Science Fiction Trivia

[Commander McLane]

Ah well, I tried to retreat from the "I can out obscure you" approach.

It's not so much a trivia challenge these days as a Google challenge...

Well, basically it's a matter of perspective. For me Dr. Who is completely and utterly obscure; I have never in my life watched a minute of it. It's not part of German TV, as it is of English TV.

To a great extent anglo-american pop-culture references (and that's what trivia are mostly about) are chinese to people from other parts of the world, and vice versa. And even if English is our common language on these boards, we are not an anglo-american community. Personally I see these questions as an opportunity to broaden my horizon. And questions from a non-anglo-american background provide an opportunity for non-anglo-american people to score, who usually don't have a snowflake-in-hell chance to answer anything about some Hugo-award winning anglo-american book from whatever decade.

Or, to put it in your words: one man's trivia challenge is another man's Google challenge—and I for one find myself far to often (read: practically always) on the Google-end of the scale.

Anyway, another hint: The time machine used by the scientists is installed in a car—but it could hardly be farther away from a DeLorean.

[Cody]

A question, McLane… is this a German TV series/film from the seventies?
That clue rings a bell… I was living in (West) Germany in those days, and watching some local TV.

[CheeseRedux]

Ooh, seventies! That explains it!

(remember, I said "continental" and "obscure").

A-ha! In other words it's German and from the 60's!

Not necessarily. (The continent does is fact comprise of more countries than Germany*, and it does in fact have more history than the 1960's*. )


*Believe it or not!

[Commander McLane]

Actually it's eighties. And it was shown, but not made in Germany (but parts of the "future" were filmed in the Netherlands).

[Commander McLane]

Nothing so far?

The way of preventing the global disaster is through a formula which the most genial physicist of all times wrote down in his youth. Unfortunately it was lost in an accident, and he only mentioned the fact in his memoirs many years later. Hence "mythical".

So the team of time travelers have to go exactly to the (short) period between the writing and destruction of the formula.

[Cody]

Is the time machine installed in a VW Transporter?

[Commander McLane]

Sorry, I was away for a couple of days.

Is the time machine installed in a VW Transporter?

No, actually it was a Lada Niva.

[Wyvern Mommy]

could it be "die besucher" ?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165019/

[Commander McLane]

Wow, another thread resurrection!

And you get the first price on top of that. Absolutely correct!

[Wyvern Mommy]

who had 12 doors opened for him in order to accept that the weather is the same out there?

[Rxke]

Petronius?

(My girlfriend's favourite SF, because of that cat )

[Wyvern Mommy]

One winter (...) my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. I doubt if it is there any longer, (...) but we liked it then, Pete and I. The lack of plumbing made the rent low and what had been the dining room had a good north light for my drafting board.
The drawback was that the place had eleven doors to the outside.
Twelve, if you counted Pete's door. I always tried to arrange a door of his own for Pete-in this case a board fitted into a window in an unused bedroom and in which I had cut a cat strainer just wide enough for Pete's whiskers. I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats. I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.
Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred. But he would not use his door when there was snow on the ground.
While still a kitten, all fluff and buzzes, Pete had worked out a simple philosophy. I was in charge of quarters, rations, and weather; he was in charge of everything else. But he held me especially responsible for weather. Connecticut winters are good only for Christmas cards; regularly that winter Pete would check his own door, refuse to go out it because of that unpleasant white stuff beyond it (he was no fool), then badger me to open a people door.
He had a fixed conviction that at least one of them must lead into summer weather. Each time this meant that I had to go around with him to each of eleven doors, held it open while he satisfied himself that it was winter out that way, too, then go on to the next door, while his criticisms of my mismanagement grew more bitter with each disappointment.
Then he would stay indoors until hydraulic pressure utterly forced him outside. When he returned the ice in his pads would sound like little clogs on the wooden floor and he would glare at me and refuse to purr until he had chewed it all out... whereupon he would forgive me until the next time.
But he never gave up his search for the Door into Summer.

Incidentally, the opening chapter of "The Door into Summer" is my favorite piece of literature, too.

[Wyvern Mommy]

shouldn't -someone- be asking a question now?

[Rxke]

errrr....

an 'anomalous' guy with a redhead and a red guy (no, really) at his side.

Name of the creator of the series

Author is British, BTW.

[Disembodied]

Chris Carter?

Edit: obviously not, no ...