Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Time After Time

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss 1979’s “Time After Time,” in which Jack the Ripper steals H.G. Wells’ time machine and travels to modern San Francisco. (originally published 09/17/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind, let's see what
are we talking about this week? Oh, this is going
to be our episode from nine to seventeen, twenty twenty one,
in which we discussed the really excellent, quite fun nineteen
seventy nine film Time After Time, in which Jack the
Ripper steals HG. Wells time machine and travels to modern

(00:24):
day San Francisco. This one is kind of a classic,
kind of a minor classic. A lot of people love
this film. We really enjoyed it. Hope you enjoy our
discussion of it. Let's go.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamp and.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
This is Joe McCormick, and it is Time Travel o'clock
on Weird House Cinema. Today's movie selection is the nineteen
seventy nine and romantic sci fi adventure Time After Time
by the American writer and filmmaker Nicholas Meyer. So this
is a movie that I had never seen until this week,
and I came across it by way of a plot

(01:14):
description in some article I was reading somewhere. I don't
even remember what it was now, but I discovered in
this article that there was allegedly a time travel adventure
movie in which the English writer HG. Wells, real historical
figure author of the novel The Time Machine, played in
this movie by Malcolm McDowell, must use a real time

(01:36):
machine to chase Jack the Ripper played by a smooth
and sadistic David Warner, through space and time in this
time machine to prevent the Ripper from slashing twentieth century
disco dancers. And the premise was it sounded so bonkers
that I immediately thought this had to be a good
option for weird House. And then the really surprising thing

(01:59):
was the more I read about it, the more it
seemed that most critics really liked this movie, even though
I had somehow never really heard of it, or if
i'd heard about it, it didn't make enough of an impression
that I remembered it. So I saw this out, and
I got to say I was really impressed. Now, on
the downside, for weird House context, at least, I will
say this movie doesn't actually when you're watching it, feel

(02:23):
quite as weird in its execution as a straight read
on the premise would lead you to assume. But nevertheless,
I think this is mostly just a really great movie,
and it opens up all kinds of interesting, bigger questions
about the themes and ambitions of time travel stories and
science fiction in general.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah. I was excited to view this film again, especially
after watching Spooky's last week, in part because I was
excited because you had never seen it, and so that
would make it fresh. It's a film that I had
not seen in a long time. I remember watching it
on TV. I don't know if they used to show
it on like TNT or maybe came on A and
E or something back in the day, but I remember

(03:02):
watching it on television, and oh it does. It holds
up so well. I've spoken to various people and folks
who have seen this movie. They tend to like it.
I haven't met anybody who hated it. It's kind of
like an Orange Julius. I guess, as long as you
just don't really hate orange juice or really hate you know,

(03:22):
malls or malls or something. I don't know. It's a
terrible analogy, but I don't know. There's something about about
this film just seems to sit well with most people.
I don't know. Everything's very well calibrated, like it's sci fi,
but it's not so sci fi that it turns off
people that would be opposed to say rampaging more locks,

(03:42):
And yet people like us who might say, why are
there no more locks in this picture? It's still it's
still so captivating and well acted and well put together
that I ultimately can't argue too much about the results.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah, I agree. I mean I would have, of course
enjoyed it if it went much weirder and wrapped in
more HG. Wells, lower, had more locks and all kinds
of stuff like that. It doesn't, And in fact, the
film is almost the opposite of that. I would say,
for a science fiction movie involving one of the most
notorious sadistic serial killers in history, this is an extremely

(04:18):
cozy feeling movie. Would you agree?

Speaker 1 (04:21):
I would agree. I believe this was a PG, but
it was a nineteen seventy nine PG, so I do
not recommend watching this with your young children. Right, there
is blood, and there's some mature themes that are explored,
But even those mature themes, which are just part of
the tapestry you're invoking by bringing in a character like

(04:41):
Jack the Ripper, they are handled in a very light
and ultimately kind of comforting way, I guess.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
And I think it also helps that you know it's funny.
I want to criticize myself because I think in a
previous episode of Weird House Cinema, I was trying to
list actors that just have that evil look, that unfortunately
just have faces where maybe they can't overcome the fact
that they look sadistic and sinister, and one of the
actors I singled out in this regard is Malcolm McDowell.

(05:11):
I'm like, it's going to be hard to have Malcolm
McDowell as a hero because he just looks like an
evil person. That's not a nice thing to say, but
for some reason he does. And yet I hadn't seen
this movie at the time. In this movie, he's so sweet.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
He is, He's very lovable in this he's a Victorian
teddy bear, and he also feels smaller than usual, probably
by design the way they were shooting him and maybe
leaning into his actual hide a little bit instead of
putting him in an apple box or something. It's also
fascinating that this was the film that followed up The

(05:45):
Notorious Caligula, in which he very much played a villain
and a nasty character in a nasty film, and apparently
that was part of it. He's like, I really don't
want to play a villain for once. Can I play
the hero of a picture? And yeah, he's great in this.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
It's almost hard to imagine the gap that has crossed
going from Caligula to this sweet romantic time travel adventure,
you know, love story galloping across time. Caligula is it's
It's a movie that I have tried to watch for
badness sake years ago with some friends and I couldn't
make it through the movie. It is just so repulsive

(06:23):
and like it is the one of the ugliest movies
I've ever seen. The colors hurt the eyes. It's just
relentless depressing violence and depravity. There's one part that's, you know,
it would have been funny in a different movie because
it's so ridiculous. There's a part where like I think
Malcolm McDowell is like watching a gigantic lawnmower in ancient Rome,

(06:47):
just like cut off the heads of people who were
buried up to their necks. But the movie is like
so depressing, Like even that wasn't funny, so it's just yeah,
just awful. And then yeah, going for that to this,
which is just this spry, sprightly, beautiful time travel adventure.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, yeah, it's quite quite a leape. But yeah, he's
very good in this. And I will say that as
Malcolm McDowell aged, I feel like he kind of aged
into that face even more to where it's harder to
imagine older Malcolm McDowell. I'm playing a likable character, a
non villain. But I say that he's been in so

(07:26):
many films. I'm sure he pops up later on playing
like a kind grandfatherly character. But also I think he
became increasingly type cast as he got older too. Yeah,
and he's still active. We'll get into his BioPen in
a bit. But yeah, he's still active, so there's still time.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
Okay, how about a movie where Malcolm McDowell plays Santa Claus.
He could go to Kurt Russell route. You know, I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
I guess the part of the thing is if you
are going to pay out and get Malcolm McDowell to
play Santa Claus in your film, then clearly you want
villainous Santa Claus, Like, wonder, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 (07:57):
You know? At this point is one of the Yeah,
one of those Santa Claus is the monster movies, like
the one with Goldberg, remember that one?

Speaker 1 (08:09):
I know of it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Well, maybe we should give a little historical context for
the premise of this movie, which is, once again HG.
Wells must pursue Jack the Ripper through time in a
time machine to stop him from ripping the twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, well, let's let it rip here. So first of all,
what do you need to know about HG. Wells and
the time Machine to enjoy this film? Well, not a lot,
but here are the basics. Time Machine is an excellent
eighteen ninety five novel by English writer HG. Wells, who
lived eighteen sixty six through nineteen forty five. It's a
short read, widely available, and in my opinion, it holds

(08:45):
up really well. It's a very readable text today.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
One thing that's worth noting is that the time this
movie is set before HG. Wells wrote the novel, So
he wrote the novel in eighteen ninety five. I don't
remember exactly the year, but I think this is set
in eighteen ninety one one or ninety three, something like that.
Or the beginning is before they travel through.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Time eighteen eighty eight. I believe, oh okay, that would
be that would be prime ripping time, right there?

