Voyagers!

I used to watch this show as a kid and absolutely loved it. Sci-Fi channel re-runs it from time to time and I heartily recommend you recording it for younger children to watch. It's cool and educational too.

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.

What a pity this show only lasted for one season and twenty episodes. What a tragedy that the freak death of Jon-Erik Hexum a couple of years later precluded any revival of this show.

This was the real fantasy for any young person. Metaphysically we are shown here that history goes off course than how the books we read have it. So whoever is running the Universe sends out certain guides to put it back on track. In this case that was the hunky Jon-Erik Hexum who time travels with a stop watch and stops at various points. The watch was called the Omni and if it had a red glow something was wrong. Green meant history was flowing as it should. Red meant he had to stop and fix things.

But Hexum loses his guidebook and he has no clue what to fix. That's where young Meeno Peluce comes in. Peluce was a 12 year ol history genius. What better than a reference book that walks and is charming in youthful innocence.

The two made a great team for 20 episodes righting all the things that go wrong in earth's time and space. Hexum and Peluce had a nice chemistry between them.

Such a pity Voyagers was not carried into a second season. In his brief time left Hexum was doing more adult type material. Who knows, he might still be with us if Voyagers wasn't cancelled.

Can someone with an Omni fix that?

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....

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".