The Series: Voyagers! was one of those shows I remembered airing around the same time as Knight Rider and like many contemporary outings, was about the heroes making things right. Unlike the escapades of Michael and KITT, this show's high tech gimmick was a small device known as an Omni; a pocket watch looking golden device that could take its owner to any time & place as well as point out when something was "fixed". The convenience of the technology was never addressed and unlike more recent attempts at the subject, the future was never seen (even in the courtroom drama episode) but the show started with the device malfunctioning to bring Phineas Bogg (Jon Erik Hexum) into the bedroom of young Jeffrey Jones (Meeno Peluce) without any major background discussed. Nowadays, having a guy in his late twenties appearing in the bedroom of a pre-teen boy to whisk him away on a series of dangerous "adventures" would probably be off limits but it was a cute way to solve the problems of the boy's immediate family problems. Apparently, his parents died in a tragic accident and he ended up with relatives not too keen on his presence. His new male guardian is upset that the boy is going to ruin established plans to go to Mexico and soak up the sun and Jeffrey, hearing this from a cracked open door, sadly bemoans his fate to his dog. His bedroom window of the high rise crashes and in pops Phineas, demanding to know where Christopher Columbus is, who fights with the dog over his book; resulting in Jeffrey falling out the window. Phineas jumps after the boy and they land in the past to save baby Moses.

The details start clumsily falling out at this point, Phineas explaining his mission to restore the balance as part of an organization of people that flit about time fixing where history went wrong. Instead of proactively saving lives and preventing disasters though, they are there to keep things the way they are supposed to be which gets them in trouble in the standard television manner. Like Dr. Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, they are limited to a specific time frame (unless, as in the opener, the Omni malfunctions) and also like that show, it is never quite clear what wrong they are set to fix; causing some confusion in the process. See, without his guidebook, Phineas is as dumb as a stump about history which forces him to rely on Jeffrey's knowledge of the past, played off as the boy being the son of a history teacher. I was never too keen about the way the writer's depended so heavily on the boy's knowledge of history in this fashion (the boy's history genius angle getting old after a couple of episodes) but this was light fluff as brought to the world by a Sunday night show on NBC. Like the Saturday morning dynamic it so heavily embraced (complete with special effects on the cheap), the show was not meant for historical accuracy (it had plenty of lapses in this area) or to be internally consistent so much as to give kids a fantasy show where the young star (Meeno Peluce) would be the smart one in a world of dumb adults. Bogg was always wooing the ladies, perhaps as an attempt to downplay the perception of impropriety between the two leads (ala later seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess)) and his romantic attempts were always getting in the way of his missions while Jeffrey would typically point the guy in the right direction by the end of the show.

Given that there was only one season for the show, it never really had much time to grow either so the general formula played off like this: The pair would land in their destination at the beginning of each episode, find something wrong, and then have to go to another time to fix what was wrong in the first spot. There wasn't a lot of variation in the way episodes were handled except for the one where Phineas was put on trial by his fellow Voyagers (The Trial of Phineas Bogg) and clips of his past (from earlier shows including the pilot) were used against him. Given the wonderful amount of potential scenarios for alternative time lines and the nearly blank slate of ideas raised in the world of fiction, this was my biggest disappointment with the show; dumbing it down so much for the juvenile market. There was a spark of appeal to a few episodes (notably Voyagers of the Titanic where Jeffrey tried to alter history, even if the clips used from a couple of old movies looked really, really bad here or in Sneak Attack where they were trying to warn about Pearl Harbor) and the comment to go to the library at the end of each episode for more information (the show proving it belonged on Saturday mornings) but older audiences were never the intended niche for this one and after twenty five years, even my rose colored glasses couldn't make this one better than a Rent It for me. The acting was stilted, the direction seemed cookie cutter simplistic, and the writing was geared towards the LCD types but it still has a fond place in history as a children's show, albeit a stepping stone for the far better efforts that came later.

I timed the episodes as I watched them and they all appear to be around 48 minutes and change so I think they were unedited from their original presentation (unlike the ham-fisted way they are hacked up in syndication by the way). Here's a list of the twenty episodes on the DVDs with the air dates according to the IMDB for those who care:

1) Pilot (October 3, 1982)
2) Created Equal (October 10, 1982)
3) Bully and Billy (October 24, 1982)
4) Agents of Satan (October 31, 1982)
5) Worlds Apart (November 7, 1982)
6) Cleo and the Babe (November 14, 1982)
7) The Night the Rebs Took Lincoln (November 21, 1982)
8) Old Hickory and the Pirate (November 28, 1982)
9) The Travels of Marco...and Friends (December 3, 1982)
10) An Arrow Pointing East (December 12, 1982)
11) Merry Christmas, Bogg (December 19, 1982)
12) Buffalo Bill and Annie Play the Palace (January 9, 1983)
13) The Trial of Phineas Bogg (January 16, 1983)
14) Sneak Attack (February 20, 1983)
15) Voyagers of the Titanic (February 27, 1983)
16) Pursuit (March 6, 1983)
17) Destiny's Choice (March 13, 1983)
18) All Fall Down (March 27, 1983)
19) Barriers of Sound (June 12, 1983)
20) Jack's Back (July 10, 1983)

Picture: Voyagers!: The Complete Series was presented in the usual 1.33:1 ratio full frame color as shot by numerous directors for airing on Sunday night broadcast television on NBC. The episodes did not appear to be noticeably edited, containing the same footage of movies in some cases (Voyagers of the Titanic employed unreleased clips of one movie and stock footage of another that were in greater need of cleaning up than usual), but there did not appear to be any significant effort to remaster the material for this four disc box set. It looked a lot better than the syndicated versions that have been worn to pieces and heavily edited to allow for the additional commercials but this was never a big budget outing and the cheesy special effects were especially dated. The stock shots used in many episodes fared the worse, coming alive with mosquito noise and a near radioactive look to them but the majority of the show held up pretty well by comparison to similar shows from so long ago. I did see some compression artifacts that may have been the result of putting five episodes on each disc but they were not too bad in most cases.

Sound: The audio was presented in the original monaural with a 2.0 Dolby Digital monaural processing applied to clean up some of the worse effects of time. The vocals were heard well enough and while there was obviously no separation in the tracks (it being in monaural and all), the dynamic range was similar to some of the recent spate of Saturday morning cartoons released on DVD that my associates have been reviewing favorably. This being a historical show, the worry of changes to the music was greatly diminished; a relatively generic score employed as I remembered it throughout the episodes. A couple of episodes had lip synch problems for a bit and some of the louder explosions were really in need of cleaning up (they alternated between sounding canned & tinny and distorted; depending on the episode) but nostalgia buffs probably won't mind the minimal issues here as they were part and parcel of the original show as it aired on broadcast TV.

Extras: Like many older shows, the only extras were some trailers and a brief outline of the episodes on the back cover of the case. Industry reports are that Meeno Peluce teaches at Hollywood High and was available for commentaries but like so many other TV on DVD releases, the producers decided to cut corners to keep the costs low so a future HD version of the series remains the only hope for an upgrade in this sense; disappointing me that some of the talk show interviews and other publicity from the show couldn't have been dug up as extras too.

Final Thoughts: Voyagers! was a light take on historical intervention by means of a science fantasy gimmick starring two unlikely heroes Phineas Bogg (Jon Erik Hexum) and Jeffrey Jones (Meeno Peluce). Phineas allegedly a pirate converted into a modern version of Dr. Who and his sidekick a contemporary history buff in the form of a geeky nerd kid, the initial premise was somewhat rough and ill conceived but better than average material for those willing to overlook the many flaws of the established formula it relied on. The fantasy angle (I loath to say science fiction given the lack of any science used in the series) should work well enough for those that aren't discriminating and the dedicated following the show still seems to have should rejoice that it is now available legally (the bootlegs on the market appear to be derived from syndicated, multi-generation taped copies) so Voyagers!: The Complete Series as a four disc box set might work for them better than a general audience, I just wish better extras and a remastered version could have been provided.