Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the nineteen sixty film adaptation of The Time Machine, based on the novel by H. G. Wells, directed by George Pale, starring Rod Taylor and a Vet Me Me You. We've gotten many requests to cover this on the on the show before. I think it came up recently, maybe in the last Listener Male episode or the one before that.
Somebody was asking us to do the time Machine, either this one or I think also that there was one in the early two thousands that is famous or infamous. It has Guy Pierce, I think, and has a lot of weird changes to the story.
Yeah, there are some definitely weird changes made to it. We'll come back to the two thousand and two time Machine. I have not watched it since it originally came out, but I remember enjoying it.
Yeah, as Jeremy Irons as something called an uber morlock.
M m.
Yeah, he's the more lock they can talk.
Yeah, great, I've never seen it, but I'd be willing to explore. But this version of the time Machine is so I just want to put my cards on the table at the beginning and say it is so great. We can discuss a few drawbacks to it, but overall this is just like great mid century cinema, an amazing visual spectacle. It's got excellent time laps and stop motion effects.
It has that wonderful film grain and color palette that it's like what people have in mind when they think about the gorgeous color films of the mid century.
Absolutely, it's gorgeous to look at. The effects, which were Academy Award winners at the time, still hold up really well and are a lot of fun to watch. The performances are effective, but it's just a fun ride and it does a great great job. There's not a dull moment. They do a great job unpacking the concepts that are essential for the adventure and then delivering on that adventure. Yeah.
I think it is, while not a perfectly faithful adaptation of the novel, I think a very good way to take it onto film. In fact, we could talk here at the beginning about some of the ways that it departs from the novel. Some of them are less interesting, but some more so. Like I guess, one thing I will say that I think doesn't work quite as well in the movie is that you remember, in the novel there's no love story or romantic element at all, like there is. The time traveler in the novel meets a
woman in the future named Weena. He befriends her, he sort of protects her, but in the novel there's no romance between them. In the movie, unsurprisingly, you've got Rod Taylor and here and they fall in love. And I'm not one of those people who is opposed to this kind of thing in principle. Some people just always hate it when you add a romantic subplot to literary material
where it wasn't there to begin with. I'm not always opposed to that, but given particular features of the narrative in the Time Machine, like how both the time traveler and the eloy are depicted, I think it does not work super well in this story.
Yeah, she is as we'll discuss a dull person, you know. Is we see this in various forms and different works of fiction, where you'll have someone like maybe they're a clone, maybe they are indeed a far future human, but for some reason or another, they have a They're naive, they are innocent despite being like biologically grown people played biologically grown actors, And yeah, it can make for some odd space for a love story.
Yeah, so that's not the best. However, there are some things this movie does to change the story from the novel that I think are fantastic. Like one interesting plot device I would single out in this regard is the way that and if you're not familiar with the story, this will make more sense later on. But the way that the Morlocks use air raid sirens to hypnotize the eloy and lure them into the Sphinx to their doom. I guess we can talk about that more in the
plot section. But this is both a harrowing sensory spectacle in the scene where it happens, and it also provides an interesting twist on the movie's anti war themes.
Absolutely, and I think the film's anti war themes hold up really well. I think that they are in large part very true to the spirit of a lot of the ideals that HG. Wells held for the majority of his life. So I think these were all a great addition then there are plenty of other like small changes, many necessary changes, like for instance, in the original book, which is essentially a novella, the time Traveler has no
given name. He is just the time Traveler, which I always quite liked because it made him feel more mythic, you know, and more mysterious, and maybe in a way he doesn't have an identity anymore because he is like a man removed from time.
Yeah, he's just he's the Earth rim Roamer or something like that. Yeah, But here they give him a name, and they give him the name H. G. Wells. Basically the other characters call him George H. Or the you know, his middle initial there. So it's doing the same thing. Actually, that is done in the later film Time after Time, which we've featured on the show nineteen, which is a fun combination of the time machine and the story of Jack the Ripper. But they make the time Traveler in
that also HG. Wells himself. Here it's a weird thing, so they give him the name HG. Wells, but they don't make him like a science fiction novelist in the eighteen nineties. He's just the character from the book. But they gave him the author's name.
Yeah. Yeah, so it's a little They treat it softly here. It's not like a a hard like Hey, m HG. Wells, the successful writer and that time Machine book I wrote, Well, I actually made one. It's in the basement. Well, I'm really excited to talk about this one. I had not seen this film in quite a long time. I think I possibly watched it on I don't know, Turner Classic Movies or American movie classics back in the day. It certainly is an American movie classic, and I think the
movie holds up quite well. And for that matter, I would argue that the HG. Wells book itself holds up quite well. I read that more recently than i'd seen this film, and you know, it moves right along at a great click. Very readable ideas speak to us today, you know, as well as they did back at it in its original publication year. You know, Wells was a great writer with a lot of tremendous ideas. Yeah.
Yeah, It's been a while since I've read the novel in full, though, I just recently reread a chapter from it because I remember way back when I first read this book in high school. One of the parts that really stuck with me was after the main action of the story, after the encounter with the eloy and the Moorlocks and all of that, there is a chapter called a Further Vision where the time traveler goes on and on further and further millions.
Of earths, million years, I think you.
Millions of years into the future to see the final fate of the planet Earth. And so he comes upon this landscape where the Earth has become finally tidally locked with the sun, so that the sun no longer rises and sets, and the part of the Earth he is on just happens to be within sort of the ring around the horizon, like the part of the Earth that is always in perpetual twilight with the sun kind of
sitting just above the horizon to the west. And so he describes this giant red sun there and this twilight landscape that is filled with giant crabs and butterflies, and the crabs like start caressing his face with their antennae, and it's a super super creepy vision that really left an impression on me. And every now and then I think I've read the book in full more than once, I believe, but I've gone back and read that chapter many times.
Yeah, it's very doomy in almost I would say, a cosmic horror sense. It's not quite the cord that Wells is striking there, but you can easily imagine how this chapter of the book may have been one of the influences on many of the cosmic horror writers in the decades to come.
It also it provides an interesting perspective because so often, especially genre stories, they really you want to get a sense that there is a happily ever after, that there is some kind of paradisical state that everything is moving toward, and once the conflict of the story is resolved, everything will be okay now. But the Time Traveler really it kind of upsets that narrative because there are conflicts to
resolve in the story. It's not like nothing matters, but you do get to see, well, in the end there are no people here anymore anyway, It's all just crabs in the end, and eventually not even any crabs will be left.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great chapter. It is not depicted in this adaptation, But then I don't think it really I don't think it would have fit. I like the way this film ends this film ends the way it needed to end, and we'll discuss that towards the final minutes of this episode.
If instead of a love story between Rod Taylor and Vetti Mu, you had a love story between Rod Taylor and the crab from attack of the Crab Monsters, that would really be a way to wrap this up. What do you think?
Possibly? Yeah, and yeah, if you wanted to end it on a much more contemplative and doomy note, that would be the way to go.
All right, let's see, should we listen to some trailer audio.
Yeah, let's hear a bit from the old trade.
Today man is successfully drobing deep into the mysteries of the universe. Can he penetrate the greatest mystery of all time itself?
Why is it that we usually ignore the fourth dimension? You see, we can move in.
The other three, as the doctor said, up, down, forwards, backward, sideways, But when it comes to time.
You have prisoners can bender.
Rod Taylor's breakthrough into the realm of the fourth dimension is defied by his friend Alan Young.
If that machine can do what you see, it gone destroy it, George before it destroys you.
Every moment is a year hurtling through the atomic wars of the future on an incredible excursion into the unknown. And what happens when boy meets girl thousands of years hence, how do they wear their hair?
Who the women of your time.
Up Black Herd show me?
Is this the human race of the future? Or is this the Morlocks fiendish creatures who live in a weird underground's world and the Eloi the tranqu will sunshine people. The Morlocks dominate and maintain like cattle, luring them below with the hypnotic wail of the sirens to feed upon them in cannibalistic chori.
All right, well, if you would like to watch nineteen sixties The Time Machine, absolutely we encourage you to go out and watch it for the first time, or or revisit it before proceeding with the rest of the episode, or just go ahead and listen to the rest of the episode. You know, we are going to spoil some things,
but it's the time Machine. I feel like this is one that you've probably absorbed culturally to a certain extent at this point, and if you do want to watch it, it is widely available, and I think all formats that have ever existed due to time constraints. I just streamed it, but there are some nice DVDs and Blu rays out there as well.
Yeah, and as you alluded to, as always a spoiler warning for the rest of the episode, this is a pretty old story at this point. But yeah, we are going to talk about the whole thing in granular detail. So if somehow this story is new to you and you're not familiar, go read the novel or watch the movie before continuing.
Absolutely. All right, well, let's get into some of the people behind this picture, this big special effects picture of
nineteen sixty. So we can't reference everybody, but the director and the producer on this was George Powell lived nineteen oh eight through nineteen eighty Hungarian American animator, film director and producer who initially worked on films in his native Hungary before moving to Berlin and then to Prague in the early thirties, creating short films and commercials before immigrating
to the United States and I believe nineteen thirty nine. Now, during this period, both in Europe and then in the United States, he made a series of puppet tunes, So that's puppet and tunes smashed together into one word. These were short films, the first being I believe a dancing
cigarette commercial from nineteen thirty two. Okay, so it's kind of I guess maybe we're even alluding to that in this picture when we have a scene with a cigar where we have a model of the time machine and they fold up a cigar and stick it in there. Though it doesn't dance or move around.
