I just really miss Robin Williams, you guys.
This is the attraction more than any other where I think I'm making an irresponsible emotional allowance to sneak it onto the list, knowing full well what is sitting there left out on the Honorable Mention section. I will probably actually do an Honorable Mentions post at the end, and some of the attractions in that group are great. And I left them out to make room for The Timekeeper.
This is my list, though, and while I may be striving for some manner of objectivity, I also get to decide I'm going to write about the attraction where Robin Williams was an eccentric robot -- and way funnier than the Dreamworks version -- and Jeremy Irons played H.G. Wells.
This was obviously the height of Williams's career. Fresh off maybe the most iconic voice acting performance ever in Aladdin, I honestly believe he maybe topped himself here. Timekeeper isn't as flat funny as the Genie, but the manic energy the Williamsbot expresses in the show made for a truly memorable parks character, and took the attraction from a simple stationary viewing to one full of personality. The loss of Williams, and the nostalgia for the peak of his career, is a lot of what drives my fond memories of this attraction. While I always loved it, missing Robin has made me miss the attraction more.
For those who missed out, Timekeeper was just a circlevision 360 show. Reflections of China and O Canada, you're most of the way there. You stood in a theater with nine screens showing a 360 degree film. The technology was pioneered by legend Ub Iwerks in the 60s, and this particular theater was an opening day attraction at Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom.
On opening day, it played a show called America the Beautiful, which I know I saw, but have no memory of. The circlevision concept is all well and good, perfectly pretty and enjoyable, and they are definitely not bad attractions, they just aren't really going to sniff this best-of list (spoiler).
It's what Timekeeper did with that theater that puts it here.
Unlike the other shows, Timekeeper's theater had a host; a really cool looking animatronic inventor, who had designed a time machine. Rather than taking you through time, however, he instead sent his nine-eyed assistant, 9 Eye (Cheers's Rhea Pearlman). Through 9 Eye, we saw the past across the nine screens in the theater, while Williams's frenetic narration described the events. Branching from the age of the dinosaurs through the industrial revolution, with a visit to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and finally ending in a trip to the future, the show was lighthearted, fun, visually gorgeous.
In 1992, a version of Timekeeper opened in Disneyland Paris called Un Voyage à Travers le Temps. There, it served as sort of a thematic glue to help bring home the concept of the Verne/Wells inspired Discoveryland. Here, it served the same job, but as an anchor for the phenomenal 1994 overhaul of Tomorrowland.
Perhaps the fact that it's not the original should knock it down a peg and make room for [attraction redacted], but this one had something the original didn't: that inspired performance by Robin Williams bringing a cool looking audio animatronic to life. Also, I completely forgot this wasn't the original until I had started writing these blog posts and it's too late now.
Timekeeper survived for just over a decade, the last several years of that seasonal, and now sits as something of an oddity in parks history. Finding pictures or researching it poses quite a challenge; there just isn't that much out there, and it's not often discussed or pondered upon. That is part of why I wanted to do this, though; I wanted to look back and scrounge corners of the Internet for information on attractions we have seemingly forgotten. This was a unique use of a classic Disney parks design, though, and an important aspect of the land it sat in from a storyline standpoint.
The audio for this attraction tends to be pretty common on streaming services like Subsonic Radio, though, and it's easily found on YouTube. That's a big reason why it probably sits here on this list, and so fondly in my heart. I don't need to tell you this, but Williams just had such a gift for fast-paced, unpredictable delivery, and managed to make even mundane sentences something to smile about. He brought all of that skill to bear here, and as wonderful as it was in its own time, it evokes even more warm nostalgia and wistful thoughts now as an important piece of recorded legacy. Listening to that absurdist, frantic voice over from a lost star is an emotional experience, a tremendous artifact from the best of someone gone too soon.
Thank you for the voyage, Robin.
Kommentare