Speaker 3 (09:09):
Oh okay, all right.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
At any rate, this is not the absolute first time
travel yarn. It's an interesting discussion to get in. I
think we've talked about this in the show when he's
trying to figure out, like, who was the first person
to deal with time travel? But it was the first
time travel story to gain just a huge degree of popularity,
and Wells actually coined the term time machine. Now, to
be clear, the character in the book is just the

(09:32):
time traveler and is not Wells himself.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Wells written from a first person perspective.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
It is but I don't think we're really supposed to
assume that Wells made a time machine.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
No, no, no no.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
This film, however, takes a different approach. Wells was a futurist,
though in real life he was not an inventor outside
of the invention of sci fi concepts and the like
and the exploration of new ideas. The book has been
adapted a few different times, the famous nineteen sixty George
Powe adaptation. This one has a really iconic look for
the time machine wonderful morlock designs. Like when you think morlocks,

(10:09):
these are the more locks you probably picture. But there
was also a nineteen seventy eight TV movie and a
two thousand and two remake that I've seen, and as
I remember it being alright. But the interesting thing about
it is that it was directed by Wells's great grandson,
Simon Wells.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
Really that's interesting. Yeah, that's worth seeing it on its own.
Even if it came out in two thousand and two,
which man movies from two thousand and two, it is
hard to escape that early two thousand's look. It just
kind of bleeds into everything. I watched the movie from
two thousand and two the other day. It was a
really bad but enjoyable Clint Eastwood detective movie from two
thousand and two called blood Work. I don't know if

(10:47):
you've seen that one.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
I've not seen that one.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
Well, so, I mean absolute like hack detective story, hilarious
but also quite fun, and it's got that look it
just like everything from two thousand and two has this
I don't know, this some feature of like the contrast
and the colors and everything just everything looks kind of
slick and awful.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Well, it's been a while since I've saw the two
thousand and two Time Machine, but I remember, I remember
being entertained by it, and I remember that it had
Jeremy Irons as a Morlock in it.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
So oh, good, good choice there.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, I remember the Morlocks look pretty good. But then again,
I'm just I'm generally in on the idea of moralo.
It's hard to break more locks for me.

Speaker 4 (11:25):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
But one thing that was true about the historical figure HG.
Wells that is also true of the character in the
movie is that he was known as something of a
kind of progressive utopian socialists and a futurist, so he
had a lot of like visions of the future that
involved progressive political ideals. I'm not sure if all of
the exact things stated by the character in the film

(11:48):
would be real things that HG. Wells thought or would
have said, but it's at least sort of in the ballpark.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Right And then yeah, Ultimately, the film is largely about
the idea that if Wells represents optimism for the future
coming out of the Victorian Age, and ultimately the optimism
about what was possible in the Victorian Age in the
late nineteen hundreds. Then our other figure represents the worst
of that time period, the notorious character of Jack the Ripper.

(12:16):
So what do you need to know about Jack the Ripper? Okay,
here are the basics. So in many ways this is
the original true crime sensation and a topic of continued
and largely fruitless intrigue today. Also referred to as a
leather Apron, this was an unidentified serial killer active in
London's Whitechapel district around eighteen eighty eight. He targeted under

(12:37):
privileged members of society, generally prostitutes, and was known for
the modus operandi of slicing first the throat then the abdomen,
as well as his taunting letters to the media.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
Now, one note I do have there is that because
this movie set me off on a reading spree where
I was like, oh, I need to know things about
Jack the Ripper. The letters are one of the most
famous things about him, though I think there is serious
doubt about the authenticity of all of the letters that
I think there's only one letter that historians take seriously

(13:10):
at all all as possibly being from the killer himself,
and this is the so called from Hell letter because
and I think the reason this is the only one
that's really taken seriously is that it was accompanied by
a jar containing a piece of actual human kidney, allegedly
taken from one of the victims, though it's not possible
to confirm whether it actually came from a victim or not.

(13:31):
They didn't have like DNA testing at the time, obviously,
and so it could have been obtained from a medical
college or cadaver or something like that.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, I believe the police at the time they suspected
or one of their theories was that that was the
origin of the organs. It came from some sort of
a cadaver situation as opposed to a murdered victim.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
And one of the weird things about it is that
the from Hell letter, I will say, just as like
a literary appraisal of the interest contained in these letters,
it's one of the less interesting ones. Like the really
interesting letters are the ones that are pretty much yeah,
known to be hoaxes that were sent possibly by like
journalists trying to gin up interest in the story further

(14:16):
to sell more newspapers.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Yeah, absolutely, those are some of the more entertaining letters.
But also and you can see why they would have
been fabricated just to sort of drum up this this
this paranoi and excitement about the murders they have that
one of them has that line, I shan't stop ripping.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Right till I am good and buckled or something.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah, so yeah, you know, there's a high probability that
he didn't write any of these letters, but they are
very much associated with him. The idea, this figure that
is killing and then mocking the press, that is that
is the subject of all this media and public fear
and fascination, but is also potentially feeding it as well

(14:58):
and feeding off of it, right.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
And I think it's these letters, even though probably none
of them are authentic, or at least most of them
are not authentic, it's these letters that sort of create
one of the most lasting legacies of Jack the Ripper,
which is this idea that he's sort of playing a
game of chess with the police and that this is
a major part of his motivation. And this does come
through in the movie as well, because you see Jack

(15:22):
the Ripper in his identity before he's revealed to be
Jack the Ripper. He is a friend of H. G.
Wells and they play chess together in the movie, and
you know he's very into like outsmarting his opponents.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, now there are I think just five verified murders
if you will, by Jack the Ripper, though there are
others that may or may not be attributed to him,
depending on where you're falling. And then likewise, there's a
great deal of folklore, fiction and pseudohistory that just abound
within the realm of ripperology. He was never caught, and

(15:55):
there are numerous suspects that have been discussed over the years,
and they range from the potentially believable to the outrageous
to the unbelievable even during the time, and some of them,
some of these suspects did have a surgical background, because
there was the whole apparent removal of organs in the murders,

(16:16):
and so you know, some thought, well, this indicates that
they had the individual had some level of training or
expertise or familiarity with human anatomy. Now, in time after time,
the Ripper is this character, doctor John Leslie Stevenson, who
is not an historical person as far as I can tell.
But weirdly enough, the nineteen nineties Outer Limit episode Ripper,

(16:38):
which stars David Warner and Carrie Elwiss, was co written
by Leslie Stevens. So there you go. That's enough of
a connection for Ripper ology.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
I think, wait, is Leslie Stevens a real person and
it's just a coincidence? Or is this a pseudonym for
saying it was like written by David Warner or something.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
I mean, it's an IMDb writing credit that's not Warner.
So I think it's either just somebody who happens to
be Leslie Stevens, or is the actual Jack the Ripper
having time traveled to the nineties to make a career
for himself in in TV screenplay writing.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
Okay, so the last week I have been wandering around
my house non stop singing that Cindy Lauper song. I
can't get it out of my head. Is it not
used in the film? In fact, the song was released
after this film came out. Is there any connection between them?

