1h 34min | Animation, Adventure, Family | 23 June 1965 | Color, ws
Director: Arthur Rankin Jr.
Stars: Larry D. Mann, Billie Mae Richards, Alfie Scopp.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192803/
Watched online, ok print.
9 songs in the Soundtracks.
Stop motion puppetry.
For a genius who invents a "magic" time machine, this professor has a poor sense of order. He has a list of events he wants to take credit for, but he hops around history in random fashion: Tombstone AZ to defeat Buffalo Bill at quick draw (I thought he was expert at sure shot), usurp Christopher Columbus as discoverer of the New World, supplant King Arthur, create the great stone monuments of Egypt in his image, invent fire (with his likeness painted on a cave wall). Seems like you should go in sequence, read the new history books to check the effect, then go to the next in sequence.
But it doesn't matter, of course, because the monkey the inventor trained to speak has escaped his cage, and recognizing the inventor's evil, stole his plans and found a random little boy who understands relativity, the inventor's diagrams, and builds a duplicate "magic" time machine. So they chase the inventor through time, thwarting his efforts to take credit for these milestones of history. And the kid does this just so he won't have to relearn the new version of history. Fortunately, they're finished before he has to leave for the first day of school, and he's not even tired.
I wish I could say the songs had clever lyrics, or something was witty about this, but I really can't. No idea why it has a 7.3 rating on IMDb (with 58 votes). Not sufficiently annoying to rate 4.
indie, dir. Rankin; 5
