I was 7 or 8 years old when I caught the American TV series “The Time Tunnel.” I cannot recall specific episodes, but the whirling psychedelic tunnel was permanently etched in my mind. Surely, stray episodes or clips of “The Time Tunnel” are to be found somewhere on YouTube University to refresh my faded memories, but I did not look them up lest I be disappointed by its outdated production values.
I watched it on a black and white TV. Worse, as an academic historian, I might be annoyed by the historical inaccuracies and fantasies deployed using artistic license. As I recall, the TV series revolved around two men transported, and lost, in the past.
In each episode, they are hurled, helplessly, from one significant historical event to another as the Command Center vainly tries to bring them back to the present. Such is the premise of cliffhangers, the reluctant time travelers never returned. To do so was the end of the story.
I remembered “The Time Tunnel” after viewing three large-scale paintings by Randalf Dilla that take the viewer into his personal time tunnel, minus the vertigo from the 1960s TV series. One portal for Dilla’s time travel is “En el Palco” (At the Theater Box), an exquisite painting by the 19th-century Filipino painter and patriot Juan Luna preserved in the prominent Paulino and Hetty Que Collection of Philippine Art. Dilla enters this portal, first through his senses.
His impressions expanded and developed through background research. Then.