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Allegedly, Cindy Lapper was inspired to write the song because
she liked the movie, and weirdly enough, there was a
In recent history, there has been a there was an
attempt to bring the novel Time after Time back as
a TV series, and each episode of the TV series
gets its title from the lyrics to Cindy Lauper's Time

(17:48):
after Time.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
Nice. Nice. Cindy Lauper doesn't get enough credit as a songwriter.
You know, have you ever have you ever actually listened
to the like the lyrics of girls Just Want to
Have Fun? Actually like a sort of profound and sad song.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yeah, yeah, I like some Cindy Lapper. I haven't really
been playing her recently, but yeah, she had a number
of hits. I would generally take the Cindy Lapper songs
of that era and put them above the Madonna songs
of that era.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
Ooh, I don't know if I would go that far,
but definitely I'm a fan. And now I have to
correct myself because I actually just looked it up to
make sure and found out that Cindy Lauper did not
write Girls Just Want to Have Fun? Her version was
a cover version. Whoops. Oh okay, okay, Well great song anyway,
and her version is great.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
So we've already pretty much done our elevator pitch for
Time after Time? Shall we go ahead and listen to
just a little bit of the trailer audio, not the
full thing, but just a little bit of the trailer.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Maybe some man I don't like this trailer. I feel
like it really it takes away from the movie. But okay,
let's just get at least get a snippet.

Speaker 4 (18:58):
The time is eighteen three and novelist and in better H. G.
Wells makes a startling announcement, gentlemen, I am talking about
traveling through time in a machine constructed for that Betty Puppose.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
The first to use the machine.

Speaker 4 (19:14):
However, is doctor John Leslie Stevenson, better known to history
as Jack the Ripper Time after time.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Yeah, this is this is a bad trailer. I hate
the comedic trailer narrator who's like Jack the Ripper is
on a on a vacation, you know, it's like always
this kind of like Casey caseum ask voice that's like,
you're gonna have a good time at the theater and yeah,
give me the voice of God any day over this nonsense.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
The trailer is bad in numerous ways, and I do
not recommend watching it. First of all, because of what
you're saying. The tone and the narrator are irritating, and
I think do not accurately communicate the spirit and feeling
of the movie. And second, the trailer reveals the entire plot,
including the ending it's one of those awful things. So like,
if you've seen the trailer, the movie is kind of
spoiled for you.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, yeah, not a good way to go into this film.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
Now, being a time travel movie, one of the things
that I was thinking about for this episode is it
it sort of made me want to create an in
house taxonomy of major types of time travel stories, sorted
by prevalent themes. And of course, any given movie or
story can partake of multiple different time travel themes, multiple

(20:41):
of the themes that follow that we're about to talk about.
And I'm also sure this list will not be exhaustive.
People will probably write in and be like, hey, what
about this type of movie. It'll be something I didn't
even think about. But I think here are some of
the major categories of time travel stories, and we can
talk about how time after time fits or does not
fit into each of them. So the first one I

(21:01):
wanted to mention is what I would call the debugging
history story. And this is a type of time travel
story that focuses primarily on isolating variables of cause and
effect in the progression of history and human life. So
it's largely concerned with the consequences of decisions and the

(21:23):
long term ripple effects of seemingly minor events and encounters.
So this can be seen, for example, and Back to
the Future, where Marty McFly learns that certain minor interventions
with his parents as teenagers, like he gives his teenage
dad a pep talk about standing up for himself and
so forth, this radically changes the circumstances of his family

(21:45):
thirty years later. Or it can be seen in movies
that don't even really feature time travel, but just merely
the alteration of past events. An example here might be
the final act of It's a Wonderful Life, where George
Bailey learns that if Clarence the Angel tweaks history so
that he was never born, everybody else in his life
turns out miserable and impoverished, and he sees the impact

(22:08):
that his life had. I would actually say that Time
after Time does not partake heavily of the debugging history theme,
though there are little nods here and there, especially at
the ending. We can maybe something we could talk about
if you want or not, though it's a spoiler for
the movie, But this is not the major type we're
dealing with in Time after Time.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, this film. Ultimately, the character of Wells is more
interested in protecting the future. That's what prompts him to
travel through time in the film, or at least not
necessarily at protecting the actual future, but protecting Well's idea
all the future. So in a sense, the existence of
Jack the Ripper in even in the late nineteenth century

(22:48):
is a threat to his worldview and vision for change.
The idea of Jack the Ripper escaping into his envisioned
utopia is a total threat to this idea.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
Now, while we're going through and talking about time after time,
I feel like we should also just run through this
list the example of Transfers to the other time travel
movie we've done.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, and I think the basic answer is always going
to be yes, sort of maybe, but who knows, because
Transfers is all over the place with time travel and
why they're doing it and who's doing it. But I
would say, yes, Transfers definitely does this, but.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
It's messy, Okay, that's debugging history. The next major time
travel theme I would say is Journey to Time Island.
This is a time travel story. This is probably one
of the least thematically interesting ways of using time travel
in a story. And it's a story that uses some
time in the future or the past primarily as a
hostile setting for adventure. So in these stories, the past

(23:46):
or the future can be thought of as largely equivalent
to physical places like Skull Island or the Forbidden Planet.
It's just a dangerous place for the characters to arrive
and then face unfamiliar challenges. And I will say Time
after Time does not largely fall into this category, but
actually HG. Well's novel The Time Machine is more in

(24:08):
this vein.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, traveling into a distant future for example, that definitely
is a commentary on the present or the Victorian present
that the author lived in. But also it is just
kind of this fantastic place in which to have an adventure, right.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
I think the Time Machine also partakes largely of another
more interesting category we'll get to.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
In a minute now, the time travel the time Island.
Rather this idea, I was thinking to myself, Okay, well,
what's something that falls in line with this? In my
mind instantly goes to Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder,
though that one is also a debugging history tale to
a large extent, sort of accidental debugging of the.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
History This is bugging history. Yeah, inserting bugs in the
lines of code of history.

Speaker 4 (24:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, the idea I can go back into dinosaur days
and have a safe adventure dinosaurs, but then you find
out no, you cannot by doing so, you're totally bugging
in the future.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
That's a very good observation. Okay. Third category, so we
had debugging history, journey to time island. Third one, I
will say is what I would call fish out of time.
This is a time based equivalent of the standard fish
out of water plot seen most often in comedies, where
most of the tension, usually comedic tension, is based on
failures of the out of place protagonists to understand and adapt,

(25:29):
understand and adapt to local conditions, expectations, you know, wandering
around being confused by surroundings, accidentally violating taboos. So you
can think of like Borat but with time instead of place,
or Demolition Man with the Three seashells.

Speaker 1 (25:44):
Yeah. Another example of this would be a Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's court. Sure you know whether a lot
of comedic fodder is made on the fact that, oh,
this person's out of time. They don't know what this means,
and the people that he's around now, they don't know
what this means, and hilarity encies.

Speaker 3 (25:59):
And you know, I will say, usually Fish out of
Time is not one of my favorite time travel themes,
but Time after Time has a good amount of this,
and I loved it in this movie. I would say,
is it works much better in Time after Time than
it usually does in other stories of this sort.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, it really excels at this, often with stuff that
on paper just sounds awful, like the idea what if H. G.
Wells traveled to the late seventies and went to a McDonald's.
It sounds awful, but it's great. It's great. My favorite
that's one of my favorite scenes where he goes into
McDonald's and he's trying to make sense to everything. And
then later he's having a meal with the romantic interest

(26:36):
and she asked or how the food is and he's like, oh,
it's better than the Scottish restaurant where I had breakfast
MS McDougall's. So yeah, Yeah, this film excels at the
Fish out of Time.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
Oh, and he gets really excited when he figures out
what fries are.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, He's like, oh, it's pump Fritz it's
pum friends. Now, as far as transfers goes, I think
they did that. I'm pretty sure they did this. Yeah,
there was a fair amount of humor in trancers, So
it's if you have humor in your time travel a scenario,
you're probably engaging in this trope.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
Okay. The next category is the one. I feel like
I need a snapier name for this one, but it's
basically what I would call the time travel arms race.
And these are the ones that tend to be the
most complicated in terms of plotting, and that's because they're
the ones that take the premise the most seriously, like

