Pop Culture Nerd Alert/If You Like That, Then Try This

Disclaimer: Yes, I am a nerd. I’ve always been a pop-culture, TV show loving nerd and I’m okay with that.

Yeah, I know, shocker, huh?

Now that I’m out the closet, time to get my nerd on with some TV show “if you like that, then try this”.

VOYAGERS! (NBC 1982-83)—Compare to DOCTOR WHO, THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO (Kinda-Sorta, I’ll explain later)
Adventure series starring the late Jon-Erik Hexum and Meeno Puluse. When Time Traveler Phineas Bogg (Hexum) accidentally crashes in Jeffery Jones (Puluse) bedroom the two team up to, as Bogg would say in the intro of each episode;

“We travel through time to help history along. Give it a push when it’s needed. When the Omni’s Red it means history’s wrong. Our job is to get everything back on track“.

Each episode would find the two landing in random points in time, using the Omni, a time traveling device, and correcting whatever problem that cause the Omni to flash red. Once it was green again, they were off to the next adventure. This series borrowed tremendously from DOCTOR WHO (especially with The Omni, that usually looked like a pocket watch but could, like The TARDIS, could be disguised to fit in its surroundings) and was possibly an inspiration for QUANTUM LEAP (Each Omni was either fixed so they could either go to a certain point in time, Bogg’s was fixed so it could only go as far as 1970, for example. Quantum Leap’s time traveler Sam Beckett time-traveling was only limited to when he was born to the year 1999, with a rare instance when he time-leaped into the body of one of his desendents during the American Civil War…hey, I told you, I’m a TV show nerd like that).

The tie-in to the 80s superhero classic, THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO? Both show’s main characters had to operate without their instruction manuals. On The Greatest…Ralph Hinkley wears this alien unitard that gives him all kinds of wonderful powers and a sort of instruction guide that Ralph loses in the first episode and thus he has to learn how to use the suit the hard way…hijinks ensue. On Voyagers! Bogg and all other Voyagers carry a Guidebook, a glorified history book, that tells them the way time should be if they need to correct…well, that was explained earlier. His Guidebook is taken from him by Jeffrey’s dog, Ralph, which happens to be the first name of the main character on TGAM.

Voyagers! was created by James D. Parriott, who would go on to create numerous TV shows, most notably cult classics MISFITS OF SCIENCE and FOREVER KNIGHT. I loved those shows, man!

Puluse’s half-sister, Soliel Moon-Frye, had a somewhat better run on NBC (and later in syndication) in the kid friendly comedy, PUNKY BREWSTER.

CHECK THIS OUT:

Voyagers! Opening theme