There's more cigar action than you would expect.
Yeah, I believe seven puppetoun I assume that's how one would pronounce it. Puppet Tune shorts received Academy Award nominations. Puppetoon animation is essentially a type of replacement animation, which is itself a type of stop motion animation, but it requires a vast number of near duplicate puppets to pull
off the effect. So my understanding diving into this a little bit, is that it's kind of like cell animation where or trip or traditional cell animation, where you would have to have like a separate drawing of say Daffy Duck every time Daffy Duck made the slightest movement, and in this case, you would have to have a physical representation a doll or puppet of Daffy Duck for each each tiny movement that would take place. So you know,
this is not quite what we see with stop motion today. Generally, when you see stop motion today, they're articulating some sort of a movable puppet or model each time, and not
just replacing it with an entirely different model. Puppet tune shorts included, let's see there is the adaptations of Doctor Seuss's The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, as well as an adaptation of and to and to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, also an adaptation of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, and also a series of shorts featuring the character Jasper that was already seen as racist in the nineteen forties so obviously does not hold
up well today. Now in nineteen fifty power, I'll switch to live action film with the comedy The Great Rupert. I think that's aid Jimmy Duranty picture, which he produced only. But then in nineteen fifty eight he directed a Tom Thumb movie that made use of puppatoon effects, and then of course The Time Machine in nineteen sixty, which doesn't use puppatoon per se, but certainly makes great use of stop motion effects.
Yeah, and I believe it was the stop motion effects and the and the time lapse effects for which this movie got an Academy Award.
I'd write about that. Yeah, though it's in general, this is just a great special effects picture, you know. It's like this is that the production designs here are amazing, and yeah, we get some great uses of stop motion throughout the picture, but main but essentially whenever there's time traveling, because there's always stuff in the background that's rotting or growing and so forth. Yeah, melting exploding into lava.
Man, I got some things to say about that lava. Did you read about that effects? Yeah, Okay, we'll get there.
So subsequently he directed sixty one's Atlantis the Lost Continent, sixty two's The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grim the fairy Tale segments only, and finally Seven Faces of Doctor Looe in nineteen sixty four. I've never seen that one, but of note to MST three K fans, that's the movie that Joel quotes in the final moments of his original run on Mystery Science Theater three thousand. This is a bit where it's every time you stop and think
I'm alive and being alive is fantastic. Every time such a thing happens. You're part of the circus of Doctor Lao, which is fun. Though that movie is I believe sadly built around a yellow face performance by Tony Randall, but still the quote I like, all right. Moving on to
the screenwriter here. David Duncan has the screenplay credit nineteen thirteen through nineteen ninety nine American screenwriter and novelist, best known for his adapted screenplays for This and nineteen sixty six Is Fantastic Voyage not an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's novel, which was itself an adaptation of that film, but rather an adaptation of an earlier script or treatment. Wow.
His other scripts when got around huh, yeah.
You know, that was a big picture. That was I think when that one was coming out, and that would be a fun one to do on Weird House. Eventually, that was I think marketed is the most expensive science fiction picture, science fiction picture of all time. So there
were a lot of cooks in that kitchen. Yeah. But Duncan's other scripts include the English version of nineteen fifty six is Rodin fifty sevens The Monster that Challenged the World nineteen fifty sevens The Black Scorpion fifty eight's the Thing that Couldn't Die fifty eighth, Monster on the Campus six nineteen sixties. The Leech Woman. That's the one you were,
the one in My Dreams of Blood. This one was featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousand as well, and he also wrote the Human Factor episode of the original Outer Limits.
Sorry, Rob, I was just looking up because the title got the Monster that Challenged the World. I was trying to remember what that one was, and oh, that's the one about like a caterpillar that comes up out of the out of the water.
It challenged the world. It didn't conquer, it just challenged. Duncan also wrote a series of novels, though some of which look quite interesting. But I think these have all been out of print for a while and are I think largely only available as very old to use paperbacks. But if anyone out there has read a David Duncan novel write in, I would love to hear about it now. As we mentioned, this is of course an adaptation of the original book by H. G. Wells, who lived eighteen
sixty six through nineteen forty six. He was active from eighteen ninety five until his death, and he is generally considered the grandfather of science fiction. He wasn't the first to craft sci fi, and it certainly would have gone on without him, but his influence is undeniable, given such works as The Time Machine eighteen ninety five, The Island of Doctor Moreau from eighteen ninety six, The Invisible Man from eighteen ninety seven, and of course The War of
the World's from eighteen ninety eight. He was a progressive social critic and futurist, which certainly contributes to the continued readability of his work.
A lot of science fiction story types that recur with variation throughout the twentieth century. I think you could essentially say, what was the first version of this story? And often it's argued that Wells Wells is the first version.
Yeah, and certainly in cases where there's some sort of a predecessor, like he cemented the idea, you know, like his is the story that casts the long shadow, and so yeah, his works are highly readable today. They're always interesting in terms of like what did he seem to accurately predict as a sort of futurist. What social commentaries did he make that are still very valid today? And so his work is largely full of that sort of thing. Now, as far as adaptations of the time Machine go, this
was not the first adaptation. There was a nineteen forty nine BBC teleplay during Russell Napier. I have not seen it, but Joe I included a couple of screenshots here for you. The time machine looks like some sort of high tech toilet.
Yeah, yeah, sitting on the throne there, it's got lights over it.
So there you go.
You know, in the version we have in this movie, it's still essentially is a big chair.
But yeah, but the version we see here, and we'll describe it a bit more in a little bit here, it is the iconic time machine. It has become the iconic iconic time machine. It's reasonably accurate to what was described in the story, and it is the one that is inevitably drawn or depicted in derivative works.
Yes, yeah, no, I love the design in this movie. But it is a chair. It's a chair on Santa's sleigh.
Basically.
We'll talk about that more as we go on. But this one is a little more compact and a little bit yeah, less impressive. It does look like a toilet. And then you've got another picture from a nineteen seventy eight adaptation, which is more like a toilet with a computer in front of it.
Yeah, this one looks like a nineteen seventy eight space toilet for sure. This one starred John Beck. I also have not seen it. I do not think it has a very strong reputation. And then, as we previously mentioned, there is the two thousand and two adaptations starring Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons, directed notably by H. G. Wells's great grandson Simon Wells. How often do you get to have a case like that? You know?
That is unusual? By the way, before this, I looked up Simon Wells. I was like, what else did he direct? He made a number of animated movies, some involving time travel. He directed We're Back a Dinosaur Story. Oh remember that one?
Vaguely, vaguely.
Maybe one day on Weird House. Well, we'll have to check that out, see how it holds up. I associate that one with being a kid and maybe like getting a babysitter and having pizza or something.
Yeah, that sounds like a good time. Yeah, yeah, two thousand and two. That was the last time I saw. Two thousand and two is the time Machine, But I remember enjoying it. You know, Guy Peers is great, Jeremy Irons is great. It had more locks in it, Like those are kind of just the basic things I need for a good film experience. There are some good actors in there, and some reasonably effective monsters that live underground, and I'm generally on board, But I do not remember
any of like the real broad Strokes. I think there's some sort of subplot about the moon getting split in half.
Like there are moon colonists and they screw something up and blow up the moon.
Yeah, that also happens in the opening to Thunder the Barbarian from back in the day. The moon gets like torn in half by something.
I didn't know that.
Oh, and then, just for comparison's sake, here Joe I included a screenshot from Time after Time, which again we've previously discussed on Weird House Cinema. They use a different design for the time Machine. It's more like a canopied little deal, but it also looked fittingly late Victorian.
Yeah, Time after Time looks more like an insectoid helicopter without a rotor.
Yeah. It's interesting because clearly in all versions, the time Traveler didn't really think about all of the features you might really want on this thing, you know. Definitely a canopy to keep subterranean monsters from pulling you off the chair. Air Conditioning, yeah, air conditioning.
Which comes up in this film.
Yeah, all right, so let's get let's get to the cast here playing the time Traveler h George Wells is Rod Taylor, who lived nineteen thirty through twenty fifteen. Taylor was an Australian born actor, best remembered for this film, Hitchcock's The Birds in nineteen sixty three, and the Disney animated film one hundred and one Dalmatians, in which he plays the lead Dalmatian Pogo.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah. Other credits include fifty six's World Without End, sixty eight's Dark of the Sun, and a nineteen eighty five Christopher Lee film titled Mask of Oh and then very late I think this might actually be his last film credit. He shows up in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards in two thousand and nine, playing Winston Churchill.
Never would have made this connection. It's basically a cameo. He has like one or two lines. He sits in the background while while what's his name is getting briefed.
Yeah, so I have to say Taylor, I think is pretty great in this. He brings a lot of charm to the to a character that would have they could have at least certainly come off a good bit more wooden and preachy in the hands of another actor.
No, they make him passionate. He's Yeah, he's likable in this role because I mean, he does have to do a bit of sermonizing in the film about the woes of humankind and the you know, the devious stupidity of war and all that, which if they had gone with a different kind of like I think I read somewhere that they were maybe thinking about getting like an older actor looking at David Niven or something, and I don't know,
could have gone a different way. But Rod Taylor, he just feels it like he's expressing his feelings and you're sort of there on the ground with him instead of being preached down at by him.
