It does power up, but remains in an "idle mode". I wouldn't at all say it's "passing the signal to the TV" because, as I described, the TV only gets "snow". If I bypass the DVD-R unit w/ a coax cable, the TV behaves just fine (displays a good picture, etc.).

The menu will not display and no DVD can be played (at least no picture displays on the TV). I'm not sure what got fried but I do believe it' was caused by a power surge related to the outage I described.