Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Time Machine (1960)

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” starring Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux. Prepare for Morlock mania! (originally published 9/5/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb. Today,
we have an episode for you that originally published 9-5-2025.
It is 1960s, The Time Machine. Yes, the 1960 film
adaptation of the legendary H.G. Wells book. This one is
a lot of fun. Prepare for more lock mania as

(00:26):
we dig into The Time Machine. The Time Machine.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
we're going to be talking about the 1960 film adaptation
of The Time Machine, based on the novel by H.G. Wells,
directed by George Powell, starring Rod Taylor. And Yvette Mimu.
We've gotten many requests to cover this on the show before.

(01:06):
I think it came up recently, maybe in the last
Listener Mail episode or the one before that. Somebody was
asking us to do the Time Machine. Either this one
or I think also there was one in the early
2000s that is famous or infamous. It has Guy Pearce,
I think, and has a lot of weird changes to
the story.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, there are some definite weird changes made to it.
We'll come back to the 2002 Time Machine. I have
not watched it since it originally came out, but I
remember enjoying it.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Yeah, as Jeremy Irons says, something called an Uber Morlock.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, he's the Morlock that can talk, yeah. Great.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
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.

(02:00):
It's got excellent time-lapse and stop-motion effects. It has that
wonderful film grain and color palette. It's like what people
have in mind when they think about the gorgeous color
films of the mid-century.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
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 job. There's not a dull moment.
They do a great job unpacking the concepts that are

(02:36):
essential for the adventure and then delivering on that adventure.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
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

(02:59):
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 Wina. 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 Yvette Miu Miu here, and they fall in love.

(03:23):
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 Eloi are depicted, I think it
does not work super well in this story.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, she is, as we'll discuss, a doll person. We
see this in various forms in 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're naive, they are innocent people, despite

(04:08):
being biologically grown people played by biologically grown actors. And yeah,
it can make for some odd space for a love story.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
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. One interesting plot device
I would single out in this regard is The way that, uh,
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

(04:43):
lure them into the Sphinx to their doom. Uh, I
guess we can talk about that more in the plot section,
but this is both. Harrowing sensory spectacle in the scene
where it happens. And it also provides an interesting twist
on the movie's anti-war themes.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
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 H.G. 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

(05:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
He's just, he's the earth rim roamer or something like that. Yeah. But, uh,
but here they give him a name and they give
him the name HG Wells. Basically there is the other
characters call him George, uh, or the, you know, his
middle initial there. So it's doing the same thing actually
that is done in the later film, uh, time after time,
which we've featured on the show before, which is a

(06:04):
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, uh, here he, It's a
weird thing. So they give him the name H.G. Wells,
but they don't make him like a science fiction novelist
in the 1890s. He's just the character from the book,
but they gave him the author's name.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
So it's a little, they treat it softly here. It's
not like a hard, like, hey, I'm H.G. 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

(06:47):
certainly is an American movie classic. And I think the
movie holds up quite well. And for that matter, I
would argue that the H.G. 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,

(07:07):
you know, as well as they did back in its
original publication year. You know, Wells was a great writer
with a lot of tremendous ideas.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
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 Morlocks and all of that, there is a chapter

(07:38):
called A Further Vision where the time traveler goes on
and on further and further, millions of years.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
30 million years, I think, yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
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

(08:08):
around the, the horizon, like the part of the earth
that is always in perpetual twilight with the sun kind
of sitting just above the, uh, the horizon to, to
the West. And, uh, and he, 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. Uh, and it's,

(08:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, it's very doomy. In almost, I would say, a
cosmic horror sense. It's not quite the chord 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.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
It also provides an interesting perspective because so often.
Especially genre stories, uh, they really, you want to get
a sense that, um, there is a happily ever after
that there is some, some kind of, uh, paradisiacal state
that everything is moving toward. And once the conflict of

(09:21):
the story is resolved, everything will be okay now. Uh,
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

(09:42):
even any crabs will be left.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
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 think I
liked the way this film ends. This film ends the
way it needed to, to end. And we'll discuss that
towards the, uh, the final minutes of this episode.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
If instead of a love story between Rod Taylor and
Yvette Miu Miu, uh, 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?

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Possibly. Yeah. I, I, And yeah, if you wanted to
end it on a much more contemplative and doomy note,
that would be the way to go.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
All right, let's see. Should we listen to some trailer audio?

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, let's hear a bit from the old trailer here.

Speaker 4 (10:29):
Today, man is successfully probing deep into the mysteries of
the universe. Can he penetrate the greatest mystery of all,
time itself?

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Why is it that we usually ignore the fourth dimension?

Speaker 2 (10:47):
You see, we can move in the other three.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
As the doctor said, up, down, forwards, backwards, sideways. But
when it comes to time, we are prisoners.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
Inventor Rod Taylor's breakthrough into the realm of the fourth
dimension is defied by his friend Alan Young.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
If that machine can do what you say it can,
destroy it, George, before it destroys you.

Speaker 4 (11:07):
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?

Speaker 1 (11:19):
How do they wear their hair? Who? The women of
your time.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Up like that?

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Show me.

Speaker 4 (11:28):
Is this the human race of the future? Or is
this the Morlocks, fiendish creatures who live in a weird
underground world? and the Eloi, the tranquil sunshine people, who
the Morlocks dominate and maintain like cattle, luring them below
with the hypnotic wail of the sirens to feed upon
them in cannibalistic horror.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
All right. Well, if you would like to watch 1960s
The Time Machine, absolutely, we encourage you to go out
and watch it for the first time or revisit it
before proceeding with the rest of the episode or just
go ahead and listen to the rest of the episode.
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.

