are moments where it's pretty clear that they know they're getting cancelled or trying to sum things up, or they're trying to maybe accelerate the narrative so that someone else will pick them up. Which is ironic because that's exactly what would have happened if that show had come out right before Sy-Fi Channel premiered. They do a trial of Phineas Bogg, and he's put on trial by the other Voyagers. Help change time, the I don't know, Gallifrayan Council.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

But just like in Doctor Who, there's a rogue voyager who's kind of a dark voyager. Of course. Um, trying to manipulate things in his image and get rid of the other Voyagers. He's the one trying to take out Phineas and young Jeffrey.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Yeah, this actually does also occur in Quantum Leap. Yeah. There's an evil leaper that sets things wrong. God, Don D. Belisario just fucking ripped this off like 100%.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

I mean, in a lot of ways, you know, what if we did Voyagers but for adults? And instead of having to deal with things like who are the Voyagers, how do they get money and clothes? How do they all speak the same language, even though they're in ancient Mesopotamia or in Nazi Germany or things like that? What if we took all those things out of the equation? Yeah. And we just send the essence of our main character into the body of someone else that is important in history, and they will play the particular thing out, get it where it needs to be, as they're always trying to get back home.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Well, gee, what does that sound like?

SPEAKER_01 23:36

It's the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

But with without the kiddiness. The God stuff. Yeah. Quantum bleep gets really heavy into the god stuff. Voyagers feels like a Doctor Who spin-off. You know what I mean? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

If Doctor Who had like a Saturday morning spin-off, it would be Voyager.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

It would be Voyagers. It is the American Doctor Who. It just got cancelled because they were putting in the wrong time slot. One of those famous death slots. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

They just keep trying to hit that refresh button with those programs. Does not work.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Oh, what do you know? You keep trying the same thing over and over again, and it doesn't work. It's incredible. There's a website to send you. They have a lot of breakdown on each and every aspect of the show. Man, this is like almost Highlander level fandom stuff here.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

When I was watching Voyagers at first, I uh the the Voyagers kind of reminded me of the Watchers from the Highlander series. Yeah, totally. But it's all this this history and it's not explained. You just have no idea why or what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Who do they answer to? Who is this authority that they're that they're who is it that's in charge of whatever the continuity is? Who is he answering to? Like, and does he get punished or I don't understand this dynamic at all.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

And and and what is this timeline?

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Why is this the one that must be how god-awful are all the other timelines? That this is the best one you got? God, I don't want to live in that world.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

They kind of set up some of the stakes in the first episode where one of the earliest places they fall into, because by turning the machine on, then they just fall through the sky, uh, but only like two feet above the ground. So they always make a soft landing.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

And they find themselves in World War One. But Germany is winning the war, and they find out that there are no airplanes, and so it's just the superior blimp technology of Germany that is gonna have them take over. And they realize, oh, obviously, the Wright brothers never invented planes, so America and the Allies are gonna lose. We have to go further back into the past and fix the Wright brothers' problem, and so thus they do that, meet the Wright brothers, and they teach Ed Begley Jr.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Yes, how to make a plane.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

The Wright brothers are obsessed with the same woman, they don't want to work together, so Phineas seduces the woman, so she wants him instead of the Wright brothers, and makes a plane, shows them that it works, so then the Wright brothers, I guess, fix his design slightly, or just take credit for his design, which is kind of Yeah. What's the core rule,

NBC Timeslot Trouble And Cancellation

SPEAKER_01 26:08

at least in Star Trek lingo, of time travel? You don't bring future tech, future knowledge into the past, because then it's kind of a recursive loop, right? The terminator paradox. A terminator doesn't exist, but the terminator exists by going into the past, leaving parts of itself that are created, their mind that knowledge to then make a terminator that then goes into the past to then make itself that's a cyclical loop.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

And let's stop with Terminator 2. Let's just stop right there. Let's not discuss any of the others further.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Most of the episodes, at least that I saw, they knew how planes work, and so they built one, and then the Wright brothers used that to then take credit for inventing a plane.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

It was a glider, though, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Not an actual plane, but it's a glider that gives them the framework basis of it.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