(27:31):
they're thinking really hard about what it would actually be
like to have the power to travel back in time,
and not just as a means to get the protagonist
to an unfamiliar setting, but actually as an ongoing mechanism
that can be used over and over, often ultimately as
a weapon, something that grants god like power, because if
you know what's going to happen in advance, and you

(27:53):
have the power to go back in time and approach
any situation differently, you can make almost any situation turn
out your way. And so this gives anybody who possesses
the power of time travel the temptation to use it
for selfish, deceitful, or evil purposes, And so I think
these plots often contain both protagonists and antagonists who have

(28:14):
the power to travel through time trying to sort of
travel back further and further to gain advantage over one another.
So the themes of this would usually include thoughts about weaponry, strategy, tricks,
and the dangers of having too much power, especially too
much technological power. Good examples of this I think would include,

(28:35):
like the movie Primer, the overarching premise of the Terminator films,
though there's not a lot of this mechanic within the
movies themselves Terminator, the setup of each film usually involves
some form of the time travel arms race, and I
guess in terms of more recent movies, you could think
about Tenet as a version of this.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
All right, Yeah, now, Transfers, I think I think definitely
Transwers got into this territory because there is the idea that, yeah,
cult members have gone back in time and they have
transfer armies, and so we need to send transfer cops
back in time to deal with them. So, yeah, Transfers
being a high minded time travel movie definitely gets in
on this action, though I.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Would say Time After Time has very little of this,
and it would have made it an entirely different film
in ways that we might mention later when we talk
a little bit more about the plot. But I don't
really hold this against the movie because it just decided
to go in a different direction with the way it
structured its story. But Time after Time could have been
a completely different film if it had just taken this

(29:38):
premise seriously and HG. Wells had said, Okay, I can
always just go back one more day in the past
and do this instead.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Right, right? Or I guess another thing that could have
complicated matters is the idea of is the question of
how many time machines are there, and is the time
machine a singular entity or is time travel a technology
that may be reproduced in this film. In Time after Time,
there is one time machine, and there's some interesting plot

(30:06):
mechanics that keep it that way. And additionally, nobody has
subsequently understood how time travel works. The time machine winds
up in a museum in San Francisco, and it's fully functional,
and nobody has really taken it apart to figure out
how it works. Which if you're going to be really
pedantic about it, Yeah, that's kind of silly, but it

(30:28):
works within the context of the film.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Yeah, agreed. So the next category I want to mention
is kind of a subcategory because it's more of a
category that would apply to usually how a like a
twist at the end of a time travel story. But
this is what I would call the have you heard
about the Fates version. I kind of don't want to
list examples of this because by including them in this
category I would usually be spoiling some kind of good

(30:53):
twist in the movie. But this is a variation that
usually starts with something that looks more like debugging history
or the time travel arms race, only for the protagonists
to discover too late that the Fates cannot be outrun
and while they thought they were avoiding some bad outcome
by going back and changing the past, they in fact
were not avoiding it or were even causing it, or

(31:16):
something to that effect.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, yeah, not so much. In this picture. Trancers did
not really get into this either, but I will say
that it does remind me. And this is not a
spoiler because and I'll explain why, but the Stephen King
time travel novel eleven twenty two sixty three is really
good for starters. I highly recommend this book, but it

(31:37):
definitely gets into this area early on, because there's this
idea that, yes, you can travel back into the past
via this portal, but once you get there, changing history
in any meaningful ways is incredibly difficult, because there's a
sense that it's like time, is this this surging river,
and to try and divert the river's course. There are forces,

(32:00):
not forces with names or faces so much, but like
just reality itself will revolt against you, like everything will
go wrong in your attempt to try and change the
course of history.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
Oh that's interesting. Yeah, I haven't read that one, but
you've tempted me.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah. Basically, an individual becomes convinced that going back and
stopping the assassination of John F. Kennedy will make the
world a substantially better place in the future, and therefore
it's worth it. It's worth basically like a one way
trip to go and see this through. And it's and
he King explores it for in a very long book.

(32:37):
And also it's a love story, which of course brings
us back to this movie. I was wondering as I
was watching it, how many subsequent time travel romances would
just simply not exist if not for Time after Time.
I'm thinking about everything from Outlander to Highlander, which even
though Highlander is not about traveling through time via mechanic,

(33:00):
it is about immortal characters living outside of their original
time and then falling in love. So I feel like
the film was probably very influential on this sort of
subgenre of time travel fiction.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
Oh well, I think this is another great category we
should mention, which is the love across time story, which
is time after time. I think you could definitely says
an example of it's a type of love story. You know,
it's common in a love story to have people who
who clearly want to be together, but there's some kind
of tension that keeps them apart, and that could be
you know, social expectations, it could be you know, in

(33:34):
romantic comedies, is often a series of farcical misunderstandings that
leads them to fighting each other. But in a lot
of more sort of serious and tragic love stories across history,
it's often been like separation of time of space, you know, like, yeah,
like we're from different kingdoms or something, and we can't
be together for that reason, But there are movies that
do this with time travel as well. It's like, well, no,

(33:55):
I've got to go back to my time, and you
don't want to leave your time and so forth.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Yeah. Other times it's the lady hawk scenario. It's like,
you're you're a hawk during the day, I'm a wolf
at night, and we're just not lying. We can't align.
That's accept during a total eclipse, right.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
That's right, okay. And then one last category I want
to mention because I think this is the one that
applies the most to time after time. This is the
category I would call fresh eyes for bad eras. And
this is the type of time travel story that is
primarily about commenting on the particular features of an age
of the time in which they are set, usually the present,

(34:35):
but often also the future as influenced by the present.
And so I think these tend to contain the most
social commentary of any of the time travel subgenres. So
the time traveler is able to look upon an age
such as the present and see it with fresh eyes,
noticing things, usually bad things that the chronolocals have learned

(34:58):
to ignore just because they're in your to them, and
so Time After Time actually, much like H. G. Wells
actual novel, The Time Machine, partakes heavily of this theme,
tying it back into the novel The Time Machine itself.
Apart from it just being a sort of journey to
Time Island, it's also very much this one because he
was using a dystopian vision of the future to suggest

(35:22):
that such a future would follow from negative trends that
existed in his present. So he's commenting on the present
by suggesting a horrible future. But in Time after Time,
it's just looking directly at the present. And I think
this is one of the most interesting ideas in the movie.
So it takes these two time travelers from eighteen nineties London.

(35:43):
So HG. Wells, who the character in the film, is
a progressive, utopian socialist in eighteen nineties London. He believes
that humanity will pretty soon advance to a golden age
of peace and prosperity and egalitarianism, where there will be
no war, no violence, no inn quality, no oppression, and
so forth. And then the other is Jack the Ripper,

(36:04):
who is sort of the embodiment of violent, sadistic, misogynist ID.
And what if these two figures suddenly got a look
at the world in nineteen seventy nine without having a
chance to get used to it as time progresses slowly
in the normal sense, what would they think? So, of course,
there's a scene in the present where Jack the Ripper

(36:24):
turns on a TV and he just starts flipping channels
for Wells to see what's on, and it's just seen
after scene both real and fictional of hatred, violence, murder,
war terrorism, nuclear escalation, full contact football, and Wells is
horrified to see that his utopian dreams were hopelessly naive,

(36:46):
and the Ripper is just like, yes, good war football,
I am home.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
This is a lovely scene. Yeah, taking place in Jack
the Ripper's hotel room. That's a little messy because he's
been staying there. He hasn't been ripping there, but he's
been staying there. He has this line has several lines
that really drive this home, but one of them is
ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today I'm an amateur.
That's right, and there's Yeah, there's so much to love

(37:14):
in this. Some of the little things, like when he
turns on the TV, he's like he's clearly at ease
in this world. He's wearing the suit of the day,
you know, of the time period. He's he's largely acclimatized
to the late nineteen seventies at this point. But then
he holds the remote control in a really weird fashion
to turn on the TV, which is a great touch.
You know, it's like he because this character, Yeah, he's like,

(37:38):
I feel the spirit of this age, but I'm not
altogether on the technology just yet.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
Yeah, it's great. And there are all these little things
in the movie that signal this as it goes on,
that there's an irony where H. G. Wells is the
progressive futurist and the age that he travels to does
include a lot of the ideals he believed in, Like
he is pleased to discover that women have more rights
now than they did in his time and so forth.