Yeah. Yeah, And I don't think I've seen any other film that he was I mean, I guess I've seen the birds, but it's been a long time, and I've seen one hundred and one Dalmatians. But maybe that's not the best way to really a praise an actor's ability, But yeah, I think he's really good in this one, all right. Now. Of note, mostly the main characters in this film are going to be the time traveler Wells and then the character Weena, who is a far future Eloy.
But there are some contemporary late Victorian characters that are encountered early on, and then we have some like some descendants of one of those characters. The main character here that is one of the time traveler's friends is the character David Philby and then later James Philby his descendant, and they are both played by Alan Young who lived nineteen nineteen through twenty sixteen.
Our protagonist has a group of several friends when the action begins in eighteen ninety nine or nineteen hundred, who are like three of the four guys are just like cigar eating machines, but the fourth guy, the fourth guy has more of a heart. He has a soft Scottish accent, and he's a nice, thoughtful guy. That's the Allan Young character here.
Yeah. Yeah. The soft Scottish accent is especially present in the elder Philby character, and many of you, if you're rewatching this film, you might be like, man, that Scottish accent sounds familiar. It sounds a little bit like Scrooge McDuck. It is absolutely Scrooge McDuck. Because Alan Young played Scrooge McDuck.
It provided Scrooge McDuck's voice for four decades, beginning with the nineteen seventy four Disneyland Records album an adaptation of Dickens's Christmas Carol performed by the Walt Disney Players, and this eventually became, in my opinion, x Mickey's Christmas Carol from nineteen eighty three like if you want a Christmas Carol boiled down to like what thirty minutes with some genuine laughs, but still retaining the spirit of a Christmas Carol,
you can't go wrong with with Mickey's Christmas Carol?
Is it better than the Mister Magoo Christmas Carrol?
Well, I don't. I think I've only seen that one once, but I'm gonna go and say absolutely yes.
Yes, I don't remember that much either, but I'm sure I saw this when I was a kid, but I don't recall much all.
Oh yeah, I recommend potentially revisiting it. I think it holds up really well. I think it's one of those that I inevitably end up watching every Christmas, in part because it's such a it's so short, like how can you not sit down and watch it? But anyway, Alan Young played Scrooge McDuck so many times, like he's Scrooge McDuck on the duck Tails TV series and the Kingdom Heart video games and so much more like he was Scrooge McDuck.
Also, there were some great duck Tails at uptates to like the eight and sixteen bit video game Eras.
Oh that's right, Yeah, there was a great.
Duct Tails game for the nes And then do you remember there was there was a ducktails game for the Sega Genesis called quack Shot. Did you ever play that one?
I don't know that I did, But I've noticed that the Ducktails games have been some of the ones over the years that have been like revisited and put back out there that you know, people were really fond of, So I'm to understand they were quality.
Games, just great side scrollers. Though there was one thing I recall about Quackshot that was really funny, which is it's one of these games where you can you can get life back by picking up power ups like food, so you can like pick up an ice cream cone to heal yourself. But one of the things Scrooge McDuck can pick up to heal himself is a roast chicken. Something seems a little wrong there, but yeah.
All right, let's see. Alan Young also did other voice acting gigs and appeared in such films as Tom Thumb in fifty eight, seventy eight's The Cat from Outer Space and nineteen ninety Wars Beverly Hills Cop. I think Beverly Hills Cop Three is the one that came out in ninety four. And then he was also a cast member on the nineteen sixties talking horse TV show Mister Ed. At any rate, of all of the Time Traveler's friends, this character David Philby and then later James Philbey, this
is the only one that really matters. This is the one that actually has a little more character to him. He cares about the time Traveler and plays a more important part in the plot.
Yeah, with these other three guys, it really is a case of like, it's like the slasher movie question, why are these people friends?
Yeah? Yeah, I guess they just attend the same club. It's just how it worked, right, Yeah, all right, Now let's come back to Wiena, played by Yavette Mimeeux. We've talked about her before because she was in nineteen six seventy nine's The Black Hole, which we discussed in a Weird House.
Yeah, that's right.
She is the Elloy love interest, though again not a love interest in the original book. Later credits include nineteen seventy three's The Neptune Factor, nineteen seventy five's Journey into Fear, and of course nineteen seventy eight's Devil Dog The Hound of Hell, along with other various TV appearances.
Now, Rob, did you notice in her filmography that she's in two not quite back to back, but almost back to back Factor movies. You said The Neptune Factor from seventy three, but in nineteen seventy she was also in The Delta Factor.
Oh wow, A lot of factors to consider there.
Yeah, Delta Factor appears to be a Mickey Spillane adaptation.
Okay, well, the Disney voice acting credits continue here. Though, because the more rotund bearded member of the crew here that's hanging out. Doctor Philip Hillier is played by Sebastian Cabot, who lived nineteen eighteen through nineteen seventy seven. He is a repeat Disney voice actor. He narrated the Winnie the
Pooh series in the original films. He narrated nineteen sixty threes The Sword and the Stone and did the voice of Lord actor in that, and he played the panther Bagheira in nineteen sixty seven's The Jungle Book.
That makes sense. I'm familiar with these voices, but I wouldn't have pegged them to him, but now I can hear it.
Another one of the friends is the character Walter Kemp, played by Wit Dissel. He lived nineteen oh nine through nineteen ninety six. Prolific TV and film actor, initially notable to me because he was a nineteen fifty four creature from the Black Lagoon, as well as nineteen seventy three Soylent Green. Other credits include fifty one's Lost Continent, fifty six's Invasion of the Body Snatchers nineteen sixties. The Magnificent seven sixty two is the Manchurian candidate plus in a
crowning achievement. Dissel was in all three fifty seven and fifty eight films. I was a teenage wear Wolf, I was a teenage Frankenstein, and Monster on the Campus. He also pops up in that nineteen seventy eight Time Machine TV film. So this guy just has a lot of credits.
Now, I assume for the late fifties films he was not himself the teenage were Wolf, the teenage Frankenstein, or the Monster on Campus.
No, I think he's a professor or a teacher in all of them. Yeah, this was like your staple professor teacher actor during that period. I get it, Okay. Paul Freese is in this one as well. He provides the voice of the Rings, which will be explained in a
bit here. With nineteen twenty through nineteen eighty six prolific actor and voice actor who isn't actually always credited, but if you look at the episode stats for Weird House Cinema on Letterbox, for example, he's currently right up there behind Christopher Lee, Dick Miller, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing for actors with the most films that we've covered. Because he or his voice pop up in The Thing from Another World, The Abominable Doctor Fivees, The Flight of Dragons,
the Magic Sword, and now the Time Machine. It was pretty prolific. He has I think three hundred and seventy credits on IMDb. Wow. All right, let's get into some of the behind the scenes folks. Here there will again we can't cover everybody, but cinematography here was by Paul C. Vogel, who lived eighteen ninety nine through nineteen seventy five. Oscar winner for nineteen fifties Battleground and nominated for sixty threes
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grim. He also worked on The Magic Sword.
I was reading a bit about the look of this film in a twenty twenty two historical review for The American Cinematographer magazine by Darren Scott, and it mentions the contributions of several people we'll talk about in a bit, Geene Davis or sorry, George Davis and William Ferrari, Gene Warren, and Wa Cheng, and the color cinematography by Paul Vogel.
It mentions a few things about Vogel's approach. One was trying to find a and otherworldly look for the film that did not make it look like fantasy, because you would have a lot of cues that might have been associated with fantasy films of the time, such as the article mentions fog filters or other devices that people would
think gave it a kind of magical look. And he wanted it to look strange and not like our world, but also grounded in science and reality, not magical, and I think that is absolutely well achieved by what we have it.
Has.
Yeah, it's not our world, but it's also reality.
Yeah. I think this is a great point. This is one of those things that it's so effective that it can be pretty much invisible to the viewer because you just you buy into the whole thing. But yeah, when we travel into the far future of the Morlocks, it feels real. It feels like we are still on Earth. It doesn't feel like we're on another planet. It feels like we were just in a distant time. Yea. So it's perfectly executed.
There are a lot of great visual stylistic choices in the film. To read one thing from this article talking about the look of the Morlocks caverns underground, I mean, which is one of the best spectacles in the movie. Scott writes, quote. Theoretically, there was no light at all in the underground caverns, and yet the action had to
be visible. Vogel gained the desired visual effect by using almost no front lighting, rimming the Morlocks with back light, and employing cross light of a greenish hue that seemed to emanate from odd machines that bubbled and sputtered in the background. And Rob, I've got a screen shot for you to look at here that shows off that effect.
I see exactly what he's talking about. It's like these creatures in a way, it helps keep their features kind of obscure and make them a little more mysterious because there's no light hitting them from the front, it's coming from behind, and then this colored green blue light coming from the sides.
Yeah. Absolutely, the Morlocks look incredible. We'll discuss some more when we get into the plot. But as always, a huge part of any monster in a film is not only what the costume consists of, but how is it shot, how is it lit? And they did a great job with these guys.
Though there are a bunch of people I think who should get partial credit for the look of the Morlocks as well, including like William Tuttle and Wachang.