And then they kind of reverse engineer it.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Correct. Or the same way that Jeffrey goes back to to Babe Ruth and Babe Ruth's like, uh, I'm gonna give up, but Jeffrey knows baseball, 1982 style baseball, a different style of hitting, which allows Babe Ruth to hit a bunch of home runs and and pitch better, uh, nine 1982 style, which then makes him the best player of all time or whatnot, and he continues playing baseball. Studied a lot of Royals players. You're taking knowledge andor tech from the future and putting it in the past, but that never would have happened without you being there.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Yeah, isn't there a serious Ouroboros problem here?

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Yes, yes, but again, it's a kid's show. It's fine.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

You're fixing things. You're not the cause for these things, which is how that would be in an actual time travel timeline.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Yeah, I mean, this is essentially the plot of the Star Trek First Contact or even a lot of original series episodes. This is how things are supposed to go, so we're gonna guide them along and just hope no one ever talks about us ever. Though they're blatant and use their names constantly.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

I mean in the Voyage Home.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Kind of like the James Bond problem.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

Don't they have to like create tech in the 80s?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

They created transparent aluminum. Yes. It was Bones and Scotty at this fucking polymer manufacturing plant. And they uh he gives them the actual chemical formula for transparent aluminum. And the argument is, well, how do we know he didn't invent it? And then Bones is like, oh yeah, okay. Well you don't know. You just did that. You could maybe have just fuck things up for everyone forever. What are you talking about? You better make sure before you do that. I can't just go give Da Vinci's designs to some dude walking down the street in Naples in 1450.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Unless that's what I was meant to be. Nothing wouldn't happen without them going back in the past and doing which is I guess how you explain those time paradox whatever's it's also extremely problematic.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

But there are some good things about it. I mean, they do stuff about Harriet Tubman and they do stuff certain things you're like, oh yeah, those things should have happened for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Again, it's a fun show for kids teaching them about history in an adventure setting. The costumes and the settings in production design are, you know, middling.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

They're a little axe, you know.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

They kind of get the job done for what it's supposed to be. At least there's like every episode, it's widely varied. It could be any time, any place. So they're really jumping around as a production designer and a costumer. You kind of have to be able to do everything at once, which is hard to do. Yeah, to do it perfectly well. So it's serviceable, and they hop around enough that you don't deal with it enough to see all of the flaws.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Yeah, and they do overlap, even though it is serialized, they do have a lot of overlap between episodes. Uh a little bit. They do that a little bit in Quantum Leap as well. It's they do a lot of especially in the first few episodes, they can bounce back and forth between places they've been and stuff they've already done. They do enough of like bleeding one episode into another that keeps you kind of compelled into the overarching narrative of it. But I don't know that it was well, I obviously it wasn't enough, which is wasn't 60 minutes. So I think if they had put this on a different night, this probably would have been a big hit. Yeah. At least like even if it was like four seasons or whatever, like still it would have been.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

I think putting it on in a Saturday morning block where it's shown to kids for kids, I think it would have done gangbusters. It's a fun show. You know, I think the the two actors had good chemistry, you know, decent charisma.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Yeah. Which is where it gets real sad. You know what's really weird about this too, and I was thinking about this earlier today. This was also created by the same guy who created Misfits of Science.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Kind of the uh Poltergeist Curse type stuff.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

That's kind of what I was thinking, too. The show was already cancelled, but that wasn't the issue. That's uh why the show didn't come back. Um there were plans to bring it back for a second season, but it didn't happen because there was a lot of internal politics and things like that. But John Eric Hexham plays Phineas Bog went on to do a couple of different projects. He looked like he was gonna be an up-and-coming star in that era. It seemed like he was good looking, he had acting credentials, he really did take his craft seriously. He was born in November of 1957. He was first and foremost a model, but then he landed the role in Voyagers because he was up for some movie, and everyone was like, Oh, we gotta put this guy in something. So he was eventually cast here in in Voyagers. And in 1985, I'm sorry, 1984, on the set of a show he was on called Cover Up, which was a spy show. He was showing off to some friends backstage how Hollywood works, and he put a gun against his temple which had blanks in it, which do still have a concussive charge. Yeah by pulling the trigger to impressive friends, he blew his brains out and died instantly. And because of that, yeah, Universal Who was the one that produced cover-up, they re-edited episodes of Voyagers into a film called Voyager of the Unknown, and then Voyagers of the Titanic, the two leadover episodes they had of Voyagers. When they got the rights, the Voyagers sci-fi channel used to show the