(12:18):
And if you do want to watch it, it is
widely available in, 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.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah, and as you alluded to, as always, 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.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Absolutely. All right, well, let's get into some of the
people behind this picture, this big special effects picture of 1960,
so we can't reference everybody. But the director and the

(13:04):
producer on this was George Powell, lived 1908 through 1980,
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 30s, creating short films
and commercials, before immigrating to the United States in, I believe, 1939. Now,

(13:25):
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 1932. Okay. So it's kind of, I
guess maybe we're even alluding to that in this picture

(13:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
There's more cigar action than you would expect.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah. I believe Seven Puppetoon, I assume that's how one
would pronounce it, Puppetoon shorts received Academy Award nominations. Puppetoon
animation is essentially a type of replacement animation of which
is itself a type of stop motion animation, but it
requires a vast number of near duplicate puppets to pull

(14:18):
off the effect. So my understanding, diving into this a
little bit, is that it's kind of like cell animation,
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

(14:38):
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. Puppetoon shorts included,

(14:59):
let's see, there were adaptations of Dr. Seuss's The 500
Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, as well as an adaptation of
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 1940s. So obviously

(15:21):
does not hold up well today.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
Now in 1950, Powell switched to live action film with
the comedy The Great Rupert. I think that's a Jimmy
Durante picture, which he produced only. But then in 1958,
he directed a Tom Thumb movie that made use of
puppatoon effects. And then, of course, The Time Machine in 1960,
which doesn't use puppatoon per se, but certainly makes great

(15:46):
use of stop motion effects. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
And I believe it was the stop motion effects and
the time lapse effects for which this movie got an
Academy Award. I believe so, yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Though it's, in general, this is just a great special
effects picture. You know, it's like, The production designs here
are amazing, and yeah, we get some great uses of
stop motion throughout the picture. But essentially, whenever there's time traveling,
because there's always stuff in the background that's rotting or
growing and so forth. Melting, exploding into lava.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Man, I got some things to say about that lava.
Did you read about that effect?

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Okay, we'll get there.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
So subsequently he directed 61's Atlantis, The Lost Continent, 62's
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tale
segments only, and finally Seven Faces of Dr. Lau in 1964.
I've never seen that one, but of note to MST3K fans,
that's the movie that Joel quotes in the final moments
of his original run on Mystery Science Theater 3000. This

(16:48):
is the 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 Dr. Lau.
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

(17:08):
screenwriter here. David Duncan has the screenplay credit. 1913 through 1999.
American screenwriter and novelist. Best known for his adapted screenplays
for this and 1966's 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.

(17:33):
His other scripts.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
That one got around, huh?

Speaker 1 (17:36):
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 as the most expensive 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 1956's Rodin, 57's The Monster

(17:58):
That Challenged the World, 1957's The Black Scorpion, 58's The
Thing That Couldn't Die, 58's Monster on the Campus, 1960's
The Leech Woman. That's the one you were the one
in my dreams of blood. This one is featured on
Mystery Science Theater 3000 as well. And he also wrote
the Human Factor episode of the original Outer Limits. Sorry, Rob.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
I was just looking up, because the title got me,
The Monster That Challenged the World. I was trying to
remember what that one was. Oh, that's the one about
a caterpillar that comes up out of the water.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
It challenged the world. It didn't conquer. It just challenged. Yeah.
Duncan also wrote a series of novels, 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 used paperbacks. But if
anyone out there has read a David Duncan novel, write in.
I would love to hear about it. Hmm. Now, as

(18:51):
we mentioned, this is, of course, an adaptation of the
original book by H.G. Wells, who lived 1866 through 1946.
He was active from 1895 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

(19:13):
such works as The Time Machine, 1895, The Island of Dr.
Moreau from 1896. The Invisible Man from 1897, and of course,
The War of the Worlds from 1898. He was a
progressive social critic and futurist, which certainly contributes to the
continued readability of his work.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
A lot of science fiction story types that recur with
variation throughout the 20th century, I think you could essentially say,
what was the first version of this story? And often
it's argued that Wells is the first version.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
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 cast 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

(20:08):
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 1949 BBC
teleplay starring Russell Napier. I have not seen it, but Joe,

(20:28):
I included a couple of screenshots here for you. The
Time Machine looks like some sort of high-tech toilet.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah, yeah, sitting on the throne there. It's got lights
over it, so there you go. You know, and the
version we have in this movie, it still essentially is
a big chair.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
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
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.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
No, I love the design in this movie, but 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 less impressive. It
does look like a toilet. And then you've got another
picture from a 1978 adaptation, which is more like a
toilet with a computer in front of it.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, this one looks like a 1978 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 2002
adaptation starring Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons, directed notably by H.G. Wells' great-grandson,

(21:48):
Simon Wells. How often do you get to have a
case like that, you know?

Speaker 3 (21:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
You remember that one?

Speaker 1 (22:05):
Vaguely, vaguely.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
Maybe one day on Weird House. 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.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah, that sounds like a good time. Yeah, 2002, that
was the last time I saw 2002's The Time Machine.
But I remember enjoying it. You know, Guy Pearce 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 were some good actors

(22:44):
in there and some reasonably effective monsters that live underground,
and I'm generally on board. But I do not remember
any of the real broad strokes. I think there's some
sort of subplot about the moon getting split in half,
but it's been a long time.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
There are moon colonists and they screw something up and
blow up the moon.

Speaker 4 (23:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
That also happens in the opening to Thundar the Barbarian
from back in the day. The moon gets torn in
half by something. Oh, and then just for comparison's sake here, Joe,
I included a screenshot from Time After Time, which, again,
we previously discussed on Weird House Cinema. They use a
different design for the time machine. It's more like a

(23:23):
canopied little deal, but it also looks fittingly late Victorian.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, Time After Time looks more like an insectoid helicopter
without a rotor.

Speaker 4 (23:33):
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
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. Definitely a canopy to
keep subterranean monsters from pulling you off the chair.

