I Love Time Travel - Part 17 - ...And Here's How It Started

I genuinely have no idea how I became obsessed with time travel stories.  I usually know these things. It could have been some Saturday morning cartoons. Maybe Spider-Man traveled to the Old West.  Probably not.   I did not start really reading fiction until I was in middle school so I didn’t get hooked from a book. But there was life before Back to the Future and 1985.  This is back in the days when the DeLorean was the clunky car that brought down a company and before it could shoot itself back in time.  I had a handful of time travel influences floating around the TV rerun landscape of the early 1980’s.  There were also a couple of movies that piqued my interest in the genre in different ways.

First, I would like to detail the first story I ever wrote.  We had a project in my seventh grade gifted English class, and we had to write a fantastical story.  I was twelve (1983-1984-ish).  I may have read six books by then on my own.  I just knew that my little story was going to be about time travel.  I created a scientist that accidentally fell through his time-portal thingy and ended up at Custer’s Last Stand.  He was at the fort and tried to warn Custer and the infantry before they took off, and he failed.  Then the professor went home.  The end.  Three whole pages.  Did I mention I never wrote anything before?

Eagle-eyed readers (and there are none) will notice that what I wrote was a rudimentary Twilight Zone episode.  I am not even sure if I saw many episodes with time travel as a focus, but it was one of my dad’s favorite shows so I saw dozens of them before I hit puberty.  It had some essential ingredients; science fiction, a lesson learned too late and, well that’s about it.  Later I realized that The Twilight Zone taught me more about premise and setting than it did about story.  The hook, and where all the action takes place is just neat and clean creativity.  Story is a lot messier.

Time Bandits came out in 1981 and was shown on HBO 10,000 times, which was the style at the time.  To say I was heavily influenced by the movie would be a lie.  To say that I understood what was happening is a lie.  To say I could follow half of the dialogue because of the British accents is a lie.  But, it was a time travel movie.  It was also fun.  It was ridiculous (it is, actually, an unofficial Monty Python movie) and there was no heavy-handed drama.  It was the story of a boy jumping through time with a gang of little people who stole things as they went along.  I loved that the focus was the confused boy.  I remember feeling jealous of the character, because he was also a nerd who thought about history. Most of the humor and absurdity was over my head.  Comedy at the time for me was Bugs Bunny.  I think Terry Gilliam is best served for people who have at least finished high school.  But having adventures in different time periods was enough.

Another film that ran ad nauseum during cable’s infancy was 1979’s Time After Time, with Malcolm McDowell.  Now this movie, which is undoubtedly more subtle and drier than Time Bandits, was very influential.  McDowell is HG Wells.  Now this is the guy who should be the first time traveler, right?  Author of The Time Machine (1895)!   In the movie Wells actually made the machine.  The man police suspect to be Jack the Ripper discovers the machine’s use and travels forth in time to 1979.  (November 5.  Sound familiar?)  Our hero Wells can follow him to the future in the machine after it returns.  He zips in the machine, which just vibrates or flashes light and he appears in the machine as it sits in a museum in San Francisco.  I thought that was so cool. 

This was a fish out of water movie.  Wells is amazed and confused by everything around him, but he studied it like a scientist.  I still remember him pawning his glasses, which were now antiques, for money to eat.  He eats at McDonald’s and is so overwhelmed by the experience he asked for the same order, in the same voice, as the guy ahead in line.  “Big Mac, small fry.”  I just remember putting myself in his shoes.  What is more alarming: the cars and traffic, airplanes, the amount of people?  Who would believe you if you told the truth?  You have no ID, family or friends.  You have no home.  Unlike Time Bandits, this experience occurs in the real world, so the problems of existing in a time that is not your own were center-stage.  Wells chases Jack the Ripper through the film and eventually is able to return home, along with Mary Steenburgen.  (Not her last time travel experience in film.)

I remember daydreaming about storylines and situations for time travel.  I imagined it was me, having gone back to the kids on Little House on the Prairie or to a black and white WWII movie and trying to explain the future.  How would you do it?  Would it even be a good idea?  What if you only had five minutes to do it? There is just something inherently interesting about the notion of being unstuck in time.  There is a pioneering feel to it; like it is a frontier that has not been explored.  It is difficult to express how my mind was blown in 1985 when I saw Back to the Future.  It was one of those things that seemed like it was made just for me.  The time travel seeds were sown years before, and I also didn’t know that in 2014 I would be compelled to write about it week after week.  But hell, it’s still fun.