Robert Colbert Movies

A tongue-tied Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) manages to say all the wrong things at the breakfast table after his father, Martin (John Mahoney), has spent the night with a woman. Realizing that he has embarrassed his dad, Frasier tries to make amends during his radio show -- and succeeds to make things worse, only this time in front of the entire city of Seattle. Our hero's last-ditch effort to smooth out the situation just might work...and then, it just might not. Patrick Kerr makes his first series appearance as irritating Star Trek aficionado Noel Shempsky, eternal nemesis of Frasier's co-worker, Roz (Peri Gilpin). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Joe (Tim Daly) has been temporarily grounded from flying due to high blood pressure. At first welcoming the opportunity to be a desk jockey for a while, Joe soon grows weary of his inactivity -- and increasingly hostile toward the devil-may-care attitude of Sandpiper Air's remaining pilot, his brother Brian (Steven Weber). One thing leads to another, and by mid-episode Joe has blown his stack and fired his own brother! And just when the situation couldn't get worse, in comes rival airline owner Roy (David Schramm) with an offer to buy Sandpiper, an offer which Joe is presently in no position to refuse. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Rookie cop Sandra Chin (Kimberly Delfin), one of Hunter's best students at the Police Academy, is seriously wounded in a Chinatown shootout. As Sandra lies in the hospital near death, she is accused of irresponsible use of her weapon. Hunter (Fred Dryer) puts his own career on the line to prove Sandra's innocence, and in so doing runs afoul of two powerful enemies--one old, one new. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The 1987 portmanteau comedy feature Amazon Women on the Moon lampoons several film genres in general and the 1954 sci-fi cheapie Cat Women of the Moon in particular. Other sketches in Amazon Women include an opening bit with Arsenio Hall; a vignette titled "Son of the Invisible Man" wherein a naked Ed Begley Jr. runs around in full view of the nonplussed supporting cast; the It's Alive parody "Hospital", which offers the spectacle of Michelle Pfeiffer giving birth to Mr. Potato Head; and a Siskel & Ebert takeoff, featuring Arche Hahn as a TV viewer whose entire life is given a "thumbs down." Directed by several hands, including Joe Dante, Carl Gottleib, Peter Horton, John Landis, and Robert K. Weiss, Amazon Women on the Moon also features a satire of the Kroger G. Babb school of "sex hygiene" exploitation cheapies, with syphilis victim Carrie Fisher being counseled by unctuous doctor Paul Bartel. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This martial arts film features Tonny Tulleners (a karate champion) as a U.S. government agent who goes after international terrorists in some picturesque locations: Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and Hawaii. His terrorist-fighting takes on another complexion when he is required to protect a terrorist who is going to testify against his former cohorts. Soon the glamorous locations are transformed into the interiors of bedrooms and hospital wards as the body count rises. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The Killer Who Wouldn't Die was the original network title for the 1976 TV movie also known as Ohanian. Mike Connors plays Ohanian, an Armenian-American ex-cop who runs a charter boat service. He's pulled back into the investigation game when one of his old friends is killed in Hawaii by a foreign assassin. The Killer Who Wouldn't Die was the two-hour pilot for an unsold series starring Mike Connors. Had it been picked up, undoubtedly much would have been made by the publicity mills that Ohanian was Connors' real last name--just as we were constantly reminded that Sanford was the actual moniker of comedian Redd Foxx. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Irwin Allen, praised in some circles as a science fiction genius and damned in others as a shameless schlockmeister, produced and directed this fanciful TV-movie. Set in the 21st century, the film concentrates on a group of colonists dwelling in a modernistic underwater city called Pacifica. The emphasis is on drama rather than special effects, as we see the deep-sea denizens struggling to cope with the pressures of their new existence--and their own personal animosities. Stuart Whitman heads a large cast of TV veterans, including Time Tunnel regulars James Darren, Robert Colbert and Whit Bissell, and onetime Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea star Richard Basehart (as the US President). Expanded from a short "demo" pilot film, City Beneath the Sea is the one Irwin Allen project that could have matured into a truly worthwhile TV series; unfortunately no network was interested in subsidizing this expensive effort. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Not technically a feature film, Aliens from Another Planet consists of two 60-minute episodes from the vintage Irwin Allen sci-fi TV series The Time Tunnel. James Darren and Robert Colbert star as Tony Newman and Doug Phillips, two research scientists working on a huge, high-tech time machine. Sucked into the mechanism in Episode One, Doug and Tony are compelled to pay danger-laden visits to the past and future, courtesy of the 20th Century-Fox stock-footage department. The first episode included herein is Chase Through Time, originally telecast February 24, 1967, in which the Time Travellers are projected into the far distant future by an unhinged nuclear technician (played by no less than Robert Duvall). In the second installment, Visitors From Beyond the Stars (original air date: January 13, 1967), a group of extraterrestrials land on Earth in the year 1885. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this entry from The Time Tunnel science-fiction TV series, Tony and Doug travel in time to 6th-century England where they meet Merlin and help King Arthur stop a Viking invasion. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The Time Tunnel tells the story of Tony Newman and Doug Philips, two scientists who find themselves lost in time. At the outset of the series, as depicted in the first episode ("Rendezvous With Yesterday") both men are part of a top secret government project, Project Tic-Toc, in the year 1968 (the series was produced in 1966, when that seemed like the "far future"). Project Tic-Toc is devised to open a time portal which would allow people and machines to move through time in the same way that the US space program projected them into space. But it is massively expensive and has thusfar yielded what one inquisitive US Senator, Leroy Clark (Gary Merrill), believes are minimal results. On a visit to the top secret desert base where the Time Tunnel has been built, he reveals that he intends to recommend that the project be shut down. Desperate not to see the work of years abandoned, Dr. Tony Newman (James Darren) takes it upon himself to activate the Time Tunnel and project himself backward in time. He is successful in his gamble, and finds himself alive in the year 1912 -- aboard the Titanic on her doomed maiden voyage. Back in 1968, the team operating the Time Tunnel -- General Heywood Kirk (Whit Bissell), Dr. Anne McGregor (Lee Merriweather), Dr. Raymond Swain (John Zaremba), and Dr. Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert)-- find that they can track Tony, and even observe where he is and what is happening to him, but they can't get him back; and he will almost certainly die aboard the doomed ocean liner, especially as, having realized where he is, and having tried to warn the captain (Michael Rennie), he has been locked in the ship's brig as an apparent lunatic. The only thing they can do is send someone back to help him, and that falls to Doug Phillips, but he is equally unsuccessful in convincing the captain of the threat to the ship from icebergs, or only barely more effective at rescuing Tony from his cell -- and as they discover, the Time Tunnel cannot pull them back to 1968. The two manage to survive, plucked out of time and space at the last possible moment, but now they are lost in the infinity of time. The series, 30 episodes in all, presented stories in which Doug and Tony find themselves in Paris during the Reign of Terror, at Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Japanese attack, at the Alamo just prior to the final Mexican assault on the fort, the impending explosion of Krakatoa, and so on; it was one of the conceits of the series that Doug and Tony always seem to land in a place and at a time of some historical significance (fans of the series do joke about the notion that in one episode, they should have appeared at a time and in a place in which nothing and no one of any historical significance was there to interact with). The Time Tunnel's control over their movements through time and space was problematic, at best, rare instances in which they could actually be directed, to a degree, on specific missions, juxtaposed with situations in which they were scarcely under any control in terms of time travel, and other moments where the operation of the Time Tunnel threatened their lives. Amid the more routine stories in which the two heroes are placed at pivotal moments in history were a smaller, more interesting body of scripts, in which they are moved into the future -- in the second episode, "One Way To the Moon", Tony and Doug find themselves 10 years in their own future, aboard the first manned flight to Mars; in another, they are trapped in a New England town that is under siege from alien invaders. There were also a tiny handful of stories that mixed horror and fantasy with science fiction, in which Merlin the magician forces the Time Tunnel personnel to aid the young future King Arthur; and one tale in which the vengeful spirit of the Emperor Nero manifests itself in World War I Italy, seeking revenge against the descendant of General Galba, that man who deposed him as ruler of Rome. The Time Tunnel was an attempt by producer Irwin Allen to take the concept behind Lost In Space and apply it to fourth dimensional travel. Its existence