(38:03):
But there's this irony because he, for some reason doesn't
feel comfortable and easy to adapt to the culture of
the future in the way that Jack the Ripper does.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, the treatment of the Ripper in this it reminds
me a lot of the ideas that Alan Moore would
would later explore in his his now classic graphic novel
From Hell about Jack the Ripper, in which the Ripper
is presented as the dark embodiment of the Victorian age
and ultimately the beginning of the twentieth century, a kind

(38:33):
of profit of the modern age to follow. Now, needless
to say, that's a much darker treatment, and our ripper
in this film does not see himself as such a
grandiose figure. He's he simply shan't stop ripping, and this
is an even better age in which to do it.
But he, like, like that line above that we mentioned, implies,
he feels like the world has ultimately passed passed him by.

(38:55):
It's even, it's even it's not only met his his
his spear, but it has surpassed his spirit. But he's
happy to live in this age, right.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
And so one could take this in a kind of
simplistic way and say that, well, maybe the movie is
just engaging in the sort of naive pessimism, the pessimistic
bias that makes people always think that times are just
the worst they've ever been, things are always getting worse
the hell in a hand basket, thinking, I would say,
the movie actually doesn't quite do that. It pretty frequently

(39:26):
acknowledges things that in Well's view, are better about the
present than they were in Well's time. But there's also
something off about the modern age, especially something the sort
of about the sort of indifference to violence and the
sort of callousness of the modern world that the Ripper
finds very welcoming.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
What is the headline in the newspaper that he picks
up about. It's a sports headline. It's like Ram's massacre
cults or something like that.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Yeah, it is Ram's mall cults or something.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah, Which I love that moment. That's a great one
of many great moments in the film where it's like, yeah,
that headline is just insane. It implies outside of the
you know, the modern sports understanding of it, that that
like herbivores are carrying each other apart in the streets,
you know, like we're living in like a biblically misaligned age.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
Yeah, And so, I don't know. I appreciate the the
interesting complexity of the feeling that it has about the
present that like, some things have definitely progressed and gotten
better since the time that Wells is used to, but
there are other things that are just sort of like
always new sicknesses that continually emerge throughout history, and there's
something going on with the kind of with the kind
of inurement to violence and hatred that just is pervasive

(40:37):
in the modern world.

Speaker 1 (40:39):
And I think I think a lot of this is
exemplified by the setting, because you know, I like the
idea of setting it in in the United States, even
though it you know, begins in what is supposed to
be London. But you could have easily you could imagine
someone arguing, well, let's set this in seventies New York,
you know, just straight to Hell City. But no, you

(40:59):
go to San Francisco. And their treatment to San Francisco
is this kind of almost fifty to fifty split of
cedier elements and seedier parts of town. But also you
have so many You have a lot of time in
the film to admire sort of modern late seventies architecture
in San Francisco, to walk through the parks in public spaces.

(41:19):
So I think it's a nice balance. It's achieved through
the setting, and ultimately the film is like a in
a way, it's like it makes you want to visit
of San Francisco. It's like a tourism brochure for the city.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
They spend a lot of time wandering around the Pan
American Exposition buildings, which is funny because he's you know,
Wells is admiring them. In Mary Stein Virgin's character, I
think she has to break his heart and inform him
that they're made of plaster.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
Yeah. Yeah. He asked if they're made of marble and
she says it says no plaster.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
But is that actually worse? I don't know. They are
beautiful to look at. Since I guess it's time to
jump into the connections anyway, I just wanted to flag
a strange fact, which is that? Okay? So this movie

(42:13):
was directed and at least in part written by Nicholas Meyer.
I know was based on a novel, and I think
there are multiple story credits for the movie, but Nicholas
Meyer the director and I think wrote the screenplay at
least or was one of the writers. He made this movie,
which is about HG. Wells and Jack the Ripper traveling
through time to nineteen seventy nine San Francisco, and Nicholas

(42:35):
Meyer also was one of the writers of Star Trek
four The Voyage Home, which involves time traveling to present
day San Francisco, but from the future instead of the past. Interesting,
he knows what he likes. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:48):
So.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Nicholas Meyer was born nineteen forty five American writer and
director who first made a splash with the nineteen seventy
four Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven Percent Solution, in which
Sigmund Freud helps Sherlock Holmes battle his drug addiction.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Meyer wrote the screenplay for then the nineteen seventy six
film adaptation that starred Nicole Williamson, Robert Duval, Alan Arkin,
and Lawrence Olivier, as well as Charles Gray and Samantha Egger.
It was a big hit. Meyer wrote more Holmes novels
and then went on to direct this film in nineteen
seventy nine, followed by Star Trek two, The Wrath of

(43:26):
Kahn in nineteen eighty two, and Star Trek Being Discovered
Country in nineteen ninety one, among other films, but those
were the big ones.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
One interesting thing about Nicholas Meyer as a filmmaker was
that he was also behind the nineteen eighty three TV
special or TV movie The Day After, which was a
supposedly factual look at the possibilities of nuclear war, like
what if the Cold War went hot? And this It's

(43:53):
hard to tell exactly how influential it was, but it
has been alleged that this TV movie was pretty influential
even at high levels of government, and changed the thinking
of some military and political officials about antagonism in the
Cold War.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
Oh wow. Now. He also wrote a number of screenplays,
including but not limited to, Star Trek, The Voyage Home,
The Human Stain, and the pilot episode for the twenty
seventeen TV series Time After Time, which we alluded to earlier,
which I have not seen it. It may be great,
but just looking at stills, it looks like it asked
the question what if time after Time? But hunkier.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Yeah, it's got some very square jaw lines.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
So ultimately, Nicholas Meyer Saturn Award winner, and he's been
nominated for both an Academy Award and three Emmys.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
But if I understand correctly, this movie, much like two
thousand and one A Space Odyssey, was one of the
rare cases where a movie based on a book is
being completed simultaneously to the completion of the book.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
That's right, And this leads us to the writer Carl Alexander.
This is the son of William Tunberg, who wrote the
screenplay for Old Yeller and the nephew of Carl Tunberg,
who wrote the screenplay for Ben Hurr. This was his
first novel, Time after Time, though the book was actually
optioned before it was completed by Nicholas Meyer, who happened

(45:23):
to be a friend of Alexander's who had heard him
talking about it and had I think, looked at a
part of the novel before it was completed, and so
he was like, this is it. I want this to
be my next film, So the film is finished alongside
the book. The book and the film were being completed
at the same time.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah. He went on to follow this up with a
sequel novel in twenty nineteen, or at least it published
in twenty nineteen. I'm not sure if someone else had
to finish it for him or how it worked out
with the manuscript, because he lived nineteen thirty eight through
twenty fifteen, so he would not have lived to see
Jacqueline the Ripper published in twenty nineteen. Now, the writer
Steve Hayes also has a story credit on in this

