Voyagers!

"Voyagers!" was one of the best time travel shows I have ever seen. But a bad time slot up against 60 Minutes on Sundays spelled doom for Voyagers! I was about 6 or 7 years old when this show came out. No one my age even remembers this show, and I don't even bother with anyone significantly younger than me remembering Voyagers! The show centered around the adventures of 12 year old Jeffery Jones and his dimwitted 20 something adult companion Phineas Bogg. Bogg is a Voyager but is ill equiped for time travel, Jeff being a history whiz(and every other type whiz) is able to help Bogg out. Like "The Greatest American Hero", "Voyagers!" features a hook with a lost instruction book. In this case, Bogg's guide book. If Voyagers! was given a 2nd Season as it so rightly deserved, then I am certain Jon-Erik Hexum would still be with us. Tragically Hexum accidently killed himself a year after Voyagers! left the air.

A lot of fans of this show were half my age in 1982-83. I was 14 and in high school. I had a terrible crush on Jon-Erik but the show was so good his beauty just enhanced a great show. I am 43 now and I never forgot it. I was reading an article on Solei Moon Frye and remembered her big brother Meeno Peluce. Then I thought about Voyagers and how I hadn't seen it in almost 30 years. I went hunting. I found several episodes...Thank You Youtube! I also thought I would look at the show with critical eyes like I do Dallas and Dynasty now. I was so wrong; I was thrust back to a simpler time, it really was a great way to learn, if we had more educational shows like that today maybe the United States children wouldn't be so "dumbed-down".

There are several things to note about "Voyagers!" The first is that this was a part of a master plan by NBC Program chief Brandon Tartikoff to merge entertainment with education, and to provide kids with intelligent programming, not the usual dreck that seemed so prevalent in the 1980s.

The concept of the show was deceptively simple. There are a team of men and women who keep track of "history." These "voyagers" each have a hand-held device called an "Omni" which gives them their location, the date and a signal if history is "wrong." They all go back and forward through time to correct any "mistakes" that may have occurred in time and keep the world on track.

One voyager is named Phineas Bogg (an obvious play on Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg from "Around The World In 80 Days"). However this particular voyager didn't pass his history exam and landed on the windowsill of Jeffrey, who just happened to be a whiz kid in history. Together, they became "Voyagers!"

The serious problem the program had was in its construction. In one episode, Germany had somehow won World War I. The voyagers traveled back in time and discovered that famed flying ace Eddie Rickenbacher had nothing to do. That's because the Wright Brothers hadn't invented the airplane. So they had to travel again and discovered Orville and Wilbur were arguing over a girl in their bicycle shop instead of working on their flying machine. So the Voyagers had to set them back on track.

It had to have been extremely difficult to write such elaborate plots that both were well known enough for an audience to relate to and yet capable of making sense in the plot of the show. As brilliant as some of these episodes were, the question is how many related subplots could there be for any moment in history, before you get into material that isn't in the library? With such a limitation, with production costs being what they were for an early 1980s s/f program and with ratings being lower than desired, "Voyagers!" was not viable for more than a year. Looking at the series now, it would have made for a brilliant "Harry Potter" style string of films, since there really aren't enough historic events to have made it to the famed 100 episode level.

I absolutely loved this show when I was a kid. It was one of the highlights of my week and I've never forgotten it. I was an ardent fan and viewer of this show (I was 11 years old at the time) and was so disappointed when it failed to show up on my TV screen. I didn't know at the time that it had been cancelled...all I knew was a show I loved had just disappeared.

I haven't seen this since I was 11 so all my memories of it are from childhood. I would love to see it again. Was it as good as I remember? I figured it most probably was after seeing all the other reviews from viewers who have seen it more recently. It certainly got me interested in history and the past when I was a kid. It was educational as well as being great fun. No other show I remember from childhood taught and entertained the way Voyagers did. There has been so much rubbish pumped out on our TV sets for years and it's sad that fun, educational TV like Voyagers just fall by the wayside. Sadly kids of my generation and kids today just get fed mostly pap. If it sells it's swell..long as a show is making money who cares what kind of rubbish it is...sigh....

Voyagers! was a time travel series that aired Sunday nights on NBC from 1982-'83. I was 7 years old and instantly hooked. The lighthearted fantasy concept involved a kid, a pirate and cool watch like time machine (the Omni) that was worn on the belt. As a kid I wanted my own Omni more then I did a Jedi lightsaber.