Mythology Questions And Rogue Voyagers

SPEAKER_00 32:18

show, and every now and then they would show these made-for-TV movies. His heart was transplanted into a 36-year-old Las Vegas man at the California Pacific Medical Center. His kidneys and his corneas were also donated. One cornea went to a 66-year-old man and the other to a young girl. And one of the kidney recipients is a 45-year-old boy, and the other was a 43-year-old grandmother of three who had waited eight years for a kidney. That's nice. They actually donated some of his skin to a three and a half-year-old boy who was afflicted with third-degree burns. Um his ashes were scattered in the Pacific near Malibu by his mother, and he left a $255,000 estate, and his mother later received an out of court settlement with 20th Century Fox. And Glenn A. Larson productions. Genuinely surprised that she actually got uh any money out of it. But Amino Pelucci would go on to become a relatively famous photographer. Surprising cameos throughout this show. Guy Stockwell, who played a character called Reverend Noise, that is Dean Stockwell's brother.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Mako makes an appearance. Shannon Dority plays a character named Betty Parris. Robert O'Reilly, who plays Galron in Star Trek, he plays a dude named Klaus in an episode. Ian Abercrombie, who's in the pilot, I think you'd probably remember him the best as Mr. Pitt in Seinfeld. Ate the Snickers Bar with a Fork and Knife.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 33:54

Played a butler in uh news radio. Uh and then Luke Perry, though uncredited, played a Union prisoner in one of their Civil War episodes. Of which there were multiple.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

How can you not have multiple Civil War episodes? You need as many as possible. It's hot. It's hot fodder for the young kids.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Everybody loves it nowadays. Everybody's going to Fords Theater. It's the hottest spot. The show I I left watching it as a kid. There's only 20 episodes. There's not a lot to get to. It is tragic because you could John Eric Hexum. You could see why he was gonna be a big deal.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

Yeah, he looked he looked very like, you know, a little like young Harrison Forge, you know, a little David Hasselhoffy, but sexier.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

The Aryan David Hasselhoff. He was gonna be big. I I do think he was gonna be big. From everything I read, there were articles about it, he was gonna be the next it guy, the new Hollywood version of Rob Gredford. It's a real tragedy. But it only lasted 20 episodes, it did catch on, but just got overshadowed.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

And you found it because it was on the sci-fi channel in the early 90s, right? You can see how this show probably influenced, you know, at least conceptually, a lot of things that came after it.

SPEAKER_05 35:02

A lot.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Yeah. And you can see how like this was influenced by Doctor Who. Good artists imitate great artist Steele, right?

SPEAKER_00 35:09

G Glenn Larson, uh, Donald D. Belisario, yeah. All the greatest thieves. I mean, really, this is where you get Quantum Leap, the the plot of Back to the Future 2. A lot of Doctor Who obviously influenced it. I feel like there's so many things that came after this that we take for granted in our in the genres we enjoy that were pretty much just ripped off from this show. Even though it didn't last long, it definitely had influence on a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

It's true. And it wasn't a bad show. It's something to go out and see. I had I had never heard of the show before you had suggested it. Uh I never saw it as a kid. I didn't know anything about it. It was a fine enough show.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

It's a fun romp. Yeah. Uh especially since you can see what it influenced later. Well, especially since like it used to air, I don't know, like nine o'clock in the morning on Saturdays or whatever. I'm like, yeah, that's about it.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

I mean, that's perfect for what it should have been.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

Exactly. If you're you and I in the good to late bad stuff of sci-fi channel, they're gonna show something at nine o'clock in the morning and we're hungover and get up early.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

This would be the perfect Voyagers.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Unfortunately, at that point they were doing Blood Surf, but you know. But this was the kind of stuff they would show at that time. And uh that was always really, really great when Sci-Fi Channel was good.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

You said that they're from another planet. I don't see them explain that in any episodes I saw on the show. They took lore from the show when they made the movie and made this canon. But what is this planet of humans? But they're also taking people from the past? Like they're just plucking regular humans to put them on this planet, correct? Well, yeah, you just explained the planet's iced. There can only be one voyager.