(46:05):
born nineteen thirty one. Again, I think this comes back
to the fact that the screenplay in the novel were
essentially being completed. At the same time, Hayes did a
lot of TV writing, including for at least two series
that I wasn't familiar with based on popular eighties action
films Conan which ran ninety seven through ninety eight, and
Rambo from nineteen eighty six, which I got excited about

(46:27):
and then realized that it was a cartoon. But then
also I find that weird that we decided Rambo needed
to be a cartoon.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Yeah, I didn't know there was a Conan or Rambo
TV series.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
All right, Well, let's come back to Malcolm McDowell, who
plays h. G. Wells in this Born in nineteen forty three,
and this is a guy where it's hard to even
figure out where to begin. Legendary British actor who played
Alex and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in nineteen seventy one. Again,
he was in the notorious nineteen seventy nine film Caligula,
which came right before this one. He was in eighty

(47:00):
two's Cat People. I fondly remember him from a child
watching nineteen eighty three. He's Blue Thunder. He plays the
villain in that who flies this little helicopter that battles.
Our big combat police helicopter that is Blue Thunder.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
Oh boy, I do not have a helicopter a battle movie.
How many are there? And I remember there's one called
I think Firebirds that has maybe Charlie Sheen or somebody
in it.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
I think, so yeah, this one. I have no idea
how big of a splash Blue Thunder was at all,
but it was big for me as a kid because
my aunt had taped some films off of HBO. This
was one of them, and it was probably inappropriate for
me to be watching it, but I mainly watched it
for the helicopter combat scenarios, and then I would build
the helicopters out of legos and have them crash into

(47:47):
each other.

Speaker 3 (47:47):
That's great. I was wrong. Actually it wasn't Charlie Sheen.
It was Nicholas Cage who was in Firebirds.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
Firebirds was a one of those bad action movies that
I taped off TV when I was a kid, because
I was like, looks like this will be a military
Harry action movie. I'm you know, I'm a boy in
East Tennessee. This is the kind of movie I'm supposed
to be watching. Not great, So Malcolm McDowell. Like we said,
he continues to work a lot in films and TV.

(48:13):
We can't we can't mention everything he's been in before.
I believe he's come up on the show before, not
not maybe in a film that we've watched, but in
you know, the various connections. But he played doctor Loomis
in both of Rob Zombie's Halloween films, which I have
not seen, but I assume he's villainous in those. Oh no,
he I mean he looks villainous because Malcolm mcdell usually does,

(48:36):
though he doesn't in time after time. I don't know
how exactly they accomplished that, maybe with the careful use
of hairstyling and facial hair. But no, he's not villainous
in the Rob Zombie Halloween movies. He's just not super helpful. Now.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
One of the interesting things about Malcolm mcdowll in this
film is that this is where he met his second wife,
Mary Stubergen, who plays the character Amy Robbins born nineteen
fifty three. But yeah, they apparently met on this film,
fell in love on this film, were subsequently married, and
their son is Charlie McDowell or one of their children Anyways,

(49:13):
Charlie McDowell, who is a director who directed the excellent
twenty fourteen film The One I Love.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Mary Stein Virgin is also great in this. She has
a kind of funny, nervous energy in the movie, and
she's of course great as a comic actress. She essentially
would you say that you think she was sort of
playing a similar character in this to the character she
plays in Back to the Future three.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
I guess so. Back to the Future three is one
of those films that I think most people only see once,
so I don't really remember her all that. I remember
the basics of the character, but I don't know how
closely they align with this.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
Right, Well, I was just thinking Back to the Future
three had to in part be based on or partially
derived from her role in Time after Time.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Yeah, yeah, I would. I would think so. I mean,
because ultimately, I think most time travel romance novels or
films or TV shows have it have to at least
in some way look back to Time after Time. It
feels very influential.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
But yeah, she I think it took me a while
to figure out that she is so good as a
comic actress because I think I recall the first the
first role in which I really became familiar with her
was as like a nefarious lawyer defending the bad company
in Philadelphia. Oh okay, you remember that.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
It's been a long time. I think I saw that
many years ago.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Oh yeah, I think she plays a ruthless lawyer who's
who's defending the company this being sued and she has
like cruel scenes where she grills Tom Hanks on the stand.
But that was before i'd seen her really in any
comedy stuff. And she's great in comedies. She's great in
Step Brothers, where Will Ferrell is her son, I think,
and well, you know, it makes me wonder as Will

(50:59):
Ferrell her son with h. G. Wells from this movie.

Speaker 1 (51:03):
I always enjoy her when she's she often pops up
in various comedy things that her husband Ted Danson is in,
and so she's been very funny in some of those films.
I remember she was in Elf and had a pretty
fun role in that. But ultimately Academy Award winning Actor
here with Mary as his steam burgon here, and she's
pretty good in this. Yeah, she's it's a it's it's

(51:24):
an interesting role because she's called upon in I think
her only second screen presence to play the modern woman,
to like to represent not only the modern woman from
the film's perspective, but the future woman, the woman of
the future from H. G. Wells perspective. So it's it's
kind of a it mostly holds up today. There are

(51:49):
certainly some some choices here and there where you're like, well,
I think they would they would inevitably do that differently
if you were to create this again in like twenty
twenty or twenty twenty one.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
But well, I would say those are not choices on
mary Stein versions in the script. Yeah, there are some,
like it is ironic that some of the parts of
this movie that the movie clearly regards as the most
illustrative of the culture of the modern world are exactly
the ones that have aged the most poorly. Like they're like,

(52:20):
there's a scene where mary Stein Margins character uses casually
using offensive language to refer to lesbians, like she says
the D word. I assume that that word was considered
derogatory at the time. I think it was. And she
talks about how she does want to pursue her own
career ambitions, but she offers the disclaimer that I'm not
women's lib.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Yeah. Oh. She also echoes this idea that one's work
should be your life and that that's like a healthy
choice for the modern professional as if. Like, ultimately, Jack
the Ripper's main flaw is that he's making too much
time for his hobbies.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Right, Yeah. I do think it's interesting though in this film,
that's like compairing these you know, different expectations for how
the future will turn out, especially with regards to things
like moral values and all that that. Like, some of
the things that are that are considered the most like
sort of textural illustrations of how people think in the
modern world are some of the things that have aged

(53:16):
the worst.

Speaker 1 (53:17):
Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. But again, ultimately this is
the writing nothing on Mary. Mary's great in this true.
All right, let's let's get to our ripper. Let's talk
a little bit about the actor who plays doctor John
Leslie Stevenson aka Jack the Ripper. This is the legendary
David Warner.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
David Warner is fantastic in this.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Yes, yeah, he's he is great. Warner born nineteen forty
one as of this recording, still still still around and
either still active or was still active in a limited
to a limited degree as of like twenty twenty. I'm
not sure, especially when you're older individuals like this. I
don't know if he has effectively retired at this point

(53:58):
or he's going to come back and do some more
voice acting. But he, like McDowell, has been in just
everything twice. He has two hundred and twenty five acting
credits on IMDb. He has done theater, he has done
audio dramas. He seems like a guy who has just
constantly been working through you know, just just NonStop throughout

(54:18):
his career. Yeah, and like McDowell, he also has a
real knack for playing villains and has played some really
notable ones. He was in Titanic, he was in Tron
Time Bandits. Oh yeah, he was in Star Trek. The
Undiscovered Country also popped up on some key episodes of
Trek television series, including the one where the Romulin tortures Picard.

(54:41):
I'm sorry, not a Romulant. It's a Cadassian. Good what
are they?