That's right, Wa Ming Cheng Visual Effects. He lived nineteen seventeen through two thousand and three. Hawaiian born Chinese American designer, sculptor, and artist, who we previously discussed on our episode concerning nineteen fifty five's Tarantula because he built the titular tarantula in that picture. He was later responsible for key prop design on Star Trek the original series, including the tricorder and communicator. He also did a lot of costumes on some key track episodes.
Including he did some work on a costume for a Star Trek alien that we may be talking about in a core episode next week.
That's right, that's right. And in addition to what we may be talking about next week, he created the tribles. I don't know, maybe we'll talk about the triples next week. I think I've maybe done the triples on Monster Fact before. But yeah. He also worked on the original Outer Limits, the original Planet of the Apes, and the TV series Land of the Lost. His adoptive father was James Blanding, Sloan, an American etcher, printmaker, theatrical designer, educator, painter, and puppeteer.
I went down the rabbit hole earlier this week of looking just at a bunch of different things that Chang designed for Star Trek, the original series, and one of the things that caught my eye is what I just alluded to, this thing we might be talking about next week, which is the salt vampire creature from the original series episode Man Trap actually season one, episode one, the first ever episode of Star Trek, I guess, apart from the pilot,
and this caught my eye because this costume slightly reminds me of something, doesn't It look a bit like a warlock, not entirely, but it's got a kind of sad, drooping monster face, long white silver hair, both kind of features we see again in the Morlock design, or I guess beforehand, in the Morlock design.
Yeah. Yeah, the design is similar in ways for sure, as some of the same, like that the shaggy hair and all. Yeah, different different mouth parts, which makes sense. One sucks salt and the other. As we'll discuss, eats exclusively man meat, exclusively human flesh yum yo. All right, a few other It's worth noting that this film, again was an Academy Award winner for its Special Effects or its Visual Effects, and the two individuals like named on the award, though of course you know, it's always a
huge team making any of the things. Any of these things happen. Happened to be Gene Warren and Tim Barr. Gene Warren lived nineteen sixteen through nineteen ninety seven. His other credits include fifty seven's Chronos, sixty one's Master of the World, and the TV series Land of the Lost. He worked on some other pal pictures as well well. And then Tim Barr lived nineteen twelve through nineteen seventy seven.
Academy Award winner again for this film and his other special effects credits, though sometimes uncredit, include forty two's The Mummy's Tomb, forty three's Phantom of the Opera, fifty six is The Ten Commandments, and the TV series hr puff and Stuff.
Hmmm, I don't know what that is, but there's a song about it somewhere in my head.
Yeah, I don know hr puffin Stuff. I don't think I've ever actually watched it, but I'm just familiar with it from the people sharing weird clips and images. And then finally, William Tuttle is credited as makeup creator, who lived nineteen twelve through two thousand and seven. His other
makeup special effects are otherwise. Films include thirty five's Mark of the Vampire, thirty nine is The Wizard of Oz, fifty six is Forbidden Planet, sixty one's Atlantis, The Lost Continent, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grim twelve episodes of the original Twilight Zone, seventy four is Young Frankenstein in seventy eight's The Fury, and then finally, the composer here for the score Russell Garcia, who nineteen sixteen through twenty
eleven American composer whose other scores include Atlantis, the Lost Continent, and he was a composer for NBC Studios and worked on such shows as Rawhide in sixty two and Laredo from sixty five through sixty seven. I think it's a fun score here. It has some nice creepy notes, a little bit of futuristic intrigue at times. Yeah.
Yeah, it's able to action, and I think especially the scenes of horror quite well.
Yeah, and then the action, because you know, we do we don't quite buckle some swash or anything, but we do get a lot of fun action. Well, there's a big mor Lock battle Royale late in the picture. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Uh okay, are you ready to talk about the plot? Let's jump in so we get a pre credit sequence that is just a cannonade of clocks flying through black space. This type of imagery I know I've seen used in other time travel stories. I wonder does it originally come from this film or did it appear earlier? Is this film reusing the convention?
I'm not sure either, but you certainly see allusions to it a lot, and including to a certain extent the Treehouse of Horror episode where Homer Simpson travels through time, and in traveling through time, he kind of like falls through an infinite space filled with clocks.
You know, I think we reference the Treehouse of Horror, Short Time and Punishment more than any other piece of media that exists. Do you think it comes up on the show more than anything?
I mean, it might. It comes up in my life a lot. It's up there with Willy Wank and the Chocolate Factory is something that I probably think about every day.
Yeah, it's so rich. It's like the Iliad or something anyway. The action opens for this film on a street in London around the turn of the twentieth century, where there's a large manor house on one side of the street and on the other a row of stores, notably a department store with a women's fashion display in the window. This will have more plot relevance than you might guess.
Yeah.
Out of the store comes the owner, David Philby, played by Alan Young. He's dressed in a bowler hat, a scarf and a heavy overcoat. He locks up for the night and runs across the street to the house of his friend, our protagonist, who is referred to by the other characters as George, but in the credits he is
h George Wells. So Philby is let inside by the housekeeper mis Watchett played by Doris Lloyd, and once inside, Philby reaches the sitting room and we meet three other characters already nestled into high backed armchairs, and they're just peeling through the house stash of cigars and brandy, issuing the occasional harumph. These guys are doctor Hillier, Bridewell or Bridy, and Kemp. It is not terribly important to distinguish these
other three guys. They're your standard late nineteenth century gold pocket watch creatures. They love to suck cigars and they're yammering about the price of a bushel of They're basically picture like that dude from Titanic who talks about how God could not sink the ship. They're all kind of that guy. The main thing is that Philby is not like the other three. He is more sensitive, thoughtful, and open minded, and he's a better friend to our protagonist George.
So anyway, these guys have clearly been sitting here for some time. When Philby joins them, the room is filled with clocks, so they're all ticking away, not in perfect unison, and all of the disorganized ticking summed up amounts to this ambient clatter, almost kind of a cranking sound in the background.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of clocks. But as we're gonna learn here, George is big on time. He's a researcher of time, and you've got to buy a lot of clocks if you can study it properly.
They don't seem like research instruments to me. I mean, it seems like he's just like they're all like, they're not scientific time pieces. It's just like grandfather clocks and wall clocks and weird little cook two clocks everywhere.
I mean, he could be a situation where friends and family know that he's really into potentially developing a time machine, and they're like, what should we get him for a Christmas? Oh, that dude loves time. Let's get him another clock.
That's right, socks and clocks every year. Yeah. So the other three cigar guys are annoyed because their host has kept them waiting. He invited the four of them over to dinner several days ago, but now they are here at the appointed time and he is nowhere to be found. The housekeeper has made excuses for him and said that he'll be along shortly, and the cigar guys are irritated and they are taking offense. These guys are having a
lot of fun getting offended. Eventually, miswatch It comes in with a note saying that if he is not here on time, the four of them should begin dinner without him. So they proceed into the dining room and Philby tries to make excuses for his friends, saying that George is usually prompt, precise, and punctual. Now you know, I love a good freeze frame to get a look at the spread food in a movie. So I did one. Here looks like we have got a big blackened meat roast
of some kind in the center of the table. There's a little plate of something white next to it. I couldn't tell what that is. Maybe hard boiled eggs.
Okay.
Each man has a yeast roll on a dish next to his plate, and then, apart from the green, let us garnish underneath the meat, I see not a single identifiable vegetable.
Yeah, yeah, I guess maybe tobacco is the vegetable.
For there you go. That's how you get your fiber. Yeah, and plenty of wine. Of course, we're told that the host, George, has the best wine cellar in the South of England. So while George is presented as a bit of a dreamer and an idealist, he is not above appreciating some luxuries. He loves a good wine.
Yeah, and maybe he values wine because it also sort of travels in time in the basement. Yeah, there you go.
So suddenly, while the four men are about to tuck into their meal, the door to the dining room flies open and install stumbles the figure of their host George. This is Rod Taylor again. He is not dressed for dinner. Instead, he is filthy in tattered clothing, bleeding from some superficial wounds,
and trembling with exhaustion. He collapses into a chair and he calls out some food a drink, and then one of the guys, Bridewell, I think, he quickly gives George a glass of medicinal wine, which he slams down, and then Bridewell has a drink too, Because I don't know, I guess what he's seeing is so disturbing, and he's got to tell them his tail while he still remembers it all clearly. Philby tries to get George to relax.
He says, don't worry, you have all the time in the world, and George gets a good ironic moment here. He's like, yes, that's right, that's exactly what I have. So to tell his tale, we start five days earlier, when George was meeting with the same four men in his living room on New Year's Eve, eighteen ninety nine. George is giving a demonstration inside a box. On the table before them is the culmination of years of work
in his laboratory. He wanted to unveil it to them before the New century began, and he finished just in time. What is it, well, George says, his invention has to do with time and doctor hill Doctor Hillier, here this is the kind of harrumphing guy with the beard who loves the scars. He's like, ah, wonderful. What our country needs now more than anything, is a more accurate time piece to be used by the Army and the Royal Navy,
especially important for coordinating artillery brigades. And George smiles a little smile. He says, no, no, no, it's not a time piece. He says, when he speaks of time, he is referring to the fourth dimension. Hillier is immediately dismissive. He says, oh, that's mere theory. No one knows if
it really exists. And then we get a little scene where George gives us a lecture on the three dimensions of space and how time can be imagined as an visible fourth dimension, the only one along which we cannot travel at will.
