FANTASIA OBSCURA: An Adventure Movie That Brought a Little Magic to Time Travel
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, all it takes to keep people amused from time to time is a little magic…
The Time Travelers (1964)
Distributed by: American International
Directed by: Ib Melchior
There are some unavoidable spoilers herein.
People sometimes refer to “movie magic” when discussing how films try and take you somewhere else. Even if the film itself is not much of an enchanted destination, we can at least appreciate the trip to get there if it’s done well.
And that applies whether the trip’s through the third or fourth dimension…
We open at UCLA, where we watch a project being worked on by three researchers, Dr. Eric Von Steiner (Preston Foster), Steve Connors (Philip Carey), and Carol White (Merry Anders). Their project is a portal device that allows operators to see into the past or future, which works pretty well peeking at the past, but is having problems looking forward.
When a worker from technical support, Danny McKee (Steve Franken), comes around because the university wants the team to give back some equipment they “borrowed” to get the project rolling, the team makes a desperate effort to give their project the juice and show some results. They then open a window into the future 107 years later, which shows the campus to be a veritable wasteland.
Danny, giving off a serious Howard Wolowitz vibe, takes a closer look at the window on the future, and discovers that’s actually a door. And like any character in lab-appropriate clothing, he steps through, gets lost and needs to be saved. First the two guys go after him, leaving Carol at the controls; however, when two mutants find the portal and try to come for her, she fights them off, then comes through to try and get her colleagues back.
Before she can succeed, however, the portal collapses, leaving the four stuck in the future. Just as the mutants start to gain on them, however, the find the cave system run by the last humans left and their android workforce, led by Dr. Varno (John Hoyt). He brings the four up to speed as to what’s happened over the last century: Nuclear war has devastated the planet, the mutants are after everyone, and the last humans are trying to build a rocket to get to Alpha Centari.
The refugees from the year 1964 are welcomed to join the collective. Some are more welcoming than others, as Reena (Delores Wells) makes a hard play for Danny. Though, to be fair, he’s not doing much to defend his honor or dignity, so she doesn’t have to try all that hard…
While Varno and his colleague Gadra (Joan Woodbury in her last role) are very friendly, their colleague Willard (Dennis Patrick) is less inviting. His cold reaction has an understandable basis, though: The window for the launch of the rocket off Earth is too tight to allow them to make allowances for four more people to go with them, and so they must leave the time travelers when the time comes. With a deadline looming, Connors and company start work on recreating the lab accident to allow them to go home.
Come launch day, and things go sideways badly; the mutants break into the compound and mess up the rocket on the launch pad, rampaging through the humans’ caves. Under pressure, the time portal is opened just as the mutants swarm in, bringing our four chrononauts and what’s left of the future folk back to the beginning…
…right back before, in fact; because they came home too early, to before the accident, they encounter their same selves frozen in time. They soon realize that a temporal paradox is created, trapping everyone out of time. Desperate not to age out of existence amidst a frozen fugue, everyone goes through the time portal to a spot where the window was focused ever so briefly, hoping it’s a potential safe spot.
Which allows their time frozen selves to resume their own agency, setting up a fantastic ending:
The revelation that the characters created a temporal loop that they’re continually struck in is one of many solid ideas about the way time works and what scientists in survival mode would do in the script. There’s plenty to work with in terms of concepts presented, more than a thin budget would be able to handle; with a budget closer to the one for Forbidden Planet this could have been an all-time classic.
Melchior – who came into films after serving during WWII as a counter-intelligence officer and gave us scripts for Reptilicus (which he was planning to direct before producer Sidney Pink edged him out) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars – got creative when it came time to bringing some magic on screen. For this film, he turned to his co-writer, David Hewitt, who had been a stage magician before breaking into film, and suggested using stage illusions for some of the sequences. As these could be shot on set during production instead of inserted in post, it gave the film a more realistic feel.
One of the better uses of stage craft was the demonstration of the teleportation technology developed in the future, using a version of “the vanishing lady”:
By bringing magic to the set (shot beautifully by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond), Hewitt’s first film gig launched a long career in visual effects to great acclaim.
Also a first was a cameo by Forrest J. Ackerman, super fan and publisher of Famous Monsters of FIlmland, the Hollywood Reporter of genre films from the 1950s to the 1980s. Ackerman would go on to have a total 48 different cameos owed him as a publisher of genre fare; for those keeping score, Stan Lee (when not playing a version of himself) has so far only gotten 36 such appearances in.
(Speaking of scores, as an aside, for the mutants, Melchior recruited members of the Los Angeles Lakers to play these evolutionary dead ends. None of the players were specifically named, but if you want to cross-compare their roster to figure out who was actually in the film, hey, knock yourself out…)
While there were plenty of magical shots, there were areas that could have used some more basic magic. Some segments, like the android factory and the final battle, go on a bit too long; when you realize that a good 14 minutes could have been cut from the film, out of 82 minutes total run time, it diminishes some of the appreciation for the work. It’s a big knock against the movie, as it makes viewers feel that the film’s just stalling for time (no pun intended).
Which is a shame, because as mentioned there are some great concepts here. Which brings up Irwin Allen, the producer who some of his properties seem, well… uncomfortably close to Melchior’s work. There is the generally accepted acknowledgement that The Time Travelers likely inspired (at minimum) Allen’s TV series The Time Tunnel. While Melchior didn’t claim his project was stolen the same way he pointed out how his Space Family Robinson project became Lost in Space in Allen’s hands, it’s hard not to casually reach that conclusion.
Then again, Melchior didn’t make much of a stink either when his collaborator Hewitt blatantly ripped off made a remarkably similar film in 1967, Journey to the Center of Time, where the plot elements are nearly identical between the two.
Somehow, these “homages” didn’t turn into major IP fights in the courts. But amazingly, everyone kept on going with amazingly little vitriol, as if by some magic…
NEXT TIME: We’ll have an interesting write-up on an adaptation of a classic; assuming, of course, that we’re allowed to read that by this time next week…
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