Speaker 3 (23:47):
Air conditioning.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, air conditioning.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
Which comes up in this film. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
All right, so let's get to the cast here. Playing
the Time Traveler, H. George Wells is Rod Taylor, who
lived 1930 through 2015. Taylor was an Australian-born actor, best
remembered for this film, Hitchcock's The Birds in 1963, and
the Disney animated film 101 Dalmatians, in which he plays
the lead Dalmatian, Pogo.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah. Other credits include 56's World Without End, 68's Dark
of the Sun, and a 1985 Christopher Lee film titled
Mask of Murder. Oh, and then very late, I think
this might actually be his last film credits, He shows
up in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards in 2009 playing Winston Churchill.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Never would have made this connection. It's basically a cameo.
He has like one or two lines. He sits in
the background while, what's his name, is getting briefed.

Speaker 4 (24:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
So I have to say, Taylor, I think, is pretty
great in this. He brings a lot of charm to
a character that would have, that could have at least
certainly come off a good bit more wooden and preachy
in the hands of another actor.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
No, they make him passionate. He's, yeah, he's likable in
this role because, um, 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. Uh, which if they'd gone
with a different kind, like, I think I read somewhere

(25:17):
that they were maybe thinking about getting like an older
actor looking at David Niven or something.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
And I don't know, it 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.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
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 101 Dalmatians, but maybe that's not the best way
to really appraise an actor's ability. But yeah, I think
he's really good in this one. All right. Now, of note,

(25:55):
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 descendants of one of those characters.

(26:15):
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 1919 through 2016.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Our protagonist has a group of several friends when the
action begins in 1899 or 1900, 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 Alan Young character here.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
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,
provided Scrooge McDuck's voice for four decades, beginning with the

(27:15):
1974 Disneyland Records album, an adaptation of Dickens' Christmas Carol
performed by the Walt Disney Players. And this eventually became the,
in my opinion, excellent Mickey's Christmas Carol from 1983. Like
if you want a Christmas Carol boiled down to like, what,
30 minutes with some genuine laughs, but still retaining the

(27:36):
spirit of a Christmas Carol, you can't go wrong with
Mickey's Christmas Carol.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
Is it better than the Mr. Magoo Christmas Carol?

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Yeah. Well, I think I've only seen that one once,
but I'm going to go ahead and say absolutely yes.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
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 about it.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
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 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 DuckTales

(28:16):
TV series and the Kingdom Heart video games and so
much more. Like he, he, he was Scrooge McDuck.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
He also, there were, there were some great DuckTales adaptations
to like the eight and 16 bit video game eras.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Oh, that's right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
There was a great DuckTales game for the NES. And
then do you remember there was, there was a DuckTales
game for the Sega Genesis called Quackshot. Did you ever
play that one?

Speaker 1 (28:38):
I don't know that I did, but I've noticed that the,
the DuckTales games have been some of the ones over
the years that have been like revisited and, and put
back out there that, you know, people were really fond of.
So I'm to understand they were quality games.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Just great side scrollers though. There was one thing I
recall about quack shot that was really funny, which is
it's one of these games where you can, um, You
can get life back by picking up power-ups like food,
so you can 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

(29:11):
seems a little wrong there.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Alright, let's see. Alan Young also did other voice acting
gigs and appeared in such films as Tom Thumb in 58,
78's The Cat from Outer Space, and 1994's Beverly Hills Cop.
I think Beverly Hills Cop 3 is the one that
came out in 94. And then he was also a
cast member on the 1960s talking horse TV show, Mr. Ed.

(29:37):
At any rate, of all of the time travelers' friends,
this character, David Philby, and then later James Philby, 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.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
With these other three guys, it really is a case of, like,
It's like the slasher movie question. Why are these people friends?

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah, yeah. I guess they just attend the same club.
It's just how it worked, right?

Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
All right, now let's come back to Weena, played by
Yvette Mimou. We've talked about her before because she was
in 1979's The Black Hole, which we discussed at Weird House. Yeah,
that's right. She is the Eloy love interest, though again,
not a love interest in the original book. Later credits
include 1973's The Neptune Factor, 1975's Journey into Fear, and

(30:37):
of course 1978's Devil Dog, The Hound of Hell, along
with other various TV appearances.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
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 73, but in 1970,
she was also in the Delta factor.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Oh, wow. A lot of factors to consider there. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
Delta factor appears to be a Mickey Spillane adaptation.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Okay, well, the Disney voice acting credits continue here, though,
because the more rotund, bearded member of the crew here
that's hanging out, Dr. Philip Hillier, is played by Sebastian Cabot,
who lived 1918 through 1977. He is a repeat Disney
voice actor. He narrated the Winnie the Pooh series in

(31:28):
the original films. He narrated 1963's The Sword in the
Stone and did the voice of Lord Ector in that.
And he played the Panther Bagheera in 1967's The Jungle Book.

Speaker 3 (31:39):
That makes sense. I'm familiar with these voices, but I
wouldn't have pegged them to him. But now I can
hear it.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Another one of the friends is the character Walter Kemp,
played by Whit Bissell. He lived 1909 through 1996. Prolific
TV and film actor. initially notable to me because he
was in 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon, as well
as 1973's Soylent Green. Other credits include 51's Lost Continent,

(32:11):
56's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1960's The Magnificent Seven,
62's The Manchurian Candidate, plus in a crowning achievement, Bissell
was in all three 57 and 58 films, I Was
a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and Monster
on the Campus. He also pops up in that 1978
Time Machine TV film. So this guy just has a

(32:33):
lot of credits.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
Now, I assume for the late 50s films, he was
not himself the teenage werewolf, the teenage Frankenstein, or the
monster on campus.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
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.
I believe 1920 through 1986 prolific, uh, actor and voice
actor who isn't actually always credited. But if you look

(33:06):
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 Dr. Fibes, the flight of dragons, the magic sword,
and now the time machine. Um, He was pretty prolific.

(33:28):
He has, I think, 370 credits on IMDb. Wow. All right,
let's get into some of the behind-the-scenes folks here. Again,
we can't cover everybody, but cinematography here was by Paul C. Vogel,
who lived 1899 through 1975, Oscar winner for 1950's Battleground,
and nominated for 63's The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.

