Before He Was Famous: Robert Duvall


Robert Duvall in The Time Tunnel


Everybody doing the funky chicken in the time tunnel lab

Hulu has the entire run of a show I loved as kid: The Time Tunnel. I used to tumble around with friends in slow motion pretending to land in some other time before playing cowboys and indians or cops and robbers. The wiki article has some good trivia on the show. It was produced by Irwin Allen who also did Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space and then went on to do a few of the famous 70s disaster movies like Towering Inferno and the original Poseidon Adventure. For this, people called him The Master of Disaster.

I was rather surprised to find Robert Duvall in one episode playing a time-traveling tool. How many actors can go from playing idiots in kitschy old sci-fi shows or movies to the OscarsĀ® and superstardom? (And which of them worked with George Lucas? Duvall is also in THX-1138.) Harrison Ford is the only other one I can think of and he has only managed a nomination. On a similar tangent, it’s interesting that a former porn star, Sibel Kikelli, won the German Oscar for best actress (the Deutscher Filmpreis) in 2004. (Head-On is a great film by the way.) You go girl.