A big ball of timey-wimey film (#SFWApro)

By happy coincidence, BETWEEN TIME AND TIMBUKTU: A Space Fantasy (1972) just showed up on YouTube this weekend. A delightfully weird one in which a young William Hickey wins a contest to have NASA send him into a time warp, then bounces around through scenes from Cat’s Cradle, Harrison Bergeron, Happy Birthday Wanda June and other Kurt Vonnegut stories. This came across more surreal in my teens, when I had no knowledge of the source material, but it’s still entertaining. “I’m not in control of my own destiny—I can hardly control my own bladder.”

KIM POSSIBLE: A Sitch in Time (2003) has the cartoon crimefighter’s Greatest Foes band together to steal the Tempus Simian idiol (“A—time monkey?”) leading to the bad guys trying to abort Kim’s Secret Origin before Shego finally wises up and conquers the world by sending Ron to Norway (“I got rid of the clown.”)! This would double-bill well with the Phineas and Ferb film for likewise showing the supporting cast turned into a heroic resistance (“Why is everyone in the future so ripped?”)—fun, though possibly not if you didn’t like the series. “Taking turns is the basic principle of preschool—the jungle law of daycare is behind us!”

GRIZZLY MOUNTAIN (1997) has two kids stumbling through a magical mountain cave into the past where they discover mountain man Dan Haggerty (playing a role very close to the Grizzly Adams character he played for two years on TV) is fighting to stop a greedy local developer doing the same thing to the mountain the kids’ father wants to do in the future. A stock kid adventure, with little to recommend it (even if I were a kid I doubt I’d say differently). “Is that why you were throwing this sparkly rocks at rattlesnakes?”

Apparently the movie cut a little too close to copyright as the opening credits of the sequel, ESCAPE TO GRIZZLY MOUNTAIN (1999) assure us that this is in no way, shape or form affiliated or based on the Grizzly Adams TV series. The movie  involves a troubled kid getting into more trouble (and of course going through the magic cave) when he tries to rescue an abused grizzly cub from a circus. Even more stock, though I was surprised that Haggerty quite enjoys a brief trip to the present-day. “It takes so much energy just to keep afloat.”

Despite the title, BEASTMASTER II: Through the Portal of Time(1991) doesn’t make the cut, as the Beastmaster’s realm is presented as a parallel world rather than a lost era of the past. This has Dar’s evil brother Wings Hauser entering our world to steal a nuclear weapon, with much emphasis on him and the Beastmaster (Marc Singer) shellshocked by TV, cars, rock music, scantily clad women and a marquee advertising Beastmaster II. Not up to the original or for that matter III, but nice to finally fill  my one gap in the series. With Sara Douglas as an evil sorceress (“I know, I know, you’ll cleave my black heart from my bosom.”) and Kari Wuhrer as a modern woman who helps Dar out. “I know now he’s of my blood—that explains why he’s so hard to kill.”