(33:51):
He also worked on The Magic Sword.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
I was reading a bit about the look of this
film in a 2022 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. Gene Davis,
or sorry, George Davis and William Ferrari, Gene Warren and
Hua Chang, and the color cinematography by Paul Vogel. It

(34:16):
mentions a few things about Vogel's approach. One was trying
to find a.
An 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

(34:38):
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, by what we have. It, it has, uh, yeah, it's,
it's not our world, but it's also reality.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
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, um, it,
it feels real. It feels like we are still on earth. Uh,
it doesn't feel like we're on another planet. It feels

(35:22):
like we were just in a distant time. So it's
perfectly executed.

Speaker 3 (35:26):
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, 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

(35:47):
the desired visual effect by using almost no front lighting,
rimming the Morlocks with backlight 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 screenshot for you to look at here that
shows off that effect. I see exactly what he's talking about.

(36:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, absolutely. The Morlocks look incredible. We'll discuss them 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.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
There are a bunch of people, I think, who should
get partial credit for the look of the Morlocks as well,
including William Tuttle and Hua Chang.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
That's right, Hua Ming Chang. visual effects he lived 1917
through 2003 a Hawaiian born Chinese American designer sculptor and
artist who we previously discussed on our episode concerning 1955's
tarantula because he built the titular tarantula in that picture
He was later responsible for key prop design on Star

(37:06):
Trek the original series including the tricorder and communicator He
also did a lot of costumes on some key track episodes.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
And 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.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
That's right. That's right And in addition to what we
may be talking about next week, he created the Tribbles
I don't know. Maybe we'll talk about the Tribbles next week.
I think I've maybe done the Tribbles on monster effect
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

(37:42):
Blanding Sloan, an American etcher, printmaker, theatrical designer, educator, painter,
and puppeteer.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
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 Mantrap. Actually, season one, episode one, the first ever

(38:10):
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 Morlock?
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

(38:30):
beforehand in the Morlock design.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, yeah, the design is similar in ways, for sure.
Some of the same, like the shaggy hair and all. Yeah.
Different mouth parts, which makes sense. One sucks salt, and
the other, as we'll discuss, eats exclusively man-made, exclusively human flesh.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yum, yum.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
All right, a few other. It's worth noting that this film, again,
was an Academy Award winner for its special effects, for
its visual effects. And the two individuals named on the award, though,
of course, it's always a huge team making any of
these things happen, happen to be Gene Warren and Tim Barr.
Gene Warren lived 1916 through 1997. His other credits include

(39:15):
57's Kronos, 61's Master of the World, and the TV
series Land of the Lost. He worked on some other
PAL pictures as well. And then Tim Barr lived 1912
through 1977. Academy Award winner again for this film and
his other special effects credits. though sometimes uncredited, include 42's
The Mummy's Tomb, 43's Phantom of the Opera, 56's The

(39:35):
Ten Commandments, and the TV series H.R. Puffin Stuff.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
I don't know what that is, but there's a song
about it somewhere in my head.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, I don't know, H.R. 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. He
lived 1912 through 2007. His other makeup, special effects, or
otherwise films include 35's Mark of the Vampire, 39's The

(40:04):
Wizard of Oz, 56's Forbidden Planet, 61's Atlantis, The Lost Continent,
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, 12 episodes of
the original Twilight Zone, 74's Young Frankenstein, and 78's The Fury.
And then finally, the composer here for the score, Russell Garcia,
who lived 1916 through 2011, American composer, whose other scores

(40:25):
include Atlantis, The Lost Continent, and he was a composer
for NBC Studios and worked on such shows as Rawhide
in 62 and Laredo from 65 through 67. I think
it's a fun score here. It has some nice creepy notes,
a little bit of futuristic intrigue at times.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
Yeah, yeah. It's able to accent, I think, especially the
scenes of horror quite well.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yeah. And then the action, because we don't quite buckle
some swash or anything, but we do get a lot
of fun action. There's a big Morlock battle royale laid
in the picture. It's a lot of fun. Okay.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
You ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Let's jump in.

Speaker 3 (41:06):
So we get a pre-credit sequence that is just a
a cannonade of clocks flying through black space. Uh, 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?

Speaker 1 (41:25):
I'm not sure either, but you certainly see allusions to
it a lot, including, uh, to a certain extent, the
tree house of horror episode where Homer Simpson travels through
time and in, in traveling through time, he kind of
like falls through, uh, in an infinite space filled with clocks.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
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?

Speaker 1 (41:52):
I mean, it might. It comes up in my life
a lot. It's up there with Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory. It's something that I probably think about every day.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yeah, it's so rich. It's like the Iliad or something.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (42:06):
The action opens for this film on a street in
London around the turn of the 20th 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.

Speaker 1 (42:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
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, Miss Watchit,

(42:48):
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 Dr. Hillier, Bridewell, or Bridey, and Kemp. It

(43:10):
is not terribly important to distinguish these other three guys.
They're your standard late 19th century gold pocket watch creatures.
They love to suck cigars, and they're yammering about the
price of a bushel of coal. They're basically... picture it
like that dude from Titanic who talks about how God
could not sink the ship. They're all kind of that guy. Uh,

(43:31):
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. Uh, so anyway,
these guys have clearly been sitting here for some time
when Philby joins them. Uh, the room is filled with clocks.
So they're all ticking away, not in perfect unison, uh,

(43:53):
And all of the disorganized ticking summed up amounts to
this ambient clatter, almost kind of a cranking sound in
the background.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of clocks. But as we're
going to 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're going to study it properly.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
They don't seem like research instruments to me. I mean,
it seems like he's just, like, they're not scientific timepieces.
It's just like grandfather clocks and wall clocks and weird
little cuckoo clocks everywhere.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
I mean, it 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 Christmas? Oh,
that dude loves time. Let's get him another clock. That's right.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
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

