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.

We've got the evil Professor Tode (who modifies an atom-smasher into a time machine that travels to the Palaeolithic and to Atlantis), a fatherly older professor, his beautiful young daughter (menaced by evil Tode), casually written racist pronouncements (by Rousseau), and our hero scientist, the dashing Jim Dent. But my favorite sentence was the brief description of quantum mechanics, which I didn’t expect in a 1930 science fiction tale.

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

The writer, David L. Hewitt, took chunks of plot and script from The Time Travelers (1964), swapped the blonde for a brunette, swapped the accidental time gate for an accidental time rift that drags the whole lab through time as if it were a time ship, added a anachronistic dinosaur, and ended up with an unwatchable movie.

Like the 1964 version, this version has a brief mention that it’s impossible to change events that have already happened, but unlike the original, the montage at the end of the film is mere chaos that no longer reinforces the idea of a single deterministic, nonbranching timeline. Despite that, I enjoyed the consequences of the villainous character running into himself, but at the same time, I dismayed at the discussion of how meeting yourself could instantly cause a disastrous explosion or implosion or maybe something-or-other (the audio was unintelligible at 1:12) would cease to exist. (I pray that the space-time continuum wasn’t in peril).

In the cartoon version of the short story, Henry imagines that his time machine is an elaborate time ship, at least until his perfect little brother brings him out of his daydream and back to the real world of cardboard.

Each installment of Andy and Terry’s Treehouse series sees the house grow upward, but what if the house never had a proper building permit? No problem, if you’ve got a time machine in a wheelie trash bin! Caution: Important detours along the way may be necessary to save antkind and The Time Machine.