ManWithPez

You try writing something like this without Huey Lewis being stuck in YOUR head!

November is time travel month here at ManWithPez, as I’ve pointed out any number of times, courtesy of Doctor Emmett Brown and the invention of the Flux Capacitor on Nov, 5th.  What better time to wheel out a top ten list of my personal favorite time machines in various forms of fiction.  I love the time travel plot device, and some of the machines that writers and prop builders come up with are some of the coolest looking machines ever.  Let’s get started!

Yeah, as a time travel method, this would kill my fat ass.

10.  The Cosmic Treadmill (The Flash) – You’d think that a person who can outrun light itself wouldn’t need a time machine, but, you’d be DEAD WRONG!!!  To travel through time, various people who are in touch with the speed force, or the force of nature that regulates velocity that all speedsters in the DC Universe can control to some extent, use a treadmill hooked to some time travel machinery.  It allows anyone with superspeed to precisely travel through time.  As you may think, it had to be done away with at the first oppurtunity.  And, it was.  It’s simply not used for stories anymore, which is a shame, cause I love the goofy little thing.  The last I saw of it was in the pages of Booster Gold.  Speaking of which…

His name is Rip! You just KNOW he's a badass!

9.  The Time Sphere (Booster Gold) – Booster Gold is the greatest hero you’ve never heard of.  Why haven’t you heard of him?  Because he travels through time secretly righting chronological wrongs perpetrated by other time travelers.  His accomplices in this endeavour are the trusty security bot Skeets and Time Master Rip Hunter, who we find out fairly early on has a vested interest in Booster’s mission.  While Booster isn’t certain of it yet, Rip is Booster’s son.  To hop about in time, they use the spherical time bubble, another of the stasis field type of fictional time machines.  Personally, I don’t know how functional it is, but I think it’s pretty cool looking.  If I had a car that looked like it, I’d drive it everywhere!

It's about time, it's about space...

8.  The Time Tunnel (The Time Tunnel) – I don’t know much about this show other than it’s theme song.  Apparently, there was a tunnel, and you could time travel through it.  I only know the song because they sang a strange version of it on MST3K.  Why would I put it here?  Well, I was going to put the time machines shown throughout the Austin Powers movies, but since they appear to be the same device, I decided to stick with the original.  Look it up sometime.  The Time Tunnel had a pretty cool looking apparatus.

Yeah...he's doing the splits in that little sled too. Just cause he can.

7.  The TEC Platform (Timecop) – It’s a rocket sled to nowhere in this Jean Claude Van Damme masterpiece.  So, before we’re treated to the Belgian doing the splits for no good reason, we get to see the mechanics of time travel at work.  You dump someone in a sled, fire it off at the wall, and hope that it actually gets to where it’s supposed to in time.  What happens to the sled, I dont know, but the individual goes to the time inputted.  Why the time travel cops?  Because some people from the future are using time travel for their own nefarious schemes. Hmm…I think I might have heard that plot before.

If George Carlin shows up and offers you a time traveling phonebooth, you TAKE IT!

6.  The Phonebooth (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure/Bogus Journey) – Sure, it looks cool, but what do you do when you need to transport a number of historical figures back to San Dimas High, whose football team rocks, apparently?  The impractical answer in the Bill and Ted movies was to lay it sideways and ride it like a canoe.  I’ve often wondered just how they landed the damn thing without slicing…say…Socrates or Dave Beethoven in two.  Suspension of disbelief, I guess.  Then again, I was wondering this about a flying, time traveling phonebooth.  Good thing it can be repaired with bubblegum and metal pudding cans.

He's quite a weird looking time machine, isn't he?

5.  You (Somewhere In Time) – What’s the best time machine ever?  At least, the safest?  Why, you yourself, according to the film Somewhere in Time.  Playwrite Richard Collier falls so in love with Elise McKenna that he convinces himself that he can travel through time to get to her.  There is one drawback, however.  If he ever encounters anything from his own time, he will immediately return, and the strain on his body would be so great that he would never be able to return.  So, what do you think happens?  Maybe you as a human being aren’t that great of a time travel device.

If you find this, read it.

4.  The Barrel (Lightning) – In the novel Lightning by Dean Koontz, a man travels through time to…you know, I really don’t want to ruin this book for anyone.  I don’t often suggest Koontz.  Something about the way he writes puts me off.  He can distribute a good story, though, and he did it in spades with this story.  The time travel device in this story causes an unnatural lightning storm, does not allow travel into the past, resembles a tunnel, or barrel, and when you go through it, no matter for how long, only 11 minutes will have passed when you return.  This book is actually worth reading for the scope of its story alone.

If only this could land you Kaley Cuoco...

3.  The Time Machine (The Time Machine 1960) – Oddly enough, my favorite appearance of this machine wasn’t in the movie it was named for, but in the TV show The Big Bang Theory, when Leonard purchased it thinking he was buying the tiny little prototype from earlier in the film.  When he gets the big model up and running with the lights and spinning blades, Leonard’s friends all run around the machine acting as though time has speeded up.  It was one of the funniest things I ever saw.  Also, the movie The Time Machine is pretty good too.

THIS is what makes time travel possible!

2.  The DeLorean (Back to the Future, II, and III) – “I figure, if you’re going to build a time machine, why not do it with a little style?” says Doc Brown about his DeLorean based time machine, filled with specialized equipment such as time circuits and a flux capacitor.  They added motion and speed to the proceedings by having the MacGuffin of the car having to go at least 88MPH to get up to time traveling velocity, and definitely helped things by not having the time machine be a refrigerator as it was in an early draft.

Gorgeous! That Hartdegan sure did have some style!

1.  The Time Machine (The Time Machine 2002) – I know I might get lambasted for this, but I thought this was a beautiful machine, and I really liked the movie.  Seemingly more attention was given to the machine, with it’s beautiful glass fans and light shafts (Professor Hartdegan, if you’ll remember, was an optics professor) and it’s steampunk design, than was given to the monster Morlocks.  This machine seemingly creates a stasis field around itself and its passenger while time outside the machine passes forward or backward, and the environment changes around the machine.  This movie is worth seeing simply for the sequences in which we see the operation of this lovely machine.

There are plenty more out there, to be certain, and the subgenre is certainly worth watching the most of.  Go find your favorite time machine!

Tags: List, Nerd

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 8:40 am and is filed under Books, Cartoons, Movies, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.