(44:56):
are taking offense. These guys are having a lot of
fun getting offended. Eventually, Miss Watchit 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

(45:20):
frame to get a look at the spread of food
in a movie. So I did one here. It 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.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Each man has a yeast roll on a dish next
to his plate. And then apart from the green lettuce
garnish underneath the meat, I see not a single identifiable vegetable.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
Yeah, yeah. I guess maybe tobacco is the vegetable for this.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yeah, and maybe he values wine because it also sort
of travels in time in the basement. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
So suddenly, while the four men are about to tuck
into their meal, the door to the dining room flies
open and in 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

(46:37):
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 like slams down.
And then Bridewell has a drink too, because I don't know,
I guess what he's seeing is so disturbing. Uh, and
he's got to tell them his tale while he still
remembers it all clearly. Now, Philby tries to get George

(46:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Hmm.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
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, 1899. 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

(47:30):
century began, and he finished just in time. What is it? Well,
George says his invention has to do with time. And Dr.
Hillier here, this is the kind of harrumphing guy with
the beard who loves the scars. He's like, oh, wonderful.
What our country needs now more than anything is a
more accurate timepiece to be used by the Army and

(47:52):
the Royal Navy, especially important for coordinating artillery brigades. And
George smiles a little smile. He says, no, no, no,
it's not a timepiece. 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

(48:15):
where George gives us a lecture on the three dimensions
of space and how time can be imagined as an
invisible fourth dimension, the only one along which we cannot
travel at will.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
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 1960 depended on more
mystical time travel techniques, you know, like hypnosis or falling asleep,

(48:51):
that sort of thing. And, you know, falling asleep is
kind of like time travel. So on one hand, maybe.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
Or a Christmas ghost.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah, Christmas ghost. 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, it travels through time, not space.

(49:21):
And it's very important that that be cemented in the
viewer's head.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
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.

(49:47):
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 willpower.
George is, he's strong, handsome, brilliant, rich, and bold. So

(50:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Right. Right. And then also this, this larger sense too, right? That,
that human destiny is, um, 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, and
as we've been saying, like a complete inability to like
shift from that path.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
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, um, it, it made me think about, uh,
tendencies I've, I've observed in reality of like, once people
reach a certain level of power and freedom, uh, I'm
thinking specifically of like a lot of tech billionaires. If

(51:18):
you listen to them talk, it seems very often like
the next thing that develops in their mind is a
desire to escape the circumstances of reality and They find
it like, I want to escape this world. I've already
mastered a kind of freedom within this world, and now
the problem is that I'm stuck in this world.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
Yeah, yeah. What do we hear some of our billionaires
talking about? It's about going to other planets or digitizing consciousness.
Or if you happen to be a, like a leader
of a powerful nation, you may be chatting about ways
to replace all your organs and live to be 150
years old. That, of course, is in the news cycle recently. So, yeah,

(51:58):
I think it's a very accurate read.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
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 table before them, which contains

(52:21):
a tiny model of the film's famous time machine. So
this is just a toy-sized thing.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
But as we'll learn, this is a working model, correct?

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Yes, yes, it worked, yeah. So imagine Santa's sleigh with
a giant dish antenna on the back of it. Uh,
the seat for the passenger is a polished wooden armchair
with dark red upholstery. Uh, and of course this is
only a toy sized replica. Uh, I was reading that
the resemblance to Santa's sleigh is not an accident. George

(52:49):
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. Uh,
it was created by the designers, Bill Ferrari and Wah Chang.
And I remember I read somewhere that the chair here
was a barber's chair. I don't know if, or either
the chair in the toy version or in the full-size

(53:12):
version was a barber's chair, which doesn't quite look like
to me, but that's funny.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
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, a I think we're fine to get away
from the idea of it being more of a saddle
and more of a chair. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
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,

(54:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Yes, that's right.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
So, To prove he has not lost his mind, George
stages a demonstration with the four gentlemen as witnesses. He
takes a cigar from Dr. 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 in the ice

(54:45):
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 a
hundred years away by now.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
We never see it again, right?

Speaker 3 (55:04):
Never again. And he tells us we're not going to.
He's just like, it's not coming back because there's no
operator in it.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
In the future, this thing's just going to appear and
deliver a late Victorian cigar to somebody. But also deliver
to them a miniaturized working replica of time travel seems
kind of reckless in many respects.

Speaker 3 (55:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
Oh, goodness. I don't know that that sounds safe either.
I'm not sure what happens when something kind of accelerates
endlessly through time.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
It's in the heat death of the universe, suddenly this
thing pops out.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Maybe this is why the universe ultimately is destroyed. Who knows? Okay.

Speaker 3 (55:54):
Uh, let's see after the demonstration, uh, 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?

Speaker 1 (56:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
Which is an insight that's is, is both incredibly thick headed.
Like if it were real, wouldn't that be the most
important invention of all time? Like, you could apply knowledge
of the future to the past. You could fix any
mistake or avert 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

(56:32):
show with, like, time travel stories before. You can imagine
scenarios where essentially as soon as time travel is invented,
it becomes catastrophically weaponized.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
Would have so much power over those that don't it,
they would become living gods among mortals. So anyway, uh,
the friends here are not impressed with the time machine.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Dr.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
Hillier says, uh, he says, why don't you do something useful? Like,
like make weapons. You know, we're at war right now
in South Africa. The country needs a 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

(57:16):
Year's Eve. And George looks mighty depressed. But Philby, remember,
he's the good friend. He's the sensitive friend with the
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

(57:37):
don't much care for the time I was born into.
He explains that he finds the world of the present
intolerably cruel and short-sighted, 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

(58:00):
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 one, I think the audience is tempted to have
mixed feelings about because on one hand it is a, uh,
an insightful and moral indictment of, of human, of humankind

