Elizabethan Era

Tag Area: Real-World Setting
Feature Film

The Road to Yesterday

Bickering newlyweds Kenneth and Malena Paulton are thrown back to previous lives in Elizabethan England where they are a knight and a gypsy. The film is loosely based on the earlier play of the same name by Dix and Sutherland.

Safety note: Do not attempt this movie’s method of creating a timeslip—via a fiery train crash—at home. —Michael Main
I know I love you, Ken! But today—during the marriage service—something seemed to reach out of the Past that made me—afraid!
Jetta Goudal clutches her bedclothes with a wide-eyed Joseph Schildkraut outside her door.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Man Who Never Lived

Strange Nicholas van Allensteen joins with a universal mind to journey back before the start of time. —Michael Main
“[. . .] This is an experiment in mental monism, you know, along the time-space continuum that forms material totality.”
I looked at Nicholas and, despite all my conversatons with him, I did not comprehend.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Time Flies

After Susie Barton’s husband invested their nest egg in Time Ferry Services, Ltd., it appears that the only way she’ll ever get anything out of it is by giving a performance in Elizabethan times.

This is the earliest appearance of a time machine—the “Time Ball”—in film that we know of. And based on the name Time Ferry Services, Ltd, it may also be the earliest film mention of a time travel agency. —Michael Main
Normally, we drift with the current and travel downstream and into what we call the future. Now, if we equip our little boat with a motor, we can speed our passage downstream into the future or, breasting the current, travel upstream to view again those selfsame scenes that were passed by humanity ages ago.
A cartoonish Tommy Handley pops out of a porthole on a spherical time machine.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Jubilee

  • written and directed by Derek Jarman
  • (at movie theaters, UK, February 1978)
In this early punk movie, John Dee, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, calls forth the spirit Ariel who transports Dee and the queen to an anarchistic and largely unintelligible) England not far beyond the 1970s. —Michael Main
Now shall one king rise up against another. And there shall be bloodshed throughout the whole world, fighting between the devil, his kingdom, and the kingdom of light.
Black-and-white drawing of a punk Britannia sneering at us all.
  • Fantasy
  • Experimental
  • Satire
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Bill & Ted I

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

The Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan, are the subjects of time-traveler Rufus’s mission, but instead they end up using his machine to write a history report to save their band, Wyld Stallyns. —Michael Main
Most excellent!
Alex Winter (A K A Bill) and Keanu Reeves (A K A Ted) sit on top of a phone booth crammed with Napoleon and other historical figures in orbit around Earth.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Early Chapter Book

The Magic Tree House 25

Stage Fright on a Summer Night

The two young tree house time travelers go to the Globe Theatre in Shakespearian times where they play the parts of two fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and discover their first kind of magic without wands. —Michael Main
“’Tis,” said Wil “The queen pretends to be young and beautiful. Just as you pretended to be a boy, and the bear pretended to be an actor. You see, all the world’s a stage.”
Dressed in colorful green garb, young Jack and Annie take bows on a Shakespearian stage.
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

How to Stop Time

As a 400-something-year-old member of the Albatross Society, Tom Hazard ages less than a month for each year of life. But now, after falling in the 21st-century and butting heads with the Society, he seems to be on a mental trip that covers his entire life (but not an actual time traveling trip). —Michael Main
But as time goes by, at birthdays or other annual markers, people begin to notice you aren’t getting any older.
A silhouette dog and man sit on a sandy beach inside an hourglass, withg a giant rose growing up through the hourglass like a beanstalk.
  • Fantasy
  • No Time Phenomena