SPEAKER_03 36:48

Looks like some kind of corpora. I'm scared. We're back to school. What's up like PS132? What are we doing here? Must be a class reunion or a hole cover or something. Can't wait to see the old game.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

That part of the lore they only reveal later because they know the show's being cancelled.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

It's so many questions.

SPEAKER_00 37:21

We already had questions like who are they? Who do they answer to? They don't include that part of the lore until they start bundling it as movies. Well, then why would you bring up more questions? Like if you're trying to bundle it up, if you're trying to end it, why bring up more shit that now we need to know about?

SPEAKER_01 37:39

I can kind of see it as opposed to a serialized story where someone's supposed to like pick up on details as the show goes on. If you're trying to bundle up into a movie, just like, hey, this is who these people are, this is what's happening, you're not going to get any more backstory than what I'm telling you right now. Drop you into it, go. Uh when they made David Lynch's Dune, they recut it into the director unauthorized version. That's the one that he has disowned, that quote unquote Alan Smithy directed. But in that version, they do a different history of Dune. I mean, they get into the Butler and Jihad, they just do still shots of paintings that I think were supposed to be material for reference ideas, but they do a different voiceover that further explains the world. They cut out Urulan talking about it. Here's

Time Paradoxes And History Tech Cheats

SPEAKER_01 38:28

more inframo.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

It's a computer that talks to Paul.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Well, technically, no, it's different. It they just found a guy who did this. Well, it's like not connected.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

I felt like that was supposed to be the idea. Granted, I'm doing the work for them.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

Yeah, I it doesn't play out anything like the history book that is in the actual film. It's very much just an added-on opening. We think you need more details of this world, and we're gonna put it in the way we deem fit. It's something that never would happen nowadays. No one's gonna take Gladiator and recut the opening to do this voice over explaining the history in these characters. I mean, I know of some re-editing for content and for length, but I can't think of anything where someone has completely added whole cloth new stuff to a film that wasn't there before, and not like a director's cut version.

SPEAKER_00 39:21

Justice League.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

But that is what the actual product that came out. This isn't like someone have a film come out when they put it to TV, then they they put in you know a new intro, new dialogue, things like that.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Yeah, that was a little weird.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

That's different. That's like a studio. Well, we need to go in a different direction, we're gonna have a different director, but that was the original vision of the studio that came out. This isn't like a TV station getting rights to the product and then re-editing it for what they thought would play better for television. That is bizarre. It's just something that doesn't happen nowadays. I mean, partially because we're way past both VHS DVD and streaming, so there's no reason for massive re-edits like that. A lot of the movies that come out now, they are on content-specific channels. So you don't have to like re-edit for nudity or foul language, even though you are getting elements of that in some things. But usually those are done by like a director will take over, you know. So, like when Spielberg put out ET again and they took out the guns for uh uh flashlights, walkie talks, stuff like that, but that's also the actual filmmaker going in and changing it. It's not like a whole different entity who happens to have the rights and is putting it on a new platform and changing it for their own things. There are versions of that. There's those Christian film editors, like entire companies, that take films and Christianize them, the take out, depending on what you want to show quote unquote your family or your congregation. You know, I'd like to show uh the transporter, but any excessive violence, sexual content, drug use, foul language, non-Christian values. Sure, the film only ends up being 12 minutes long, but at least a decade or go, like that was a popular thing. You could pay for people to re-edit a film in the way you wanted it, and then they'd send you uh a copy of that in their own version. I don't know the legality of all of that. I'm sure there's some way skirting around quote fan edits of things, and maybe because Yeah, Paramount did set a lot of those copyright laws because of all the Star Trek fan films.