(58:23):
and the way we are and, 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 from to a
time when humankind has become better.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
It's like it goes even beyond the privilege that he
already has in life to distance himself economically and geographically
from a lot of the problems in the world, now
potentially traveling through time to do so. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
So George and Philby argue. Philby says he agrees with
his friend. He says, you know, you're right. You're right
about the age we live in, but this obsession with
escape is unhealthy.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
He says.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
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. Uh,
so this is almost kind of the alternative, you know,

(59:31):
the alternative to the escape that George is suggesting is,
is love and brotherhood that Philby is suggesting.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:40):
But George refuses. Philby asks him to promise that he
won't go anywhere else tonight. And, uh, George, before Philby
leaves says, I promise I won't walk out the door.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
You didn't say anything about traveling through time.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
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, they're
blowing party horns and yelling Happy New Year. And after this,
George retires to his laboratory where the full-sized time machine

(01:00:14):
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 workbenches 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

(01:00:35):
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 And then plop down in the year 800,000
in the land of the Eloy and the Morlocks. But

(01:00:56):
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
lapse and stop motion effects, which again, I believe are,

(01:01:17):
these are the main parts that won this film an Oscar.

Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
Yeah, yeah, they're incredible. They hold up quite well. I
also want to quickly throw in that it always amuses
me that the time machine, really the centerpiece of so
much time travel fiction, it sets its sights 800,000 years
in the future. Such a safe distance when it comes
to depicting what the future will be like. when pretty

(01:01:42):
much everything else decides to look at the far future
of 1987. Yeah, exactly. Or the, you know, apocalyptic hellscape
of 2003 and so forth. But, you know, I don't know,
maybe people will have a good laugh 800,000 years from now.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
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 almost starts to feel like a fantasy world that's
just not connected to your present reality.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
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 clock
spinning round and round and the sun rising and setting quickly.
Frost growing on the windows and then receding. He sees

(01:02:55):
the flowers in his greenhouse opening and closing their little,
their blossoms, like these little yapping mouths. There's a great
part where he sees a snail racing across the floor.
It's 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

(01:03:16):
fancy dress. And there's this whole little subplot here where
we see years flip 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.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
Yeah, it's legitimately a hilarious line. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
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 1917
when he discovers the lights have gone out in his house.
His home is now filled with cobwebs and dust and
there are sheets over all the furniture. He leaves the
lab and wanders out into the street where, going into

(01:04:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
Yeah, same actor, but now without the distinct Scrooge McDuck accent.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
That's right. Jamie tells George that his father was killed.
in the war a year earlier. A sad moment. And
then we also learned the story of the inventor chap
who lived across the street. He apparently disappeared in the
year 1900 and left the house in the care of
Jamie's father. And Jamie always wanted his father to sell it,

(01:04:43):
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, lives

(01:05:05):
wrecked by violence again and again. So he goes back
to the time machine.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
That's right. Time to jump back in and fast forward
to the part where we solve this whole war thing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
That's right. So he's going to go faster now. The
months fly by. Suddenly in 1940, 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

(01:05:46):
house is destroyed, I guess, in the Blitz. And the
machine is destroyed. 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-lapse
and stop-motion effects. The mannequin time-lapse also continues. We get
to see more modern fashions, including a bikini. And he

(01:06:06):
stops again in the mid-60s because he hears high-pitched sounds
all around. 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.

(01:06:28):
He doesn't know what the sounds are. He sees crowds
of people running somewhere, being ushered by civil defense men
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 outside
the department store. He's checking out a shaving kit display.
It has a nuclear civil defense sign right above it

(01:06:48):
with a picture of a mushroom cloud.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
Yeah, but buy your clean shave razor today. Yes. People
still have the moxie to be like, you know, people
are heading off to the bomb shelters, but dagnamit, they
still need a shave. They still need a quality shaving device. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
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.
It's now the 60s. 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. We're all going down

(01:07:25):
to the bomb shelters because a nuclear strike is imminent.
He says, we've got to 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

(01:07:47):
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,

(01:08:11):
oatmeal made orange with food coloring, poured out onto the
model set. And then the story is the oatmeal was
left sitting out for several days, long enough that it
started to ferment and it smelled incredibly foul.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
It looks great, though.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
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 800,000 years later when

(01:08:46):
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. No war
seemed to come in and destroy it. all the human
structure as he sees in the distance. And so he
brings the time machine finally to a halt.

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
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 of these steps to get here. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
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. George goes up, he tries to
knock on the doors, but he finds no reply.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
Love the design here of the sphinx. It's, you know,
it feels connected to various creatures. earth traditions, but also
feels very alien. So it really strikes a perfect note. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
So he goes out wandering through the landscape and he
finds beautiful flowers everywhere, fruit trees heavy with ripe, unfamiliar produce.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
Wonka fruits.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
Yeah, wonka, 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 and a botanical garden. Humankind has fully tamed
the plant kingdom and shaped it entirely to our liking.

(01:10:25):
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,

(01:10:49):
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. 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.

(01:11:10):
So George 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

(01:11:31):
blonde with like the men all have bowl cuts.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:36):
Lounging on a sandy bank next to the water. They
are talking, laughing, dancing, and picking fruit.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
Quick question. Do you think they're cutting their own hair
or do you think the Morlocks cut their hair?

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
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,

(01:12:10):
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

(01:12:30):
seem to notice her cries for help. And when they
occasionally glance her way, They don't even bother to 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.

Speaker 1 (01:12:45):
Yeah, they're just like, oh, something's happening. And that's it.
It's completely dispassionate.

Speaker 3 (01:12:51):
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
ladies here by the river giving the time traveler the
stink face? They're just like, ew, weird. So George is perplexed.

(01:13:17):
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 Yvette Mimieux. She asks why he saved her.

Speaker 1 (01:13:39):
He asks how.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
Come 20 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 questions. So they introduced themselves to each other. Her
name is Weena. And George learns that despite speaking perfectly
understandable 20th century English, 800,000 years later, none of these

(01:14:00):
people can read or write. And so when he like
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 called themselves the Eloi. that
they are profoundly incurious and don't seem to have thoughts

(01:14:21):
about much of anything, that there is no one older
than what looks like maybe mid-20s 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.

