It’s Harry Houdini’s birthday today, and I love combining
historical trivia with your recap experience, so we’re watching an episode of
1982’s Voyagers!
This was a family show created by Scholastic to get kids
more interested in history, even though it’s wildly historically inaccurate.
Every week, displaced time travellers Phineas Bogg and Jeffrey Jones get flung
to a temporal emergency by a device known as The Omni. Bogg, played by Jon-Erik
Hexum, claims to come from a future society of time travellers called,
unsurprisingly, voyagers. Jeffrey, on the other hand, is a kid from 1982 who
got caught up in all of this when his dog attacked Bogg’s history guidebook.
Through a twist of fate and fall out of a window, he was flung along with Bogg
back to the time of Moses.
It’s not so bad, because as it turns out, Jeffrey – played
by Meeno Peluce, real life brother of Soleil Moon Frye of Punky Brewster – is an orphan and also destined to be a time cop
anyway. And he’s useful. Bogg, despite being responsible for aligning the time
stream, doesn’t know much about the past. The guidebook he lost was crucial to his success. Luckily,
Jeffrey’s dead father was a history professor, so Jeffrey is a pint-sized poindexter
who knows everything Bogg doesn’t.
Every week, The Omni sends them to a new temporal emergency,
and it’s often something that’s interwoven with several other temporal
emergencies, so our dynamic duo has to untangle history like it’s a necklace
you left at the bottom of your purse. Once that’s done, they get to move on.
Today’s episode starts with a Puritan woman in a white
bonnet running through a misty swamp at night, pursued by an angry mob with
dogs and torches shouting things like: “After the devil-witch!” and “There is
no hiding from the Lord!”
