The Fantastic Journey

A group of boat castaways get lost in time or lost in vortex on a mysterious island.

Strong shades of Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel (1966), Irwin Allen's Lost In Space (1965) and classic Star Trek (1966) in this production.

The disco theme music gets ten out of ten. The pilot is well done. Note the music when the boat is sucked into the mysterious sea cloud. Note the photography in this opening scene. If only this level of film-like production remained for the whole ten episodes.

This series shined in the episode titled, Beyond The Mountain, this is the one where Roddy McDowall was introduced and he was a horrible guy at the start. He became nicer after this hour. Too bad the writers did not spend more time "beyond the mountain" as this setting was just so powerful, all thanks to the acting talents of McDowall.

Another episode about children making trouble for adults (Children of the Gods) was well done as well.

I am not sure exactly why the series was axed after such a short time (ten episodes) but I am guessing some viewers ran into problems with the okay-but-not-great closing four hours. Towards the end the premise of a group of people appearing in some oddball zone (amusement park, weird house, etc) was starting to repeat itself too much. And while the travellers were indeed pleasing enough, the viewer was not drawn to them the way we should. I am not suggesting "Journey" should have gone the way of more recent sci-fi shows (like Stargate) where the characters are drawn out in every detail. But they need to have some sort of spark that is missing here. The Lost In Space (1965) castaways were not drawn out too much be we cared about them.

Go on this journey for McDowall's acting and shades of 60s Irwin Allen/60s Star Trek. Nine of the ten episodes are very watchable, the only hour I felt like turning off was Turnabout where the tired old sci-fi plot of a female dominated world (led by Joan Collins) was used.

Another reviewer has compared "Journey" to the Stargate (1997) series but I would have to say I like "Journey" more.