SPEAKER_00 41:28

We we talked about that before.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

And I guess if you're not mass producing it or putting out for wide use, you know, in the same way that you could make a t-shirt for a singular person that has Tweety riding a sandworm with the Toronto Raptors mascot through the yellow brick road, that's fine because it's a singular use of all of these intellectual properties, but you couldn't make that and sell it wide widely mass-produced because you'd have copyright infringement on those intellectual properties. Maybe that's how they get around that?

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Maybe. I mean, I'm just shocked you've seen my ass tattooed recently.

SPEAKER_01 42:04

You think I don't see your ass tattooed all the time. I got those cameras, you don't know where they're at.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

You're always coming at me with those guns.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

It's not a gun, baby.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

So sad.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

I am, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Stop plugging it in. So anyway, that's a lot like the sci-fi channel.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

Yeah. Voyager was on the sci-fi channel. It did get a short second life there, which obviously the the way you saw it, I think a lot of people got a new taste for it, and it had a brief Second Life. Um, unfortunately, it's kind of faded into the ether at this point. Yeah. But again, it shows us the type of show that could get a second life, did make up the programming blocks of that early sci-fi channel, and kind of give you an idea of what sci-fi channel was intended to be and could be.

SPEAKER_00 42:48

100%. It was popular when it came out. It was uh an unfortunate victim of its time slot and the decisions made by Studio XX at the time. It's a fun watch. But I mean, if you've seen Quantum Leap, you kind of get it. Uh, I did watch it when it came out on the Sci-Fi channel. It did end in tragedy. If you ever get a chance, yeah, it's worth a watch. It's a good time. And you can see exactly what it inspired later on. So. If you're really passionate about it, there are many websites that are devoted very specifically to the minutiae, the show. Uh good on them.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

Yeah, and there I saw there are multiple web podcasts that are devoted just to Voyagers. Yeah. It's always interesting when we do these episodes and you find these clusters of intense fascination and love for these small niche properties.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

Yeah. Highlander looks like absolutely like mercurial compared to this. But even but even that, it's still niche. Man, there were a series of junior novels, apparently. This had some purchase outside of the show in fan fiction and con presence, and but very few people remember.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

But that's why we have this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

That's why we do this.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

That's true. And we hope that you've enjoyed it going on this voyage through time with your trusty podcast host. You can be Jeffrey Jones. I'll be Phineas Bogg.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

Well, I don't want to be Jeffrey Jones.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

That's that's how the cookie crumbles.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

Oh. Wait, am I Jeffrey Jones from Howard the Duck or am I real life, Jeffrey Jones?

SPEAKER_01 44:18

So anyway.

SPEAKER_00 44:20

I don't want any of these.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

You are what you are. But what we are is Dispatch AJX, and we hope that you've enjoyed. Please like, share, subscribe. Follow us on all social media. Find out information whenever we post it, which is rarely. But someday. If you wouldn't mind like, sharing, subscribing, please uh tell your friends, relatives, fellow voyagers, any Phineas that you happen to find, and or no.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

If you wouldn't minding fog or bog, doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

Clockwork bog.

SPEAKER_00 44:50

No, I said fog or bog.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Fog or bog. Please rate us.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

There was a made for Jimmy. All right.

SPEAKER_01 44:57

Please rate us five Jeffrey Joneses on the favorite podcast app of your choice. Gross. Ideally, Apple Podcasts is the best way for us to get heard and thus seen. We would greatly appreciate it. Again, thank you for going on this voyage with us. But before we fall through time again, ass backwards into relevant historical events that need to be fixed. Skip.

Production Limits And Saturday Morning Fit

SPEAKER_01 45:20

What should they do?

SPEAKER_00 45:21

They should definitely remember where the guidebook is or the sports almanac, because those things will ultimately decide your fate and determine whether or not Donald Trump becomes president, so keep that in mind. Make sure that you support your local comic shops and retailers, and from Dispatch Ajax, we would like to say no matter where you go, there you are.

SPEAKER_02 45:43

This cancel business. It can never happen to Voyagers, could it? Yes, Jimmy. And I'm afraid it has.