Speaker 3 (54:48):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Not a Kardashi Cardassian, Yes, the Kardassians. He plays a
Cardassian in that, and a Cardassian interrogator, and he is
torturing Picard and trying him to to like break him
a very memorable episode.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Speaking of being in time travel movies, Oh, I love
him in Time Bandits. He plays the villain in Time Bandits.
He's the embodiment of evil. He's sort of the devil,
but he is obsessed with technology in Time Bandits, which
I think has some sort of satirical content, but like
a lot of things in Time Bandits and Terry Gilliam
movies more generally, and it's a thing that I like

(55:25):
a lot of times, the satire is not super clear.
It's satirical in a kind of vague way. But yeah,
I love that the devil like he's he seems to
not really understand what subscriber try dialing is, but he
really wants to know about it, and he really wants
to know about you know, about computers and things.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
I need to watch that one again.

Speaker 3 (55:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
So David Warner is an actor who's been in way
too many things to list here, but I thought I
might mention some of some of my additional favorite roles
that he's had, and I think all of these are
roles where he doesn't necessarily play a villain. He has
a role in John Carpenter's in the Mouth of Madness,
he plays the head of the Assassin's Guild and the Hogfather,

(56:10):
and oh, most memorably, he plays both a good guy
and a bad guy in the Quest of the Delta Knights.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
I don't know that movie.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
Oh, oh my goodness. So the Quest of the Delta
Knights is this low budget Renfestie fantasy yarn and it
was used on Mystery Science Theater three thousand, so it
was riffed on that show. And it's a strong Mystery
Science Theater three thousand episode, as I recall. But it's

(56:40):
what the thing I love about it is that it's
not something that comes to mind as a good David
Warner film. But there was a fabulous interview with David
Warner on The av Club by Will Harris with David Warner.
This was in twenty seventeen where they basically just run
through and ask him about various films that he was in,
just you know, what kind of stories do you have

(57:01):
from this picture? What kind of stories you have from
this picture? And they asked him about the Quest of
the Delta knightes and he responded with this, wow. Well,
that was, of course a low budget film, which what's
that called Mystery Science Theater? It ended up there laughs.
But I had great fun doing it, playing two parts.
Originally I was just asked to play the one part,

(57:22):
and I said, would it save you money if I
played two parts for the same money? And they said yes.
So I had great fun changing from a black wig
into a gray wig and putting brown contact lenses into
my normal blue eyes. It was great fun logistically. So
I have great affection for that little, low budget film.
I've always loved that, this idea, that this film that
we think of as being bad and you know, forgettable

(57:45):
for an actor of David Warner's pedigree. He's like, no,
that was tremendous fun. I'm so glad I did that picture.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
Wonderful.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
In that same interview, he also mentions that when it
comes to time after time, the studio wanted Mick Jagger
for this role. But yeah, but the filmmakers are like, no,
we don't want Mick Jagger. We really want David Warner.
And they fought for David Warner and thank god they
got him.

Speaker 3 (58:10):
Yeah, because you had to save Mick Jagger for free Jack.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
I think free Jack chowse us everything we need to
know that it would have. I'm not saying mc jagger
would have made a bad Jack the Ripper, but I
don't think he would have been well, he would not
have been a very good Jack the Ripper. Let's just
leave it there.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
I like David Warner. Yes, I'm glad we got David Warner.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Yeah, he's great in this Get the Mate. That's your
Mad Jagger, though that's not your David Warner, our ripper
in this film of Doctor Stephenson. He's very, very stern,
but at times he has a sardonic wit to him.
He's it's just it's a great role and he has
a lot of great lines in it. It's a very

(58:53):
interesting villain. And ultimately I think this may be my
my favorite take on Jack the Ripper. I mean, Jack
the Ripper is a character that doesn't automatically mean great
film presence, but he's I think Warner is terrific in
this film.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
You know what I also love Warner in is Tron,
where there's a thing in Tron where the same actor
will usually play a character in the real world in
meete space, but then also play a character within the
digital world. And so David Warner does he's like a
sort of corrupt software business leader guy. I think he

(59:29):
steals somebody's ideas for some video games or something in
the real world. But then within the computer world he
plays the villain Sark, who is this evil like you know,
Frisbee player who works for the Master Control program. If
you haven't seen The Old Tron, it's worth seeing for
a number of reasons. But David Warner is a great

(59:49):
villain in it.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
Oh, yes, he's great. Oh I should also I mentioned
that nineties Outer Limits episode that has Jack about Jack
the Ripper. I watched it last night, so I just
have to share real quick. It's titled Ripper, and it's
pretty fun. It's maybe a little long, like the episode
is longer than the premise demands, but it's it's pretty great.
Carrie Elwiss is in it, but also Francis Fisher and

(01:00:13):
France Newan of Death Moon Fame for us of Death
Moon Fame. I don't think anybody is actually of Death
Moon Fame, but but it's got a fun cast and
the premise is essentially this, what if the Jack the
Ripper murders were not due to a human killer, but
we're due to some sort of a of an alien
space snake that goes that travels into people's mouths and

(01:00:37):
then emerges from their bellies, thus creating the abdominal wounds
associated with.

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):
The Jack the Ripper killings. Wow, yeah, so it's okay.
Is David Warner played the snake?

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
No, David Warner plays a Scotland yard investigator, and Carrie
Elwiss plays a former doctor turned opium And what is
he is? He's an opium attic, but also he's drinking
too much absinthe and is just generally depressed and sweaty

(01:01:09):
all the time. And so so there's a lot of
great overacting from him, like just the right level of overacting,
the type of overacting you you want from Carrie Elvis.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Okay, well, I guess I gotta see that one. Maybe
it'll come up in a future anthology episode. All right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
As far as other people in the film, like these
are really the three main characters, I'm not sure how
many of these other individuals we need to go into.
Some of them are only in it briefly.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
There are some cameos that pop out. Corey Feldman shows
up as a child. I don't think he has any lines,
but I just saw him and I was like, wait,
that's Corey Feldman. And then he just walks off screen.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
He may say something like look, mama, time machine or
something like that man's in I don't know, he maybe
says something, but yeah, this was his film debut. Another
film debut. I believe this was at least his first credit.
Film screen credit is mc gainey, who displays one of
the London Bobbies. But this is an actor born nineteen

(01:02:15):
forty eight. You may not envision him in your mind
when I say his name, but if you look him up,
you'll be like, oh, that guy because he's a character
actor frequently cast as rotund creepers, bikers, and bad cops.

Speaker 4 (01:02:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
I think about the pilot of the plane in con Air.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, that was him. Now. I usually
pinpoint the music, and I should pinpoint the music in
this one as well. It is a score by Miklos Rosa,
who lived nineteen oh seven through nineteen ninety five. So
if you're watching this in the score of this film
feels very traditional. Well, that's because Rosa cut his teeth
on film scores in the thirties and forties. He was

(01:02:54):
a Hungarian American child prodigy. His earliest successes included The
Feathers in nineteen thirty nine and The Thief of Baghdad
in nineteen forty. He earned seventeen Academy Award nominations, including
three oscars for Spellbound in forty five, a Double If
in forty seven, and Ben Her in fifty nine. So
huge name in the score business in the Golden Age
of Hollywood. He composed a good one hundred scores and

(01:03:17):
also maintain a career as a concert composer. So even
though it's not the sort of film score that I
would want, I would personally want to listen to outside
of the viewing experience, it's a fine score by a
legendary composer.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
It is a nonsynse score that you will allow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
Yes, yeah, I will allow it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
So I guess we're getting kind of close to the
end here. It doesn't make a lot of sense, I
think for this one to talk in much detail about
the plot or scene by scene, but I mean broadly,
the main thing is you have this setup where you
establish the characters in the eighteen nineties, and then there
is invocation of the time travel mechanism. So Jack the
Ripper escapes to the future, and HG. Wells realizes what

(01:03:59):
is happened, realizes that his friend is in fact Jack
the Ripper has escaped to the future using his time
machine that he invented, and now it's his responsibility to
track him down and bring him to justice. So that's
one half of the plot, is this sort of chase
through time, and then the other half is broadly the
love story. When HG. Wells arrives in the future, he
and Mary Steinbergen, they meet each other at a bank

(01:04:21):
because he is trying to exchange one hundred year old
British pounds for money that he can use to buy
Palm Fritz at mcdongle's and she is working there at
the currency exchange. They meet and they fall in love,
and there's a very sweet love story that develops between
them as the plot goes on, and the threat of

(01:04:41):
Jack the Ripper is sort of looming in the background.
But apart from that, I mean, I guess, drawing on
the themes, I think one thing that's interesting in this
movie is it's very pointed about H. G. Wells's reaction,
his extreme resistance to army himself with weapons in his

(01:05:02):
struggle against Jack the Ripper when he goes to try
to apprehend him. At first, he doesn't arm himself or
try to use force in any way. He just goes
and tries to talk him into coming back with him,
and even later on, as the threat becomes more and
more dire, it's only at a point of sort of
like breakdown an extremity that he finally gets a gun.

(01:05:23):
It's something that he's been urged to do, I think
by Mary Steinbergen and maybe other characters before that time.
And I wondered what you thought about that. It was
an interesting decision to make this character who's so almost
irrationally resistant to using weapons or arming himself.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Yeah, I did wonder at that point in the film,
like what it was ultimately supposed to mean. Like maybe
I guess it was probably more about the character and
the necessity of the plot, Like it may be one
of those situations where you're like, Okay, he's in a
life and death struggle. Surely he would break and get
some sort of a weapon at this point. And then

(01:06:00):
it also helps with the whole situation where the police
have apprehended him and they find him not only behaving
suspiciously but also armed. So I guess it has its
role in the plot. I don't. I struggled to get
anything more significant out of it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
Personally, Well, well, I mean, I mean, I think it
probably has something to do with like his utopian ideal,
because Wells is imagining, you know, he's his character, and
the actual HG. Wells in the late nineteenth century was
a member of the Fabian Society and didn't think that,
you know, that incrementalist change in a progressive direction would
eventually eliminate war and poverty and all that kind of stuff.

(01:06:36):
And so if he's thinking of the utopian ideal, I mean,
it seems that he is committed to the utopian ideal
of nonviolence in a way that even could be very
self destructive and could be seen as irrational. In this
case is where like clearly he's dealing with like a
dangerous killer one on one. Yeah, And it's interesting that

(01:06:57):
the time when he breaks this is in a moment
of weakness. It's when he's sort of like lost it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:02):
True, true, Yeah, But.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
I thought that also had interesting implications. And I don't
want to spoil anything, but for how how the conflict
has finally resolved in the.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
End, another point I would I would make about the
time machine because I, you know, what, to step into
a movie like this and I expect to sort of
geek out about the particulars of time travel a bit.
And it's interesting because if you asked me to explain
exactly how the time machine works, and I'm not talking
about like the you know, the power system in all
it's supposed to be like solar powered or something, but.

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
There's solar powered even though it's in his basement, right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
But there's this whole bit about the different keys that
make it do different things, and I cannot tell you
what how these exactly worked. But the film, the film
screenplay and presentation is so effective that you you don't
really have to think too much about it. But it's
almost like the whole situation where it's like you have

(01:07:57):
to try and draw a bicycle. You have this vision
of the bicycle and and you think you understand it,
but then you really don't, not enough to draw it. Now.
I feel like that's how the time machine functions in
this plot. Like they it works. I understand how it
functions in the plot and ultimately in the climax of
the picture. But I also would struggle to explain how
these keys work and which one does what.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
That's one type of writing skill. I mean, one good
quality of writing is writing that gives you the illusion
of explanatory depth. I mean, most stories that you enjoy,
you probably couldn't go through and explain in the same
level of detail as the author why exactly everything happens
and stuff. But there's a sort of ease you settle
into with certain types of storytelling, with good writing and

(01:08:41):
all that, where you just kind of like forget about it,
You don't worry about it, and you accept that everything
makes sense even when it often doesn't. And I mean,
and one way in which it doesn't that I wanted
to bring up is how this movie does not get
into the archetype of the time travel story the arms
that I was talking about earlier, and I was thinking

(01:09:02):
about how different the movie could have been if it
had embraced that ethic. So when Jack the Ripper flees
to the future, the way HG. Wells decides to deal
with it is he's going to go to the same
time in the future and bring him back, instead of
going one day in the past and preventing Jack the
Ripper from stealing his time machine in the first place.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
Yeah, Like that might have been a wiser choice, but
it wouldn't have made for his fun of motion picture.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
Yeah yeah, just different storytelling sensibilities. And ultimately, I mean,
I think it comes down to what is it that
the storyteller really wants us to think about. In this case,
I think they want us to think about the qualities
of the present age in which the movie was made,
sort of the arc of history, and how that would
be sort of metabolized by somebody from the past with

(01:09:51):
utopian ideals and things like that, And it wants to
tell that kind of story more than it wants to
tell the kind of story about the power that would
be granted by a time machine and how people would
use that power.

Speaker 1 (01:10:05):
Yeah. Yeah. My final note on this film is that
there's a scene later on where HG. Wells is using
a phone booth. Oh wait, let me back up. Another
great point in this film where I was laughing out
loud and disturbing my wife while she's trying to work
in the next room. Was the whole scene with the
garbage disposal. Like, there's a scene where somebody goes to
use a garbage disposal and you just see the hand.

(01:10:26):
It turns out it's not HG. Wells, But you're like,
oh no, don't let HG. Wells use the garbage disposal.
He is not ready for this technology.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
Very good point. Yeah, and he's repeatedly confused by phones,
though he eventually gets the hang of them.

Speaker 4 (01:10:39):
M m.

Speaker 3 (01:10:40):
But yeah, there's a great part where he goes to
a telephone booth. And there's some like graffiti that I
think is supposed to display the sort of like violence
and callousness of the age.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
Yes, it says eat razor blades, which is great because
it's one of the I love it when movie graffiti
is like clearly orchestrated. It doesn't feel like an organic
bit of legit graffiti art from the age, like this
is the prop department. But it feels perfect for this film,
Like it feels in line with the sort of worries

(01:11:12):
about the future and the present that are inherent in
this tale of Jack the Ripper traveling through time. All right, well,
we're gonna probably go and close it out here. Obviously,
we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you
have not seen Time after time, well lucky you. It's
widely available on disc and as a digital purchase or rental,
or a physical rental if you have a video store

(01:11:34):
like say Videodrome in your area. As of this recording,
it's currently streaming on HBO Max in the US, so
if you sign into that app, into that app, if
you use that service, you can skip all the Mortal
Kombat and Suicide Squad stuff, go right to the classics.
They really have a great selection of older films on there.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
Oh yeah, I've lately been impressed by the selection of
older movies on HBO Max. Thumbs up on that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:57):
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Weird House Cinema, you'll find it on Fridays
and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're
primarily a science podcast, but on Fridays we put aside
most of the science discussion. I guess there's been more
of it in here since we're talking about time travel,
but generally Fridays those are our days to just talk
about weird films, and thus.

Speaker 3 (01:12:19):
Here we are huge thanks as always to our wonderful
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just
to say hello. You can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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