The Timekeeper

Some attractions get a narrator; this one got Robin Williams. This post preserves the complete show audio of The Timekeeper, the Circle-Vision film that brought time travel to Tomorrowland in 1994 — Williams at full improvisational tilt as a manic inventor, Rhea Perlman as his nine-eyed camera robot, and Bruce Broughton’s score carrying an audience standing in the round through all of history. The Timekeeper was the first Circle-Vision film ever built around a story, and it still sounds like nothing else in the parks.

Born in Paris, Raised in Tomorrowland

The show began life in France. It premiered as Le Visionarium on April 12, 1992 — the day Disneyland Paris opened — in Discoveryland, that park’s answer to Tomorrowland, where Imagineering built it as the new park’s showcase: a Circle-Vision theater whose film broke from travelogue tradition by adding characters and a plot. A Tokyo Disneyland version followed in 1993, and the Magic Kingdom edition opened on November 21, 1994, in the theater briefly renamed the Transportarium, its film titled From Time to Time; a few months later the theater became the Tomorrowland Metropolis Science Centre and the show took the name it kept. The room itself had been Tomorrowland’s movie house since 1971, showing the Circle-Vision travelogues America the Beautiful, Magic Carpet ‘Round the World and American Journeys — worthy films, but films in which nothing ever happened to anyone. This show changed that: for the first time, the nine screens had a story to tell, characters to follow, and jokes that landed.

Robin Williams Is The Timekeeper

The Timekeeper himself — a gleaming Audio-Animatronic in a suit of exposed circuitry, designed with Williams in mind and voiced by him, improvisation and all — stood in the theater, dispatching his flying camera 9-Eye, so named for the nine cameras whose images filled the nine screens surrounding the audience. Her nine lenses stood for the nine cameras that film a Circle-Vision picture, one for each screen. Rhea Perlman’s 9-Eye is the show’s eyes and ours: across a twenty-minute show she darts from a Jurassic swamp to Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop, where Franco Nero’s Leonardo inspects her as a most curious machine, and on to the 1900 Paris Exposition, where Michel Piccoli’s Jules Verne stows away to the present day, meets Jeremy Irons’s H. G. Wells, and is returned to his own century delighted and converted. A young Mozart pounds a harpsichord somewhere along the way.

Photo: the Timekeeper figure — this post’s long-standing featured image.

That Irons played Wells carried a private joke for the park-sharp: that very same season, his voice was narrating Spaceship Earth over at EPCOT. Broughton’s music does the heavy lifting between the jokes — a proper film score, recorded to fill a theater in the round; he became Disney’s composer of choice for such films, later scoring CinéMagique for the Paris resort as well.

Seasonal, Then Gone

The Timekeeper slipped into seasonal operation in April 2001, opening only in Tomorrowland’s busiest weeks, and closed for good on February 26, 2006 — the last of the three versions to fall silent, after Tokyo in 2002 and Paris in 2004. Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor tells jokes in the room today, and its host figure later turned up on display inside EPCOT’s Innoventions — which is where this post’s featured photograph of him was taken.

Photo: LEONARDO DASILVA, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Press play and stand in the round once more. And for the other survivor of Tomorrowland’s 1994 reinvention, the flight ride nearby lives on in its latest form as Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin.