steverr63

As far as I know, this show was never repeated on UK television after its original run in the late '60s / early '70s, and most episodes are now sadly "missing presumed wiped".

Series 6 from 1971 however still exists in its entirety, and I recently got the chance to watch it all, the best part of 4 decades on.

After rushing home from school, Freewheelers was essential viewing for me and many of my contemporaries back in those halcyon days of flared trousers, Slade and Chicory Tip. And watching it again brought a nostalgic lump to the throat.

Never mind the bad / hammy acting, the unintentionally amusing fight scenes, plot holes wide enough to pilot a large ocean-going yacht through and the "frightfully, frightfully" RADA accents of the lead players.

No - forget all that. Because Freewheelers harks back to a bygone (dare I say "golden") age of kids' TV drama, when the shows were simply about rip-roaring fun and didn't take themselves so seriously. Before they became obsessed with all the angst-laden "ishoos" that today's screenwriters have their young protagonists fret over, such as relationships, pregnancy, drugs, STIs etc.

No doubt if it were "remade for a modern audience" in these days of all-pervasive political correctness, the boss figure would be a black female, one of the young male heroes would be a Muslim, the other would be a white lad confused about his sexuality and the girl would be an all-action go-getter with an IQ off the scale, who'd be forever getting the lads out of scrapes and making them look foolish - in other words a million miles removed from Wendy Padbury's deferential, ankle-spraining washer-upper.

It's a show that's very much "of its time". But is that a bad thing? I for one don't think so.

I'm not going to waste too much time summarising this film, given that I've already wasted 2 hours on it last night that I'll never get back.

I am however going to swim defiantly against the tide of glowing (nay - make that fawning) reviews that this movie is getting here, because for me, three words sum it up: Tedious, plodding and anti-climatic. And Tommy Lee Jones basically sleep-walked his way through the whole thing. "Great performance"? I don't think so.

Yes it has an anti-war message about 'dehumanisation' and all the rest of it. I DO get it! But so did 'The Deerhunter' and 'Apocalypse Now', both great films with far longer run times yet 1000% more gripping and powerful (the overly-long wedding scene in DH notwithstanding).

Not recommended.

After a promising first two thirds that seemed to be building up towards a gripping climax, the final third of the movie goes off at something of a tangent and gets mired in tiresome pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectual pondering and posturing.

Various 'whys and wherefores' are left unexplained, and far from delivering a "heart-stopping final moment" as the DVD cover blurb claims, the movie ends very abruptly with one of the main characters sitting at his breakfast table, droning on about some dream he's had.

In my opinion the 8+ overall rating here greatly flatters this movie, and I can only put such a high score down at least in part to many voters experiencing an "emperor's new clothes" moment along the lines of "Coen Brothers = widely regarded as 'serious film-makers' = must be good then - even though really it degenerated into nebulous twaddle".

I find it ironic in the extreme that the reason most often given for this pilot not being picked up by the networks is that "it's too similar to Stargate".

Have these people forgotten that the original "Time Tunnel" series preceded "Stargate" by some 30 years - so if anything, it should be "Stargate is similar to Time Tunnel".

So let's not forget that without Irwin Allen's "Time Tunnel" to provide the inspiration and the basic concept behind it, there would probably never even have been any "Stargate".

And speaking personally, I'd take a new series of "Time Tunnel" over the entire "Stargate" franchise any time.

There had been rumours of another attempt to relaunch "Time Tunnel" in 2007, but sadly this seems to have come to nothing. A real pity.

It really was that bad. On a par with the (mercifully!) short-lived "Dirty Dozen" TV series that starred Ben Murphy and was made at around the same time (also on the cheap in Yugoslavia).

I was embarrassed for the cast members of this film - and for Telly Savalas in particular. He was waaaaaay too old and fat for the role (pushing 70 when he made this garbage), and the reviewer who draws parallels with Telly the Greek in this and John Wayne in "The Green Berets" pretty much sums it up.

Other reviewers have pointed out some of the many laughable howlers that this crime against celluloid contains, so I won't repeat them here. But I will add that I'm amazed that no-one's yet mentioned the ridiculously tiny-looking helmet that Savalas wears on his big, bloated head.

I'm also astonished that this trainwreck of a film has a rating as high as 4.7 here at IMDb.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a "1" right across the board. If you want a good example of why flogging a franchise to death really is a bad idea (especially 20-plus years after the original) - look no further than "The Dirty Dozen - The Fatal Mission".

Awful - avoid!!!!