The film really takes its time in a good way, presenting some of the concepts of time and time travel here, which again I think is pretty admirable. Because you know, time travel films were not new at this point, but a lot of time travel films prior to nineteen sixty dependent on more dependent on more mystical time travel techniques, you know, like hypnosis or falling asleep, that sort of thing, and falling to sleep is kind of like time travel.
But so on one hand, maybe Christmas ghost Yeah, Christmas ghosts, So maybe it was more essential at this time. But also it's worth noting that the particulars of the time machine here are also rather distinct, namely in the way that it travels through time but not space though don't nitpick that concept too closely either, But still essentially, as far as we're concerned, to travel through time, not space, and it's it's it's very important that that be cemented in the viewer's.
Head, that's right. And it's also this lecture is good because of the interesting way the script uses the lecture to further characterize George. Like when he speaks of time in this scene, he uses a lot of vocabulary having to do with constraint and the lack of freedom. He says, when it comes to the other three dimensions, we are free.
But when it comes to the fourth dimension, we are prisoners, and you get this feeling of George as a man of action, a man who breaks through barriers and feels a kind of access and mastery over many domains due to his strength and his economic privilege and his will power. George's He's strong, handsome, brilliant, rich and bold. So in a way, it's like anything feels possible to him, except
for time. There's nothing we can do about time. We live in bondage in one part of it, and it moves at its own pace rather than us moving through it at ours right right.
And then also this this larger sense too right, that that human destiny is like is a track leading into an unknown future, and therefore we just have we have limited vision of what's to come and of and as we've been saying, like a complete inability to like shift from that path.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I found this part of the movie really interesting in the way it's revealing George's personality. It made me think about tendencies I've observed in reality of like once people reach a certain level of power and freedom. I'm thinking specifically of like a lot of tech billionaires. If you listen to them talk. It's it seems very often like the next thing that develops in their mind is a desire to escape the circumstances of reality. They find it like, I
want to escape this world. You know, I've already like mastered a kind of freedom within this world, and now the problem is that I'm stuck in this world.
Yeah, yeah, what do we hear? Yeah, some of our billionaires talking about it's about going to other planets or digitizing consciousness, or if you happen to be like a leader of a powerful nation, you may you maybe chatting about ways to replace all your organs and live to be one hundred and fifty years old. That, of course, was in the news cycle recently. So yeah, I think it's a very accurate rate.
To escape mortality, to escape morality, to escape the planet, to escape whatever, or the limitations of Yeah. Anyway, So after this, George he stages a demonstration of quote the possibility of movement within the fourth dimension. So he opens the box up on the before them, which contains a tiny model of the film's famous time machine. So this is just a toy size thing.
Fight as well, learn this is a working model.
Correct, Yes, yes, it worked. Yeah, So imagine Santa's sleigh with a giant dish antenna on the back of it. The seat for the passenger is a polished wooden arm chair with dark red upholstery. And of course this is only a toy sized replica. I was reading that the resemblance to Santa's sleigh is not an accident. George Powell allegedly modeled this design on a horse drawn sleigh because he rode in horse drawn sleighs a lot when he
was young and he had fond memories of that. It was created by the designers Bill Ferrari and Wacheng And I remember I read somewhere that the chair here was a barber's chair. I don't know, or either the chair in the toy version or in the full size version was a barber's chair, which doesn't quite look like to me, but that's funny.
Yeah, yeah, again, this becomes the iconic time machine. This is like the primary vision of the late Victorian time machine, and it's pretty accurate to the book, I believe. In the book it's described as having rails, levers and also a saddle. I think we're fine to get away from the idea of it being more of a saddle and more of a chair.
Yeah, So George, he's gazing at this thing with excitement and pride, and the revelation of this machine gives way to a discussion. Bridewell says, hey, you know, don't go messing around with the future, because George, of course says you can travel to the future with it. He says, don't go messing around with the future. You could screw it up for the rest of us. And then Hillier says, no, no, no,
the future cannot be changed. Even if you could travel through time, you couldn't change the course of history because what happens will happen either way. And George says, this is the question he wants to answer. Can man control his destiny? Can he change the shape of things to come? That latter phrase, I believe would become the title of a Wells associated film later on.
Yes, that's right.
So to prove he has not lost his mind to George, stage's a demonstration with the four gentlemen as witnesses. He takes a cigar from doctor Hillier's pocket, and then he bends the cigar into the shape of a seated man, and then he puts it in the seat, and he sends the machine off. The dish starts whirling, and the room rattles around them like the champagne and the ice bucket is rattling. And then suddenly the toy time machine disappears, leaving only this fading yellow glow on the table where
it was. Where has it gone? Not anywhere in space, but somewhere through time. George says it could be one hundred years away by now.
We never see it again, right, never again.
When he tells us we're not going to he's just like, it's not coming back because there's no operator in it.
In the future. This thing's just going to appear and deliver a late Victorian cigar to somebody, but also deliver to them I miniaturized working replica of time travel seems kind of reckless in many respects.
There you go, Yeah, you don't know who's going to get hold of that thing though, presumably because there's nobody inside to turn the lever back and make it stop, it's just going to keep speeding through time forever.
Oh goodness all that. I don't know that that sounds safe either. I'm not sure what happens when something kind of accelerates endlessly through time.
In the heat death of the universe. Suddenly this thing pops out.
This is maybe this is why the universe ultimately is destroyed. Who knows.
Okay, let's see after the demonstration, the guests funny thing, they're not very impressed, Like they don't believe that his disappearing toy actually traveled through time. But even if he had invented a time machine, of what use would it be? Yeah, which is an insight that's is both incredibly thick headed, Like if it were real, wouldn't that be the most important invention of all time? Could apply knowledge of the future to the past. You could fix any mistake or
revert any disaster. But on the other hand, when you think about it, it might also be accidentally profound. Since you know, we've talked about this on the show with like time travel stories before, you can imagine scenarios where essentially, as soon as time travel is invented, it becomes catastrophically weaponized. Like the parties who possess time travel would have so much power over those that don't they would become living
gods among mortals. So anyway, the friends here are not impressed with the time machine, doctor Hillier says, He says, why don't you do something useful like make weapons. You know we're at war right now in South Africa. The country needs brilliant inventors like you to design things that can help us win the fight. And he promises to put George in touch with his contacts in the war office.
And then Hillier, Bridewell, and Kemp all depart, all with their own plans for New Year's Eve, and George looks mighty depressed. But Philby remember he's the good friend. He's a sensitive friend with a soft Scottish accent. He stays behind to counsel his friend. Philby asks why this preoccupation with time, and George resists talking about this at first, but eventually he's persuaded to explain. He says, if you want to know the truth, I don't much care for
the time I was born into. He explains that he finds the world of the present intolerably cruel and shortsighted, where even the most marvelous discoveries of the new science are captured and perverted by evil men who care only about the destruction of their enemies, and the quest for power, and George wants to escape this bloodthirsty time, to find a world without all of this hatred and stupidity and warmongering, when humankind can build and learn and live in peace.
It's a powerful sentiment that I think the audience is tempted to have mixed feelings about, because on one hand it is an insightful and moral indictment of human of humankind and the way we are and of our ills. But also it is it's a he has a sense of resignation that he can't stop it, like he can't change it. All he can do is escape it to like take him to remove himself away to a time when humankind has become better.
It's like he goes even beyond the privilege that he already has in life. Yeah, to like to distance himself economically and geographically from a lot of the problems in the world now potentially traveling through time to do so.
Yeah, So George and Philby argue. Philby says he agrees with his friend. He says, you know you're you're right, You're right about the age we live in. But this obsession with escape is unhealthy, he says, destroy that machine before it destroys you. So I think Philby is in a way seen as the voice of sanity here, like he's you know, he's there's some wisdom in what he's saying. And then Philby tries to invite George to his home for New Year's Eve to spend it with him and
his wife and his young son, Jamie. So this is almost kind of the alternative, you know, the alternative to the escape that George is suggesting is his love and brotherhood that Philby is suggesting. But George refuses. Philby asks him to promise that he won't go anywhere else tonight, and George, before Philby leave, says, I promise I won't walk out the door.
Don't say anything about traveling through time.
That's right. So George sits down and he writes an invitation for Philby and the other three men to come back to the house for dinner the following Friday, five days. Hence we hear people on the street outside the blowing party horns and yelling Happy New Year. And after this, George retires to his laboratory where the full sized time machine awaits, and we get a sharp music sting when it's revealed the laboratory is in George's conservatory, which is
full of plants and work benches and tools. The windows are frosted over with ice, and outside it is dark. George he hastily makes a few mechanical preparations, like sharpening the He's sort of got a car key for his time machine. It's this lever that he has to insert to make the machine go. He does something to it
and he hops in. Now the next thing. People who remember the broad outline of the story might think he is about to flip a switch and then PLoP down in the year eight hundred thousand in the land of the Eloy and the Morlocks. But there is actually a long and I think quite interesting middle section of the story here, where the time traveler is experimenting with the machine, taking it slow at first, and seeing what happens in
the century after his departure. This part of the movie involves a lot of time laps and stop motion effects, which again I believe these are the main parts that won this film and Oscar.