and chances for success were predicated on the availability of the 20th Century-Fox film library, and his ability to use clips from any number of historical films shot by the studio (and not just films shot in color -- Time Tunnel was the first Irwin Allen series to go into production in color, but even clips from the black-and-white 1953 film Titanic were used successfully in the first episode, tinted and projected through the Time Tunnel itself. The problem with the show lay in its very concept, however -- audiences may not have known what to expect each week, which can be a virtue; but it can also be a stretch, especially as there were no especially charismatic characters or actors (with the possible exception of Lee Meriwether) in the cast -- Darren and Colbert were handsome enough, but the nature of the stories and scripts prevented anything resembling character development in most of the episodes (the one exception was "The Day The Sky Fell In", in which Tony meets his own father shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor in which the man was listed as missing-in-action). The other problem with the series is that many of the costumes and aliens seemed to be leftovers from producer Irwin Allen's other two science fiction series, Lost In Space and Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea -- few could overlook the hand-me-down nature of the props and sets. Still, the series did attract enough viewership to initially get renewed for a second season, though for reasons unclear at this time, that renewal was subsequently rescinded, limiting the program to a single season of 30 episodes. Some viewers, seeing the final episode on the original run of the series lead back to previews of the first episode, interpreted that as indicating that the two heroes had ended up in the time-loop, repeating the same cycle of adventures. According to those involved with the series, however, a handful of second season scripts were written and ready to shoot, with others in the pipeline when the plug was pulled on the program. Those close to the series also say that if there had been a second season, it would have depicted the Project Tic-Toc scientists as gaining more control over the time-travel process, if not the ability to return Tony and Doug home, which would have increased the diversity of stories that could be told. The series did entertain some interesting ideas concerning time paradoxes, though it did avoid the idea that the two heroes could do anything to change already occurred events. Indeed, it often seemed as though Doug and Tony's presence only helped along events to occur in the manner in which we knew them -- this notion was picked up for the short-lived 1980's series Voyagers. More impressive than anything else about this series was the Time Tunnel itself, a huge device that seemed to go back to infinity. And in one of the more intriguing episodes, viewers got double their money's worth -- in "Secret Weapon", are actually sent on a mission of sorts to investigate a top secret enemy project and encounter an early precursor to the Time Tunnel, in Eastern Europe a decade prior to the development of their own time travel apparatus. Like most of Irwin Allen's projects of this period, The Time Tunnel was a very good idea that the producers never had a chance to explore to its (of their) best advantage. There were two attempts to revive the series, both unsuccessful, but a DVD release of the complete run of the show (with the unaired pilot) did prove popular, and airings of the series on the Sci-Fi Channel in the 1990's were also well-received. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

In this sci-fi drama comprised of two episodes from the Time Tunnel TV series, the time trekkers find themselves dangerously embroiled in Grecian and Israeli politics. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Ben Cartwright makes a solemn promise that the entire estate of dying skinflint Jake Smith (Burt Mustin will go to Jake's next of kin, Meredith Smith. But Ben never expected to be besieged by six different people, all laying claim to be the Meredith Smith-among them a woman named Meredith (Anne Helm) and a scroungy hillbilly known as Little Meredith (the great Strother Martin). Also in the cast are Robert Colbert as Ace, Winnie Coffin as Widow Smith, Guy Lee as Ah Chow, and Robert Sorrells as the Cowby. First shown on October 21, 1965, this comic episode was written by Lois Hire. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Tim (Bill Bixby) falls for pretty female reporter Cynthia Parker (Nancy Rennick), but has no idea what Cynthia likes in a man. Thus, Tim asks Martin (Ray Walston) to read the girl's mind--and as result, Martin finds out that in the long run, Tim and Cynthia would be poorly matched. Using every Martian power at his disposal, Martin endeavors to link Cynthia up with her "ideal" mate Bill (Robert Colbert), and to take care of Tim as well. This episode was originally slated to air on November 24, 1963, but was rescheduled because of the JFK assassination. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide