Mad scientist Don Sindulfo and his best friend Benjamin take off in Sindulfo’s flying time machine along with Sindulfo’s niece, her maid, a troop of Spanish soldiers, and a bordelloful of French strumpets for madcap adventures at the 1860 Battle of Téouan, Queen Isabella’s Spain, nondescript locales in the eleventh and seventh centuries, 3rd-century China, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, and a biblical time shortly after the flood.

After taking a year of Spanish at the University of Colorado, I undertook a three-year project of translating Gaspar’s novel to English, which is available in a pdf file for your reading pleasure. Even with the unpleasant twist at the end, it was still a fine, farcical romp through history.

After falling asleep, Professor Chump finds himself being chased by dinosaurs and curvaceous cavewomen. Intended as a dream, I suppose. In any case, this is one of a series of live-action films based on E. T. Reed’s cartoons from Punch. I ran into several websites, including Palaeontology Online, that blamed this one movie for cementing the juxtaposition of dinosaurs and men in the cinema forevermore. According to IMDb trivia, the dinosaur special effects were accomplished with simple costumes.

The plot of . . . “When Knights Were Bold,” is more or less original as modern comedies go. It circles round the love affair of a man and a maid. In the first act, a very twentieth century one, the hero, despite the pronounced encouragement of the heroine, fails to screw up his courage to the proposing point. When alone he can declare his love manfully enough, but in the maid’s presence he becomes as shy as an early Victorian school miss. As the curtain falls, he writes himself down as an ass, takes a big drink, smokes a cigarette, and—dreams.

Act II represents the dream. It is the medieval age—the age of chivalry, of bold, bad barons and gallant knights. An ancestor of the hero is one of these latter. His love story is depicted vividly. There is nothing lackadaisical about the lovemaking. The bold knight finally seizes the maiden in his arms and carries her off bodily to the altar in the face of strenuous opposition.

In act III the twentieth century again appears. There hero wakes up and follows, so far as modernity will let him, the example of his ancestory shown him in the second act.

— San Francisco Call, 14 December 1906

. . . we thought [Kenilworth Castle] might account for the cold in the head which was the cause of Sir Guy’s tribulations [possibly his dream or trip to the past]. . . . The story of the play has been followed closely, and the humour of its situations and much of its dialogue skilfully preserved, while the more spacious setting provides opportunities for many effective scenes which add greatly to its interest.

We have sparse information about this silent film apart from a note in Alan Goble’s The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film, which lists the 1907 [sic] play When Knights Were Bold as the source of the 1180-meter film, directed by Oreste Visalli, released by Aquila Film, and featuring Jeanne Nolly, Giulio Del Torre, and Claudia Zambuto.

Unk tells a story to his two nephews about the time when he and Joe visited the stone-covered grave and haunted cabin of Mad Dick where they (and their dog, Soxie) were able to view the prehistoric past through a queer looking instrument that accidentally allowed T. Rex onto Slumber Mountain. Sadly, at the end, Unk suggests that it was all a dream, but what does he know?!

The IMDb lists Herbert M. Dawley as a co-writer, but Wikipedia lists him as only the producer. The initial three-reel film premiered at the Strand Theater, but an unhappy Dawley cut it from over 40 minutes to about 12. Around six extra minutes were later restored by the Dinosaur Museum of Blanding, Utah, in 2016, but the full version no longer exists.

We may never see this first movie adaptation of Twain’s story, since only three of the eight silent reels are known to still exist. The Yankee in this version is Martin Cavendish, who after reading Twain’s book, is knocked on the head by a burglar and slips into the time of Camelot. The result is high comedy coupled with a romantic interest and replete with motorcycles, explosions, Model T Fords, telephones, indoor plumbing, and lassos at a jousting tournament. As we did for Twain’s original, we classify the story as science fiction for the Yankee’s attempts at bringing modern technology to the distant past. And yes, the hero predicts a solar eclipse to save his life.

One review at Silent Hollywood indicates that the ending has Martin awakening from a dream and there is no explicit mention of actual time travel. With this in mind, we’re marking the time travel as debatable. Oh, and Mark Twain himself appears in the film, played by Karl Formes.

Of course, this early talkie shouldn't be in our list because the writer himself—as Cosmo Brown—says it’s all just a dream, but when one of our correspondents pointed out that none other than Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont starred in  The Dancing Cavalier (née The Dueling Cavalier), we couldn’t resist. Note: Lina Lamont’s voice was dubbed over by writer Kathy Selden, but due to Lamont’s underhanded ploys, Selden went uncredited in the original release.

This is a very free adaptation of the merry farce in which James Welch made so great a success, and with the greater scope of the screen, with some characters omitted and new ones introduced, there remains little beyond the main idea to make any comparison with the original more than a matter of antiquarian history. As, however, the majority of modern picture audiences will never have seen the original play, the film will be judged on its own merits, and there is little doubt that its fantasy and quaint humour will recommend it to popular favour.

— The Bioscope, 6 February 1929

Two stories, millennia apart, connected by office worker Paul Feron in a 20th-century New York heatwave and Roman gladiator Ferronius in a heatwave of his own. Time travel? Or a dream?

In this first talkie adaptation of the 1906 play, Sir Guy sings a song about his love Lady Rowena and immediately falls asleep, only to appear in the Age of Chivalry, where he tap dances (still attired in his 20th century tuxedo) and is now beguiled by Rowena of days gone by.

A blackmailer demonstrates his ability to send an entire city back to prehistoric times.

This story could be a fantasy about Egyptologist Ted Craven, who studies Pharaoh Ras Hati-Ka so deeply that he eventually becomes the ancient Egyptian; but there are clues that the whole story is only a delusion in Craven’s overworked mind. Or perhaps it’s all a dream of the pharaoh himself.

Yes! They had sf nerds even back in the 1950s, but they called them “born fools.” In this case, the born fool is Ebenezer, who believes that a secretive new stranger is building a time machine.

Imagine you’re a young boy in 1921 Cambridge when your equally young first love dies in a deep well. What would you do? Naturally, you’d vow to become a great scientist in an artsy movie so you could go back in time to alter the tragic event.

Apparently, people in early 20th-century Cambridge espouse many wise thoughts about time, parallel universes that encompass every possible combination of events again and again, and something about every decision every made creating a branch point. In the end, it's difficult to make a cohesive model of time from the plotline of Dimensions, but we tried our best to do so in our plot notes.

Under severe stress, Agent Aram Mojtabai decides to try psychedelic therapy. Not realizing that he’s tripping, he finds himself repeating a violent time loop.

While in a coma, a patient hears everything in the hospital room for 50 years.