The Time Travelers

The Time Travelers (1964)

Step Through

Research scientists experimenting with time warps are accidentally propelled forward into an unbearable future.

Date of release
1964-10-29
TMDB
5.1 / 10 (86)
Runtime
1h 22m
Genres
Science Fiction, Adventure, Drama
Director
Ib Melchior

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $250K

The Time Travelers is a 1964 American science fiction film directed by Ib Melchior and starring Preston Foster, Philip Carey, Merry Anders, Steve Franken, and John Hoyt. The plot involves a group of scientists who find that, due to an electrical overload, their time-viewing screen suddenly allows them to travel through time.

Production

Production began in 1963 under the working title Time Trap. Shooting took place in Los Angeles (including at the University of Southern California campus) and Pisgah Crater.

Director Melchior was unable to secure an adequate budget to fully exploit the potential of the story line. In some scenes conjuring tricks are used to compensate for the lack of visual effects; for instance, in one uncut shot, a mask-wearing actor playing an android appears to have his head removed and replaced by another, before walking away.

At 44 minutes into the film Forrest J Ackerman appears briefly in a scene depicting several technicians working. Ackerman's only line is "Don't worry. I'm keeping our spacemen happy. Getting things squared away." The joke is a self-referential sight gag; his character is working on a device that turns a circular frame into a square frame. At the time, Ackerman was editing a science-fiction magazine titled Spacemen.

The film was one of several low-budget B movies that future Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (billed as 'William Zsigmond') shot during the 1960s. Zsigmond's close friend László Kovács was his camera operator on the film.

Animator Oskar Fischinger contributed to the film's visual effects.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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