Yeah, yeah, they're incredible. They hold up quite well. I also want to quickly throw in that is it is. It always amuses me that the time machine like really like the centerpiece of so much time travel fiction. It sets its sites eight hundred thousand years in the future like such a safe distance when it comes to depicting what the future will be like, when pretty much everything else decides to look at the far future of nineteen eighty seven, yeah, or the you know, apocalyptic hell scape
of two thousand and three and so forth. But you know, I don't know, maybe people will have a good laugh eight hundred thousand years from now.
I think it's easier to feel emotionally involved with a story that is within a generation or two of your own, of your own time.
You know.
It's like, once you start getting further out from that, you can still have drama take place in the place you go to, but it just it almost starts to feel like a fantasy world that's just not connected to your present reality.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as humans, we have a difficult time really viewing things beyond our own personal horizon. Maybe we can see it one generation out, so yeah, it makes sense that we tend to limit our storytelling to that time frame.
So anyway, he first goes slow, making sure the machine works. He like skips ahead several hours, and he sees a candle burned down several inches in an instant, and then he goes faster, and he sees the environment change quickly in these cyclical ways, like the hands on the clocks spinning round and round, and the sun rising and setting quickly, frost growing on the windows and then receding. He sees the flowers in his greenhouse opening and closing, their little
their blossoms, like these leapping mouths. There's a great part. We sees a snail racing across the floor, going fast, and then through the glass window he sees the department store across the street, and in the window of the store there is a mannequin displaying a fancy dress. And there's this whole little subplot here where we see years flit by through the changes in women's fashion, and the time traveler is like, good, heavens, that's a dress. This
was intriguing. I wonder just how far women would permit this to go.
Yeah, it's legitimately a hilarious line.
Yeah, he says, I began to grow very fond of that mannequin, maybe because like me, she didn't age. So we see the fashions change. He stops briefly in the year nineteen seventeen, when he discovers the lights have gone out in his house. His home is now filled with cobwebs and dust, and there's sheets over all the furniture. He leaves the lab and wanders out into the street, where going into the department store, he sees a man in a military uniform who looks exactly like his friend
David Philby. He thinks it is Philby, but when he greets him, the man is confused. We learn this is not David Philby, but his young son, Jamie, now grown up to the age his father was when George left.
Yeah, same act, but now without the distinct scooge McDuck accent.
That's right. Jamie tells George that his father was killed in the war a year earlier. Just sad moment. And then we also learned the story of the inventor Chap who lived across the street. He apparently disappeared in the year nineteen hundred and left the house in the care of Jamie's father, and Jamie always wanted his father to sell it, but David forbade it, believing his friend would come back someday, and he says, people hereabouts think it's
haunted anyway. Have you been at the front? And George is quite confused. He's like, what front? And Jamie says why the war, of course, and George smiles, but with a clear sadness. This time seems no better than his own. Everywhere live's wrecked by violence again and again. So he goes back to the time machine.
That's right. Time to jump back in and fast forward to the part where we solve this whole war thing.
That's right. So he's going to go faster now. The months fly by. Suddenly in nineteen forty something rattles the world around him and he stops. He comes out and we get this nightmarish glimpse of the Blitz of London. There are fires raging, there's anti aircraft fire going up into the dark, and it's like the god of war still rules this cursed planet. So he pushes on in
the machine. His house is destroyed, I guess, in the blitz, and the machine is speeding through time just now out in the open in a grassy field, and he has a view all around of buildings being rebuilt quickly with time laps and stop motion effects. The mannequin. Time lapse also continues. We get to see more modern fashions, including a bikini, and he stops again in the mid sixties because he hears high pitched sounds all around, and so the years stop racing by. The sounds come into focus
and we realize these sounds are air raid sirens. Now we are in the era of the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear weapons always looming over us. But George doesn't know about this yet. Of course, he doesn't know what the sounds are. He sees crowds of people running somewhere, being ushered by civil defencemen in gray jumpsuits with white helmets, and people are trying to get him to hurry along with them, but he resists. He's like, what's the rush. He's like checking out a outside the
department story. He is checking out a shaving kit display that has a nuclear civil defense sign right above it with the picture of a mushroom cloud.
And but by your clean shave razor. Today, Yes, people still had the moxy to be like, you know, people were heading off to the bomb shelters, but diagnam it. They still need a shave, They still need a quality shaving device.
Yeah, so he eventually meets a now aged version of the once young Jamie Philby. George wants to speak with him about the splendid technological achievements he sees all around them. You know, it's now the sixties. There's technology everywhere. But Jamie does not have time to chat. He's like, I can't talk to you about flat screen TVs.
There.
We're all going down to the bomb shelters because a nuclear strike is imminent. He says, we got a hurry, or the mushrooms will be sprouting, and he points to a thing in the sky that he calls the atomic satellite. He says it's zeroing in, and George gets back into his time machine just in time to avoid being destroyed. He sees in fast motion how the fire of war destroys everything. The labor of centuries gone in an instant,
he says. And then after this, this part's a little hazy, but he says, mother nature responds somehow, like all of the human warfare causes volcanic eruptions from below, which flood the city with glowing hot lava. Apparently this special effect was done with a model city set and a big vat of orange oatmeal oatmeal made orange with food coloring,
poured out onto the model set. And then the story is the oatme was left sitting out for several days, long enough that it started to ferment, and it smelled incredibly foul.
It looks great though. Yeah.
So after this, George pilots his time machine fast into the future. He gets encased in lava and is completely covered in stone, so he has to keep running the machine until the rock around him erodes away so he can escape, and that takes a long time. He eventually pops out of the rock, like eight hundred thousand years later, when the world is greatly changed, he finds himself deposited in what seems to be a peaceful land of perpetual summer.
The earth stays green and lush year round, and no war seemed to come in and destroy all the human structure as he sees in the distance, And so he brings the time machine finally to a.
Halt, and in this we finally get to the portion of the film and book that most people remember. Though again, the journey here really makes us earn it. You know, we definitely needed all these steps to get here.
Yeah, So the time traveler He tumbles out into a clearing of grass surrounded by this green jungle, in front of some kind of stone temple crowned with a monolithic statue of a human head, generally referred to as a sphinx. The doors of this temple are made of metal, and they are sealed shut. Georgie goes up. He tries to knock on the doors, but he finds no reply.
I love the design here of the sphinx. It's, you know, it feels connected to various Earth traditions, but also feels very alien, so it really strikes a perfect note. Yeah.
So he goes out wandering through the landscape and he finds beautiful flowers everywhere, fruit trees heavy with ripe, unfamiliar produce, wonk of fruits. Yeah, wank exactly, Yeah, he says, not a weed or a briar in sight, No unpleasant plants. So it's as if the entire natural world has become, in its wild state.
A garden.
It's like the wilderness itself is now a fruit orchard in a botanical garden. Humankind has fully tamed the plant kingdom and shaped it entirely to our liking. And he thinks he says, at last, I'd found a paradise, but it would be no paradise if it belonged to me alone. So he goes out looking for people. He wanders down a hill covered in ivy, and he comes to one
of the structures he saw in the distance. It is a giant dome with stone rocky steps leading up from a plaza in front, flanked by two dark sphinxes, and there's a big metal door leading inside. And once he comes close, George sees that this building is actually in pretty bad disrepair. It seems it has not been kept up for centuries. So is it abandoned? Well, seems maybe not.
He goes inside and he finds a hall filled with circular banquet tables covered with glasses and bowls and ripe fruit, so it seems like someone is coming in here on a regular basis. And when he makes sounds in here, the sounds echo through the hall with this eerie delay pattern, like they're like running away and coming back. Next, the time Traveler wanders down to a riverside where he finds people.
A group of beautiful, fit young men and women, all blonde with like The men all have bowl cuts, lounging on a sandy bank next to the water. They are talking, laughing, dancing, and picking fruit.
Quick question, do you think they're cutting their own hair or do you think the morlocks cut their hair?
Very good question. I think they're cutting their own hair, but only for fun, right, because there's no work in this world.
We'll get to that.
So this is what he says. He sees them all lounging around. He says, so this is man's future, to bask in the sunlight, bathe in the clear streams, and eat the fruits of the earth, with all knowledge of work and hardship forgotten. Well and why not? So it seems he thinks he has finally found his long sought earthly paradise of peace. But then he hears a scream. A young woman is drowning in the river. She's being swept away by the current, and weirdly, her friends on
the rocks nearby do nothing. They barely seem to notice her cries for help, and when they occasionally glance her way, they don't even bother to like reach down and offer her a hand up. So she's drifting away helplessly while the rest of the people just sit there and talk and laugh and ignore her.
Yeah, well they're just yeah, they're just like, oh, something's happening, and that's it. Is dispassionate.
So finally the time Traveler himself jumps in the water to rescue her. He brings her ashore and he puts his coat around her shoulders, and once she comes to, she doesn't say anything to George. She just gets up and walks away. And Rob I took a screen grab here because did you see this part where the other lady's here by the river giving the time traveler the stink face? They're just like, ew weird. Yeah, so George
is plexed. He's like, what's wrong with these people? Later, they all wander away happily to the dome that he found earlier, and he follows them back. He sits down by himself on the stairs outside, and eventually the woman that George rescued from the water comes and sits behind him, and again this is evet Mimu. She asks why he saved her. He asks how come twenty of her friends did not save her, Like why were they watching her dying and doing nothing to help? And she says nothing.
