Did you know Disney World once had an attraction that featured the voice of Robin Williams, Jeremy Irons, time travel, a meeting between literary legends H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, AND a sassy flying robot voiced by Rhea Perlman?
In retrospect, the “Disney Decade” was a fascinating time for the company’s theme parks. A slew of projects were announced in the early 1990s, only to be canceled or scaled back massively due to the initial financial failure of the EuroDisney resort. However, some interesting projects made it to fruition, including The Timekeeper.
I’ve been visiting Disney’s theme parks for over 30 years, and during that time, I’ve been lucky enough to experience many attractions that have since been shuttered. However, few have stayed with me the way The Timekeeper has.
Originally opened with Disneyland Paris in 1992 as Le Visionarium: Un Voyage à Travers le Temps, the attraction combined animatronics with a Circle-Vision film to craft a narrative story about time travel through European history. Then-CEO Michael Eisner referred to it as the “showcase attraction” of the park’s Dicoveryland.
Led by an animatronic of the Timekeeper, guests would be taken on a journey looking through the nine eyes of Nine-Eye (a way to use the Circle-Vision’s unique nine-camera and screen technique to tell a narrative story). During the film, the Timekeeper sends Nine-Eye to various locations in the past, present, and future, including the Jurassic Period, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Renaissance workshop, both the 1878 and 1900 Exposition Universelles in Paris, documenting a meeting between H.G. Wells (portrayed by Jeremy Irons) and Jules Verne (portrayed by Michel Piccoli), and then taking Verne on a trip to the future, including 1990s Paris and New York. The show then ended with a trip to Paris in 2189.
Within two years of its Parisian debut, the show had also been installed at Tokyo Disneyland (where it was known as From Time to Time) and the Magic Kingdom (where it was initially also known as From Time to Time and set in the Transportarium, before those names were changed to The Timekeeper and the Tomorrowland Metropolis Science Center respectively). It’s this English version, which included performances by Robin Williams as The Timekeeper and Cheers veteran Rhea Perlman as Nine-Eye that has become a favorite of a generation of Disney Adults who grew up with the show as an anchor of Tomorrowland.
Despite the attraction’s initial buzz and the U.S. version’s star-studded voice cast, the variations of The Timekeeper had a relatively short lifespan. A version planned for Anaheim’s Disneyland was planned but never built, the Tokyo version closed in 2002, and the original Paris version closed in 2004, with both replaced by variations of the Buzz Lightyear blaster ride.
The Magic Kingdom version actually lasted the longest, technically being open until the mid-00s. However, it had operated on a seasonal basis since the Spring of 2001, and had seen editing to remove shots of the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks. The Timekeeper finally closed for good in 2006, being replaced by Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor in 2007.
Despite its comparatively short lifespan, The Timekeeper has stuck with many Disney Adults of my generation thanks to its unique use of Circle-Vision, steampunk time travel aesthetic, and a well-remembered Robin Williams performance. Stay tuned to AllEars for more explorations of Disney history.
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Do you remember The TimeKeeper? Let us know in the comments below.
I’m with you on this one. Time travel is my favourite topic within sci-fi. In the DLP version, the film was slightly longer than the WDW version because it had extra scenes.