Speaker 1 (01:14:42):
I had a nice chuckle observing that they're, they're kind
of all like 13 year olds, you know, like where
does food and clothing come from? I don't know. It's just,
it's provided.

Speaker 3 (01:14:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
It's just here, here for us.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
So inside the dome, George eats fruit with the rest
of them and he's trying to figure out how their,
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:11):
And he's coming up with some real softball questions here,
some real leading questions like, you know, give me anything. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:15:20):
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. Yeah, post-scarcity. Yeah,
they can spend their lives producing Doing what? George suggests, well,

(01:15:41):
maybe you spend all your time studying and experimenting, learning,
you know, about the world. Evidently not. The other guy
at the table, when he brings this up, this guy
just acts annoyed. 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

(01:16:03):
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 hands. And finally, George becomes enraged and he
shouts at the Eloy. He says, what have you done?

(01:16:24):
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 Eloy. He says,
I'm going back to my own time. I won't even

(01:16:46):
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

(01:17:10):
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

(01:17:31):
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 maybe leaning back into a Spartan ethic of war
is life. I don't think that's it. I don't think

(01:17:53):
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

(01:18:17):
not automatically make life good. You might see the elimination
of war and material want in George's new dawning consciousness
as something necessary but not sufficient conditions for the earthly
paradise that he dreamed of so the eloi are abhorrent
to him even though they are at peace or at

(01:18:38):
least they appear to be at first because there 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 dun dun dun yeah
because it's been towed exactly yeah it's an impound lot Uh,

(01:19:02):
you 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, Wina follows George
out into the woods to warn him of danger. Interesting
that this is the first, uh, risky or self-sacrificing thing

(01:19:23):
that we have seen an Eloy do. Uh, 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. Now, 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.

(01:19:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:19:53):
That's right, where 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, we only get
some peaks and all does it, despite I realized the
fact that they're prominently featured on the posters for this movie.
And that's also often the case.

Speaker 3 (01:20:12):
One of the Morlocks tries to grab Wina 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 were
afraid of fire. And we'll need to remember that for later.
Wina and George gather sticks to build a fire for
protection and And here we also get the first hints
of a love story where they're huddled around the fire

(01:20:32):
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 Eloi are from us
and how soon it is after George's arrival and all that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
The main thing they have in common is they eat fruit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
The next day, we get some exposition in this sequence
through the so-called talking rings. So Wiener 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 disks that are stored in metal
rings by setting them spinning on a glowing tabletop. From

(01:21:17):
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

(01:21:38):
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.

(01:21:59):
My memory of the novel is that Wells included a
class critique here where 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

(01:22:19):
changed and the exploited underground people became the Morlocks and
became the exploiters in the most direct sense by eating
the surface dwellers.

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:45):
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 air raid sirens go off,
the noise puts the Eloi into a hypnotized state where

(01:23:06):
their eyes go glassy and they just start to automatically
march en masse straight into into the Temple of the
Sphinx until the doors slam shut. So this is what
happens here. George runs after the Eloi, 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

(01:23:27):
unable to get there in time. So here we have
the final descent into the underworld. George has to go
into 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

(01:23:47):
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 it's almost by like a biological mechanism.
The surface dwellers have been conditioned to retreat underground to

(01:24:07):
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 Eloi? Or is it
just like raw bone chomping?

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
I mean, there's their machines down there. So I assume
they're processed into some sort of sausage and then they
just dump the skeletons, which are, I guess, rather complete
skeletons there in the bone pit.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
Eloy Mortadella. So here we come down to meet the Morlocks. Rob,
I know you had some stuff about the Morlocks. This
is probably the place to talk about them.

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
Yeah, yeah. So we don't actually see these guys in
full until this point, really, and pretty late in the film.
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 trying
to find what happened to the Eloi. And we begin

(01:25:18):
to see them stalking him here. I think one of
the first glimpses, we get one where he's blending into
the cavern walls, and then he moves. And then there's
even one that comes right up behind him, like he's
going to grab him. It's almost a little Abaddon Costello scene.
but it's still rather creepy because the monsters look so good.

(01:25:38):
They're essentially stocky, blue-gray, ape-like creatures with long manes of
white hair. Kind of bangs, too, a little bit. They
have sharp claws and teeth. They've got David St. Hubbard's
hair on them. They're quite stealthy, and as we'll see
in a bit, they're prone to leap at their adversaries

(01:25:59):
from ledges. do like flying body presses, the kind of
luchador 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.

Speaker 3 (01:26:17):
The sense I get of the Morlocks is a glass
cannon design.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:26:21):
They're very vicious and dangerous, but if you just hit back,
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 if that is intentional, that would fit
with the themes, because the whole thing is that the

(01:26:42):
Eloi don't fight back at all. It doesn't even occur
to them to.

Speaker 1 (01:26:47):
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 ape men. They are, like,
weaker than a contemporary human, but They have the numbers
on their side, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:27:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:02):
Uh, so down here in the, uh, down here in
the caverns, George locates the Eloy who have been brought
in to be, to be eaten. Uh, 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 stealth fighting.

Speaker 1 (01:27:19):
Swinging the torch around. We'll see the torch in a bit.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:27:22):
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,

(01:27:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:27:54):
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, ooh, I hope none
of the machinery they just destroyed wasn't essential for life
to continue on the surface here.

Speaker 3 (01:28:08):
Well, I think the implication actually is that it was.

Speaker 4 (01:28:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:28:11):
Like they did destroy the machinery. They destroyed the Morlocks
who were harmed or oppressing them, but they also destroyed
the machinery that 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.

Speaker 1 (01:28:26):
Yeah. The presumably it doesn't like destroy oxygen, like the
machinery down there wasn't creating a breathable atmosphere or anything
like that.

Speaker 3 (01:28:33):
Hopefully not.