The show was about a recently orphaned 12 year old named Jeffrey Jones (Meeno Pulce). Jeff is living a dreary life in his Manhattan high rise with his aunt and uncle, who don't like the idea of suddenly raising a kid themselves. One night a time traveler named Phineas Bogg (Jon-Erik Hexum) crashes into Jeff's bedroom. Bogg is a ruggedly handsome man that's dressed like a pirate from the 1700s, who happens to be a member of a mysterious organization called "Voyagers". "I am a Voyager" Bogg says, "You ever hear of one? Course not, no one has", Bogg continues to tell Jeff. Voyagers are people that are trained to "travel through the ages" to keep history on track and make sure it's always on the right path. They don't get into the philosophical aspects of what is the right or wrong history, and there is no need to in a fun show like this. If the Omni flashed red then something was wrong with history. Once the good guys fixed the problem it became a solid green. The Voyagers seems to exist out of our linear time, they appear to be from the past but use technology from the future. Through a series of mishaps Jeff winds up as Bogg's time traveling companion, and Bogg is unable to take Jeff back to 1982 because his Omni would only go up to 1970. Apparently it was malfunctioning, which led him to land in Jeff's 1982 high rise apartment in the first place. Jeff is a child genius who knows everything there is to know about history. Bogg doesn't know much about history so Jeff proves valuable to Bogg, as Bogg left his Guidebook back in Jeff's 1982 bedroom (remember they can't go back). Jeff basically becomes Bogg's new Guidebook and the two improvise their way through solving problems the best they can.

This was created as an educational series for children, and it worked. They hit it out of the ballpark with this one. I probably learned more about history from Voyagers! then I did from any of my 2nd grade classes. There was always a main plot and then a secondary story line where Jeff and Bogg visited another time line. Sometimes a brief third time story would be thrown in. The best episodes had two story lines that mirrored each other in some way. "Agents of Satan" had Jeff and Bogg land in New England during the Salem witch trials, after escaping being burned at the stake the duo land in 1924 Boston during a séance that just happens to have Harry Houdini in the audience. Houdini never believed in real magic or the supernatural, only the incredibly well staged illusions that he performed. He famously went around the country debunking phonies swindling people out of money, so when Houdini sees our heroes appear out of nowhere and then immediately vanish into thin air he is convinced that ghosts are real. Jeff and Bogg inadvertently turned a green light zone into a red one. This kind of story telling was just flat out AMAZING for a kids show. The writing was top notch. Other great episodes were "Worlds Apart" (Thomas Edison and Lawerence of Arabia), "The Travels of Marco Polo", "Barriers of Sound" (Alexander Graham Bell), "Voyagers of the Titanic", "The Trial of Phineas Bogg" (we get to see the Voyager school) and "Jack's Back" (Jack the Ripper).

I have acquired all the episodes in recent years, complete with the NBC bumpers ("Voyagers will be back after these messages"). A few of my episodes even have some of the old NBC ads from the time, with Meeno and Jon-Erik dressed in costume and telling us "Sundays are the place to be on NBC!", which was a precursor to the "NBC Let's All Be There!" ads a couple years later. I get a flood rush of magical childhood nostalgia when I see stuff like that. I was nervous that show would look just too ridiculous and immature for my adult eyes. I was proved wrong. Sure there are a couple of forgettable episodes and yes there are some corny moments here and there where you can tell this was a children's series, but it's damn entertaining one. The acting can be silly at times, but sometimes you have to just accept a well made show's faults and just roll with it. The stories and the writing were what really attracted me. This was a series aimed at children but written with older audiences in mind, so I can still watch this one as an adult and not feel guilty. The series always dealt with famous historical figures, but who cares? The show had plenty of wit and zany enthusiasm going for it. That other great time travel series Quantum Leap would be there later to deal with the more regular folk. At the end of each episode Meeno Pulce would give a quick narration over the closing credits, telling you that you could learn more about the historic figures visited in this episode through reading, "Take a voyage down to your local library, it's all in books". Unfortunately NBC canceled the show after 1 season. The show couldn't compete against the hard hitting 60 Minutes, and perhaps the complex plots was something that couldn't be sustained. I'll always remember this show though. It's a shame that back in the 80s moron shows like The Dukes of Hazzard lasted for six years and Voyagers! only stayed on the air for one.