I’m pretty sure Disney’s The Timekeeper taught me the word “improbable.”
Back in the day, when their theme parks weren’t absolutely caked with their movie IPs, Disney took risks and greenlit original scifi attractions, and it was like exploring a mad scientist’s lab.
Adventure Thru Inner Space? They shrunk you down to the molecular level and rode you through a snowflake. Body Wars? Again with the shrinking, only this time it was a fantastic voyage through the human body. Alien Encounter? Teleportation gone really, really wrong. Even The Tower of Terror was like an original episode of The Twilight Zone, where YOU were the star. I think that’s how it went.
Half their parks were obsessed with time travel. Spaceship Earth was a voyage through the history of human communication, with a story originally written by Ray Bradbury himself. Horizons plopped us into another time machine and showed us the future of human life and colonization. Countdown to Extinction sent us to the end of the Cretaceous period, and Universe of Energy was… also there.
So what was one more glitched out Circle-Vision 360° time machine adventure, with robot hosts voiced by Robin Williams and Rhea Perlman?
“Improbable, yes.”
The Timekeeper, originally called From Time to Time, sat inside the Tomorrowland Metropolis Science Centre, right along the main entrance to the Magic Kingdom’s New Tomorrowland circa 1994. It was somewhere along the Avenue of the Planets, I think, but don’t quote me on that. Outside, a sign read “See the greatest invention of all time, today live!”
I picked this particular recording because it shows off the queue intro video. These things are important. A weird wormhole spits out objects like it’s The Twilight Zone, again. Then there’s a little demo from the Kazooie-like Circumvisual PhotoDroid sidedick herself, Nine-Eye (Perlman). Never underestimate a good theme park queue for worldbuilding.
After the queue, everyone would shuffle into the Circle-Vision 360° theater to get shouted at by Robin Williams as the eccentric Timekeeper. A robot who built a time machine with an AI sidekick? Sure, why not?
This was similar to shows at EPCOT, but The Timekeeper took things a step further, incorporating animatronics and an actual narrative. Visitors viewed the world and its story through Nine-Eye’s nine eyes, each one “linked” to one of the theater’s nine movie screens. Standing only, though, so maybe not the best attraction if you were feeling worn out. Which, more often than not, I was.
But soon after entering, the Timekeeper would flip a switch and the time machine would start its temporal journey.
From the Earth to the Other Earth
If you want to see the particulars, watch the video. They cruise around different eras, bump into a dinosaur, visit with Leonardo Davinci and Mozart, and land finally in 1900 AD at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. And it’s there I have to highlight the exchange between two of our other characters, H.G. Wells (played by Jeremy Irons) and Jules Verne:
“I spent my life writing about the possible, and you prefer the impossible,” Verne says while looking at a model of Wells’ fictional time machine.
“Impossible?” replies Wells, “No, sir. This may be improbable, but believe me, it’s not impossible.”
“Have you traveled through time?” Verne counters. So Wells says, “Have I ever traveled through time? Uh, I have traveled through time as often as you have traveled from the earth to the moon.”
Got ’em. That has been embedded in my mind since the 90s. After that, Jules Verne spots Nine-Eye, grabs on, and away they go.
In 2006, The Timekeeper attraction closed its doors for good, replaced by Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor. The future was no longer on the menu. And still isn’t, I guess. In fact, after 9/11, Disney froze the Timekeeper’s machine to 2000 AD, turning the show into a bit of a time capsule itself. A frozen vision of the optimistic future that New Tomorrowland promised. An actual fork in our own timeline.
Anyway, the real time travel is watching a video of someone recording a CRT monitor in 1994. When you’re done, please be sure you have all your personal belongings and exit to the left. Have a good day.