Speaker 1 (01:28:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:28:36):
But 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 story is opposed
to militarism. One of these themes we get over and
over again is that Every time humankind is able to

(01:28:58):
build something good, something benevolent and brilliant and useful, we
unleash our war-making impulses and destroy it all over again.
So humankind'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

(01:29:18):
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

(01:29:41):
they're able to save themselves is when George inspires them
to make war against the repressors, the Morlocks.

Speaker 1 (01:29:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:29:49):
Um, I don't know exactly how to take that. I, again,
I don't think, 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's has an ethos of
some accepting that sometimes we have to fight in self-defense

(01:30:13):
and admitting there could be virtue in that but also
sticking by this belief that maybe that the case for
fighting needs to be very strongly made and.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
Yeah, yeah, like it needs to be a righteous battle.
And it's interesting because in this moment, or at least
the way we're talking about it here, it reminds me
of that pivotal moment in the Bhagavad Gita. This is
the scene where, I believe it's Arjuna, who is, you know,
he's out there on the battlefield. I think he's perhaps
on his chariot. And, you know, there's about to be

(01:30:44):
this huge battle, and he's just ruminating on, like, how
can I act? How can I do anything? Like, this
is just, you know, this awful situation of war. And
Krishna says, 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,
inaction is not a choice. And so we, we have

(01:31:05):
something maybe akin to that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:08):
Though, of course that, that has to be done with
a kind of, with a kind of a peace biased reason,
I think is, is the case you'd make here because
you can justify any number of atrocities by claiming that
it's somebody's duty. And, you know, bullies and and you
know oppressors are always able to convince themselves that they
are in the right if you know if you uh

(01:31:29):
if you are not skeptical of the the arguments that
make your side feel good then yeah you can you
can always come up with a way of justifying being
the bad guy.

Speaker 1 (01:31:39):
Yeah i mean because if you're gonna 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.

Speaker 3 (01:31:49):
Well maybe Well, we don't really get to hear their
point of view. If only there were an Uber Morlock
to speak for them, to explain their side of things.

Speaker 1 (01:31:59):
There have been so many time machine-inspired works of fiction,
derivative works. This has to have been explored at some point.
I know there have been at least literary and comic
work for the Morlocks to get a hold of the
time machine and travel to late Victoria and England and
have their own adventures there. So maybe someone has explored this.

Speaker 3 (01:32:26):
So anyway, we're coming to the ending now. George is
going to go back to his time machine because the
doors of the temple are open again. So he goes
back to his machine. There's a question of whether he's
going to take Weena with him or something or whether
he's maybe not going to go back. 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. uh,

(01:32:50):
by his machine. And so he has to get in
and escape through time back to the year 1900. And
this cycles back to the beginning of the story.

Speaker 1 (01:32:57):
We get that great scene though, of the Morlock that's
been killed, uh, 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.

Speaker 3 (01:33:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:33:07):
For a second.

Speaker 3 (01:33:08):
I was like, are we going to get the vision
of the further future with the crabs? But we didn't know. Uh,
so he goes back and he, you know, stumbles into
dinner to tell the story to, to his friends at
the burnt roast dinner. Uh, 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

(01:33:31):
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 Mrs. Watchit standing around
being like, where did he go? Did he take anything

(01:33:52):
with him? And he did take something.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
Mrs.

Speaker 3 (01:33:54):
Watchit is like, oh, look, three books are missing from
the shelves. What could they be?

Speaker 1 (01:33:58):
That's right. And 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 uh, civilization and like re-nurture, uh,
the best of humanity. Um, and, and then indeed, like

(01:34:22):
what three would any individual choose to take with them?

Speaker 3 (01:34:25):
Uh, and you gotta have Dianetics.

Speaker 1 (01:34:30):
Yeah. Um, I was, 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. I mean, certainly physics would still hold
up and most medicine and biology. I mean, obviously not
for the extinct species, but presumably humanoid biology is still

(01:34:50):
relatively the same.

Speaker 3 (01:34:52):
I would wonder if the most useful books, yeah, maybe
something on like a field medicine manual and a book
about like metalworking or something.

Speaker 1 (01:35:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:35:15):
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 on scavenging and harvesting flora and mushrooms, wild
mushrooms today, would be of virtually no use, presumably, in
the far future.

Speaker 3 (01:35:36):
Presumably, metals still work the same way. So I'm going
to stand by metalworking as one of the three.

Speaker 1 (01:35:41):
Yeah, I think that's a strong selection. Metallurgy, I don't know.
You could make a case for books of general knowledge.
I don't know how I don't know how ultimately useful
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

(01:36:02):
and Kindles, because you can just have a Kindle loaded
with 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 they prove virtually useless, you've

(01:36:24):
still got two more books in a world where you
maybe have five books total.

Speaker 3 (01:36:29):
I bet it really did get people chatting going out
of the theater. I mean, I wonder if there's stories
about that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:34):
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, uh, here at times,
you know, and I see the Bible, uh, mentioned numerous
times as being like a key book. And, uh, I
don't know. It's also fun to think of it just like, okay,

(01:36:55):
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 I'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.

Speaker 4 (01:37:13):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:37:15):
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, I'm happy with just the two. But
then again, it's like people that I share these with
are going to 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.

Speaker 3 (01:37:33):
The novelization of Halloween 3, Season of the Witch. Okay,
I think that does it for The Time Machine.

Speaker 1 (01:37:40):
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
1960 adaptation, other adaptations, derivative works, the use of The
Time Machine and Morlocks and related works of fiction? Write in.
We would love to hear from you. Just a reminder
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science

(01:38:02):
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 podcast.

(01:38:23):
But yeah, on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film here on Weird
House Cinema. If you go to Letterboxd.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 Letterboxd right now and get a peek ahead

(01:38:45):
at what we're going to cover.

Speaker 3 (01:38:47):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. 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
at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Speaker 2 (01:39:12):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
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