The Flying Delorean

Nestled away in our children's video collection, often found resting safely between a bevy of Veggie Tales videos and a few Disney DVDs, is a video-tape that contains two episodes from a cartoon series entitled The Flying House.

For those who aren't familiar with this particularly obscure series, which appears to have aired on CBN during the 1970s, the show is based on the premise that three kids (named Justin, Angie, and - no joke here - "Corky") stumble onto a mad inventor ("Professor Bumble") and his whacky robot, who has created (you guessed it!) a flying house which also happens to be capable of time travel.

By some happenstance that I presume transpires on another video, the house journeys back to Bible times where the kids find themselves repeatedly encountering Jesus and his disciples in their quest to return home.

Needless to say, wackiness ensues, generously sprinkled with bite size chunks of New Testament teachings.

But, believe it or not, I haven't even reached the part that makes it truly bizarre: the whole thing is done in a Japanamation style that would make the producers of the Pokemon series turn green with envy, right down to the hasty shouting of virtually every line and the abysmal lip synching.

You have to see it to believe it. Its just downright surreal. Think: Veggie Tales meets Pokemon, without Phil Vischer's sense of humor.

But today, as I popped the tape in for Becca after an afternoon trip to the park, it suddenly occurred to me that - if Robert Zemeckis - director and writer of the Back to the Future films ever saw these cartoons, he could probably do something really cool with this premise.

Just imagine: Marty McFly and Dr. Emmit Brown bungling through two-plus millinea of biblical history in a time-traveling Delorean, encountering key characters and constantly having to clean up their tracks as they disrupt various events ("Great Scott! Marty, do you realize what this means?! If Mary and Joseph don't get back to the temple before sundown, they'll never realize what their son was doing all of this time! Pages upon pages of valuable biblical knowledge will be lost forever!" "Doc! Look! Luke 2 is already vanishing from my bible!")

Or...just try to visualize an episode where Marty accidentally leaves an MP3 player, loaded with vintage Carpenter's music, in a Philistine general's travel bag. Suddenly, these powerful, ancient conquerers become 70's-soft-rock-hippies. What would have to be done to correct that blunder?

Another hip time-traveling film series, of course, began with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. This premise also holds more hope, I think, than the Flying House. Just imagine Bill and Ted, on a quest to do a class report on the Babylonians, accidentally finding their lives threatened if they don't fake their way through interpreting Nebuchanezer's dreams. ("Dude! Its all about the smoke on the water!" "Yeah, and FIIIIIREEEE in the SKYYYYYY!")


What do you think? If only the producers of the Flying House had me around when they were dreaming up the concept of their show. After all, everyone knows that houses can't fly, much less time travel. Delorians, on the other hand...