She doesn't even seem to understand the question, so they introduce themselves to each other. Her name is Weena, and George learns that despite speaking perfectly understandable twentieth century English eight hundred thousand years later, none of these people can read or write, and so when he shows her what writing is, he writes words in the dust. She laughs. She thinks this is funny, and in this scene and
the following scene he learns a number of things. He learns that these people call themselves the ELOI, that they are profoundly incurious and don't seem to have thoughts about much of anything. That there is no one older than what looks like maybe mid twenties or so, only young people. They have no government, no laws, nobody works, and they don't seem to know where their food and clothing come from.
They are afraid of the dark and believe that you have to hide inside the dome after the sun goes down.
I had a nice chuckle observing that they're kind of all like thirteen year olds, you know, like, where does food and clothing come from? I don't know, It's just it's provided.
Yeah, yeah, it's just here here for us. Yeah, So inside the dome, George eats fruit with the rest of them, and he's trying to figure out how their world works. He tries to make conversation, but nobody has much much to say to him. They just sit there, docile, dull, eyes down, giving these simple, half hearted responses to all his questions, and.
He's he's coming up with some real softball questions here, some real leading questions, like you give me anything.
Yeah. On one hand, he seems to be impressed because he believes they have eliminated war and automated all labor and production, so there is no more suffering or want. Everything these people need is produced and harvested for them by machines, so they can Yeah, they can spend their lives doing doing what George suggests, Well, maybe you spend all your time studying and experimenting, learning you know about about the world. Evidently not the other guy at the table.
Look when he brings this up. This guy just acts annoyed and he's like, you ask too many questions. And the time traveler says, do you have books? You know he wants to He's like, books will tell me about your culture. And one of the eloy men takes George to a room in the dome, which is a dark library with shelves indeed full of books, but they are covered in thick dust, and as soon as the time traveler tries to open one, it falls apart into flakes
in his hand. And finally George becomes enraged and he shouts at the eloy He says, what have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating. Also you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams for what, So you can swim and dance and play. Then he comes back out into the hall and he yells some more. He yells at the whole crowd of the Eloi. He says,
I'm going back to my own time. I won't even bother to tell them of the useless struggle for a hopeless future. But at least I can die among men. So here we get to I think one of the
most interesting paradoxes of the movie. The central desire of our hero is to escape the cruelty and stupidity of his time, war, greed, rapacious destruction, and he finally does come to a time in the future that seems free of these evils, but he discovers that the people here make him sick because they have no virtues, no intelligence or curiosity, no kindness or generosity or spirit of self sacrifice.
He has escaped a world he saw as characterized by vicious stupidity, and arrived in one instead of docile, mindless, pointless self entertainment. Now one could be tempted here to interpret this as an inversion of the earlier themes of the film, like a maybe leaning back into a spartan ethic of war is life. I don't think that's it. I don't think that is the point of the film here. The point of view that I detect is more that the time George left behind was wrong. It was ruled
by a vicious stupidity. It did cause the needless suffering of millions for the glory of a few selfish men. But he has discovered that merely eliminating war and material want do not automatically make life good. You might see the elimination of war and material want in George's new dawning consciousness as necessary, but not sufficient conditions for the
earthly paradise that he dreamed of. So the eloy are abhorrent to him, even though they are at peace, or at least they appear to be at first, because there's more about this world he hasn't figured out yet. So next, the time traveler goes back out to hop into his time machine. I think he's going to go back home or find another time. But when he gets there, the time machine is gone. Oh done, dun duh. Yeah, it's
been towed exactly, adds an impound lot. He can see from tracks in the ground that it has been dragged inside the doors of the stone temple underneath the sphinx. Who took it and how how is he going to get it back now? Despite her fear of the dark that was established earlier, Weena follows George out into the world woods to warn him of danger. Interesting that this is the first risky or self sacrificing thing that we have seen in eloy Do. She's perhaps inspired by the
way George risked his life for her earlier. But what is the danger? We learn it is the Morlocks. They come out at night. George doesn't know what these are, but there are several points here where we can see the Morlocks spying on our hero through the bushes. We don't get a good look at them at all, but we see their eyes twinkling. They have these glowing eyes kind of like the jawas that are a wonderful feature of the costume design.
That's all right, they sparkle in the dark. And in general, this film does a great job of obeying all the laws of monster revelation. You know, we only get some peaks and all does it despite I realize the fact that they're prominently featured on the posters for this movie, and that's also often the case.
One of the Morlocks tries to grab Weena and take her away, but George rescues her, and it seems that they are repelled, and not only by the light of day, but even by the light of a torch. They're afraid of fire, and we'll need to remember that for later. Weena and George gather sticks to build a fire for protection, and here we also get the first hints of a love story, where they're huddled around the fire at night.
As I mentioned earlier, not always opposed to adding in a love story, but it seems really ill suited to the story of the time machine, given a number of things like how different the eloy are from us and how soon it is after George's arrival and all that.
Ye getting they have in common as they eat fruit.
Yeah exactly.
Yeah.
Anyway, the next day we get some we get some exposition in this sequence through the so called talking rings. So Weena takes George to this automated history museum where there are machines that tell about the events of the past, and you can play these sort of data discs that are stored in metal rings by setting them spinning on
a glowing tabletop. From these rings, George learns that long ago, there was a horrible world war that left the atmosphere so contaminated with germs that the air was not fit to breathe, and two groups of humankind parted ways here. Some remained above ground to take their chances trying to survive in the poisoned atmosphere, and the other group went underground into caves and tunnels. The earth eventually recovered over the centuries, but this became a division point for the
human species. The Eloi are descended from those who stayed on the surface, and the Morlocks from those who went below. This history is if I'm recalling correctly, Rob, I think you've read the novel more recently than me, somewhat different from the novel. My memory of the novel is that Wells included a class critique here, where like the Morlocks were descended from exploited workers who were forced to toil underground on the machines that kept life free and easy
for the rich on the surface above. Though eventually, over the centuries the relationship changed and the exploited underground people became the Morlocks and became the exploiters in the most direct sense, by eating the surface dwellers.
Yeah, this is my recollection as well, and yeah, it was more of a class critique here, though I think the change is understandable because it's been adapted to fit the overarching critique of humanity's propensity for warfare. Yeah.
So, at some point, while George is trying to climb down a ventilation shaft to explore the caverns below, there's a sound from above. And here's a scene I made reference to earlier. It is the sound we hear of air raid sirens. When the A raid sirens go off, the noise puts the eloy into a hypnotized state where their eyes go glassy and they just start to automatically march en mass straight into the temple of the Sphinx until the door slam shut, And so this is what
happens here. George runs after the eloy trying to get them to stop, but it's like they don't even see him, and Weena and many others are taken underground. George is unable to get there in time. So here we have the final descent into the underworld. George has to go in to the rescue, so he climbs down one of these ventilation shafts to find below the surface a great cavern with all these pipes and gears. This is the machinery that makes life on the surface possible. And also
he finds bone pits full of human bones. He discovers that the Morlocks treat the Eloi as livestock for meat, and they lure them underground with the sound of the air raid sirens that now almost by like a biological mechanism. The surface dwellers have been conditioned to retreat underground to safety when they hear the air raid sirens. Like so the technology of war has become a part of our physical organism, and they retreat underground for the air raid
sirens and then they're eaten by the Morlocks. Now, one thing I do wonder what kind of dishes do you think the Morlocks make out of the Eloy or is it just like raw bone chopping?
I mean, there's there are machines down there, so I assume they're processed into some sort of sausage and then they just dump the skeletons, which I guess rather complete skeletons. They're in the bone pit Eloy Mortadella.
Yeah, so here we come down to meet the Morlocks. Rob do you, I know, you had some stuff about the Morlocks. This is probably the place to talk about them.
Yeah. Yeah. So we don't actually see these guys in full until this point, really pretty late in the film. You know, we get a few teases here and there, and then we begin to see them more fully as our hero, the time traveler, is stalking into the caverns. He's you know, trying to find what happen into the Eloy,
and we begin to see them stalking him here. I think one of the first glimpses we get one where he's, uh, he's blending into the cavern walls and then he moves uh, and then there's even one that comes right up behind him like he's gonna grab him. It's almost a little abbot in costello. But it's still rather creepy because the monsters look so good. Uh. They're essentially stocky, blue gray ape like creatures with long manes of white hair kind of bangs to a little bit. They have sharp claws
and teeth and gave it. Yeah, they're quite stealthy, and as we'll see in a bit, they're they're prone to leap at their adversaries from ledges do like a flying body uh body presses the kind of Luca door style. However, they're just as if not more, prone to injury than a typical human, So they're not like super strong. They can still get you know, knocked on the head and they're out for the count.
The sense I get if the Morlocks is a glass cannon design. Yeah, they are very vicious and dangerous, but if you just hit back there, they're easily beaten. Like they're very delicate. There's one point where someone hits a Morlock in the face and it's almost like its face just shatters, like all the blood comes out, and and that if that is intentional, that would fit with the themes, because the whole thing is that the Eloi don't fight back at all. It doesn't even occur that occur to them.
To Yeah, and if memory serves, this does essentially match up with the book where I think the Morlocks are not depicted as like super strong eight men. They are like weaker than a contemporary human, but they have the numbers on their side of course.
Yeah. So down here, in the down here in the caverns, George locates the Eloi who have been brought in to be to be eaten, and he uses the fact that the Morlocks are afraid of fire to get advantage over them. There's also just a lot of standard like punching and roadhouse roadhouse, still.
Fighting, swinging the torch around. We'll see the torch in a bed.
Yes, But the very important thing here is not just the George fights, but that he finally inspires he rouses the imprisoned Eloy to fight for themselves. There's a scene where one of them dramatically makes a fist as if for the first time in his life, and then he punches a Morlock and breaks his face and we see the blood running out of its mouth and George and
the Eloy. Then they fight back and they escape the underground caverns, and then on the surface, they drop flaming branches into the air vents all around the landscape, burning the passages below.
Yes, things kind of collapse and more smoke and fire comes out, and I remember thinking, I mean, both times I've seen the film, I've had the thought, Oh, I hope none of the machinery they just destroyed wasn't essential for life to continue on the surface here.
Well, I think the implication actually is that it was like they did destroy the machinery. They destroyed the morlocks who were harm or repressing them, but they also destroyed the machinery that it keeps them alive. Yeah, so they're going to have to learn how to live again. They're going to have to learn how to work.
Yeah, presumably it doesn't like destroy oxygen, Like the machinery down there wasn't creating a breathable atmosphere or anything like that.
Hopefully not. Yeah, but you know, this whole sequence I think is also interesting because it highlights some paradoxical stuff in the film that I don't know exactly what the intended way to take it is, but again to come back to the movie's anti war themes. I mean, it's pretty clear that the movie that the story is opposed
to militarism. One of these themes we get over and over again is that every time humankind is able to build something good, something benevolent and brilliant and useful, we unleash our war making impulses and destroy it all over again. So it's a human kind's relationship to war before this point is presented as this kind of horrible addiction, one where every time we think we've kicked it and can begin to build a good life, we relapse and we
ruin everything. And yet when George reaches the far future, he finds the eloy As, these people who are purely peaceful and have no destructive impulses. But as we talked about, he's disgusted by their lack of virtue and the absence of humanity and kindness and generosity within them. And the only way they're able to save themselves is when George inspires them to make war against their oppressors, the Morlocks.
I don't know exactly how to take that again. I don't think that means the film is going back on its earlier values and making a war is good argument. But I don't know. I guess that I would have to take it as that it has a more complicated attitude. We're accepting it has an ethos of some accepting that sometimes we have to fight in self defense and admitting there could be virtue in that, but also sticking by this belief that maybe the case for fighting needs to be very strongly made.
Yeah, yeah, like it needs to be a righteous battle. And it's interesting because in this moment, or at least the we were talking about it here, it reminds me of that that pivotal moment in the the Baca Ragita. Uh. This is the scene where I believe it's Arjina who is you know, he's he's he's out there on the battlefield. I think he's perhaps on his chariot and you know, there's about to be this huge battle and he's just ruminating on like like how can I act? How can
I do anything? Like? This is just you know, this awful situation of war, and Krishna, you know, comes to him and persuades him that no, you know, you have to just follow your duty. You know, that's that's what you have to do like you in action is not a choice, and so we have something maybe akin to that.
Though of course that that has to be done with the kind of with the kind of a piece biased re I think is the case you would make here, because you can justify any number of atrocities by claiming that it's somebody's duty and bullies and you know, oppressors are always able to convince themselves that they are in
the right. If you know, if you if you are not skeptical of the arguments that make your side feel good, then yeah, you can you can always kind of come up with a way of justifying being the bad guy.
Yeah, I mean, because if you're going to really like analyze things like maybe the Morlocks need some help too, and they don't just need to be wiped out. Maybe there's room for growth for them as well.
Maybe well we don't really get to hear their point of view. If if only there were an uber Morlock to speak for them, to explain their side of things.
There have been so many like time machine inspired works of fiction and derivative works, this has to have been explored at some point. I know there's been at least like literary and comic work for the Morlocks, like get a hold of the time machine and travel to late Victoria in England and have their own adventures there. So maybe someone has explored this.
So anyway, we're coming to the ending.
Now.
George is going to go back to his time machine, but because the doors of the temple are open again, so he goes back to his machine. There's a question of whether he's gonna take Weena with him or something, or whether he's maybe not going to go back or I don't remember exactly what he lands on there. But anyway, there's a surprise attack by the remnant of the Morlocks.
They jump him by his machine, and so he has to get in and escape through time back to the year nineteen hundred, and this cycles back to the beginning of the story.
We get that great scene though of the Morlock that's been killed, slow motion rotting right as he travels forward, and then he's like, whoa, I don't need to go forward, I need to go back. Yeah.
Well, for a second I was like, are we going to get the vision of the further future with the crabs? But we didn't. So he goes back and he you know, stumbles into dinner to tell the story to his friends at the burnt Roast dinner. They don't really believe him, though he does bring a piece of proof. He has a flower given to him by Weena, and we learn here that Philby is a botany fanatic and he takes a look at it, He's like, I've never seen a flower like this before. There isn't a flower like this
on Earth. And then shortly after this, Philby comes back looking for George but finds both him and his time machine missing.
Where did he go?
And so I think we're just left with Philby and missus Watchett standing around being like, where did he go? Did he take anything with him? And he did take something? Mis Watchett is like, oh, look, three books are missing from the shelves.
What could they be? That's right? And so this is I love this. This is a nice little, hey, audience, here's a ready to go conversation to have after the movie. Indeed, which three books might he have taken with him into the far future to essentially rebuild civilization and like renurture the best of humanity? And then indeed, like, what three would any individual choose to take with them?
And you got to have dianetics got.
Yeah, I was thinking about this. I was thinking, well, I guess you'd want, what a book on physics, a book on medicine, and maybe a book on biology. And I think, I mean, certainly physics would still hold up, and most medicine in biology, I mean obviously not for the extinct species, but presumably humanoid biology is still relatively the same.
I would wonder if the most useful books, Yeah, maybe something on like a field medicine manual and a book about like metal working or something something, just given where you're starting there, because like otherwise, you know, if you don't know how to work metals, then that might really prove difficult for a long time.
Well, I was thinking one of my first thoughts was a book on foraging. But we have no idea what the flora situation is like out there, So who knows A book a book on scavenging and harvesting flora and mushrooms wild mushrooms today would be of virtually no use. Presumably in the far.
Future, presumably metals still work the same way. Yeah, so I'm going to stand by metalworking as one of the three.
But yeah, I think that's a strong that's a strong selection metallurgy. I don't know that you could make a case for books of general knowledge. I don't know how. I don't know how ultimately useful like a farmer's almanac would be, But things of that nature I guess would
be an easy selection. It gets a little easier when you get into the days of e readers and kindles, because you can just have a kindle loaded with, like you know, essentially all the important works of human literature, and then another one with a whole bunch of scientific works, and then you're pretty much good to go. But you can also nitpick this and say, why just three books? Like you would think he had room for if he
had room for three, he had room for five. Just grab two at random, even if even if they prove virtually useless, you've still got two more books in a world where you maybe have five books total.
I bet it really did get people chatting going out of the theater. I mean, I wonder if there's stories about that.
I mean, I did a quick look around, and I see people asking this question all the time on the internet. People rewatch the time machine and they're like, hey, what three books would you choose? And you know, people are
you know, making very personal choices here at times. You know, I see the Bible mentioned numerous times as being like a key book, and I don't know, it's also fun to think of it just like, okay, if I don't have to rebuild a human civilization, like if it was just for my personal reading, like essentially, treat it like a desert island question, which everybody loves that one as well, you know, like I think, well, I guess they'd bring Dune. I guess i'd bring Name of the Rose, and I
don't know, maybe Dune Messiah. Maybe that's too much Dune. I just I wouldn't want to go as far as to have Dune Dune Messiah and then Children of Dune as well, because then I don't know, it's like I'm happy with just the two. But then again, it's like people are that I share these with the They're gonna be like what happens next? And I'm like, well, there are these other books, but I just didn't bring them. I only brought the first two.
The novelization of Halloween, three, Season of the Witch. Okay, I think that does it for the time machine.
All Right, we're going to go ahead and close this one up then, but we hope you enjoyed it, and we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What are your thoughts on the time Machine, the original work, the nineteen sixty adaptation, other adaptations, derivative works, you know, the use of the time machine and morlocks and related works of fiction right in We would love to hear from you.
Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, including some past episodes on time travel, and we did one on time travel fiction, like when did we start writing about time travel? You know, speculatively and so forth. That's a fun one to revisit, so you'll find all those, you know in the archives wherever
you get your podcasts. But yeah, on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns, so just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. If you go to letterbox dot com, you'll find a list of all the movies we've covered over the years, and sometimes a glimpse at what is coming up next, such as next week, which is Star Trek Week. Yes, on Friday, we will talk about one of the Star Trek movies, which one
will it be? Well, you can go to letterbox right now and get a peek ahead at what we're we going to cover.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway, and special thanks to our guest producers this week, Dylan Fagan and Evan Tyre. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact pat Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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