Time traveling is a pretty common theme in sci-fi and geeky topics in general, where the heroes often jump around in time trying to solve problems and often are trying to do nothing more than get back when they started.

Today's quiz has 20 possible points, plus a bonus.

1. (1 point) Name the TV show revolving around a doctor who travels through time in machine disguised as a phone booth?

2. (2 pts) In this excellent adventure movie a young Keanu Reeves stars as half of a time traveling duo that use a time machine, also disguised as a phone booth, to learn about history. They are helped in this task by Rufus, a man from the future who gives them the machine to use.

Name the Movie.

Name the famous Comedian who plays Rufus

3. (2 pts) This cartoon show and its successor ran for 5 seasons in the late 50’s and 60’s and featured a recurring segment starring a talking dog and his companion, a boy named Sherman.

What is the common name for this show?

What is the name of the dog?

4. (2 pts) This cartoon show ran far longer than the five seasons the show in the last question did, but during the fifth annual installment of its Halloween Special it features a character who’s mechanical incompetence cause him to turn his Toaster into a time machine while repairing it, eventually causing him to alter time so much by the Butterfly Effect that it begins raining donuts.

What is the name of this cartoon series?

Which character ‘repaired’ the toaster?

5. (1 pts) This 2004 movie dealing with time travel stars Ashton Kutcher in one of his rare non-comedy roles, and deals with a common theme of time travel, that to change the past only makes things worse.

6. (2 pts) This book, written way back in 1895 and mostly taking place about then and in year 802,701 A.D. is generally considered the first major time travel story. The main character of the story eventually travels all the way to the year 30 Million AD where the only life left on a Dying Earth are large red crabs and the butterflies they chase.

What’s the name the Book?

… and the Author?

7. (3 pts) Many sci-fi plots are set in the Dying Earth sub-genre, but are particularly common as one of the various, often dystopian futures encountered by time travelers. Just as common is the Twenty Minutes in the Future Crapsack world ruled by homicidal machines bent on enslaving or exterminating humanity. Probably the best known of these, this series of movies features a time machine that only works on naked people, had its first installment come out in 1984.

What the name of that first movie?

Who played the killer robot in that movie?

What was the name of the character in that series played by various actors including Edward Furlong and Christian Bale?

8. (2 pts) This famous writer wrote about time travel and robots, especially the latter, though typically his robots were anything but homicidal, his best known work dealing with time travel was titled, ‘The End of Eternity’. His other debatably well known time travel work did involve killer robots, as well as mutants, though he did not write it but rather revised the English translation of this French animated sci-fi movie made in 1988, whose English version includes voices done by a number of notable actors, including Penn and Teller, in which Teller actually speaks.

Who is the writer?

What was the name (English or French) of the 1988 animated film?

9. (2 pts) Comic books of course have no shortage of time travelers, robots, or mutants. The X-Men and associated works feature quite a few of these but the most well known are a pair of mutants though both were raised in very different times. One has a name of rather religious significance, but the other is a near messianic personage in his own times and has a much more down to earth name. Both have also appeared in animated shows as well as comic books. This being comics though, both characters have timelines more tangled up than the cables behind the TV’s you’d have watched them on.

Name the character with the religious name?

… and the other one?

10. (3 pts) Killer robots and mutants are pretty common in the time travel but so are killer cyborgs. This time traveler, played by Tom Baker from 1974 to 1981, regularly traveled through time and relative dimensions in space often fighting a species of genocidal cyborgs from the planet Skaro who sought to exterminate just about everyone.

Name the character

… and the name of his time machine?

… and the genocidal species of cyborgs?

Bonus: This time travel movie features whales and transparent aluminum, and much of it takes place in San Francisco... name the movie.

You can go straight to the answers, or if you enjoyed this, try out some of the earlier quizzes:

... and the Scif-FI Circle Quiz

Questions, suggestions, and comments are always welcome, they help me guess if the quizzes are too hard/easy and come up with other themes.