included · Mechanical
Time at the Top
14-year old Susan Shawson travels back in time in her building's elevator. As altered by a retired physicist living in her building, it transports her from Philadelphia of 1998 back to the same place in 1881. There she meets Victoria Walker, a girl her own age in need of assistance with her own family problems. Gradually discovering the power of her time machine, Susan, Victoria, and her young brother Robert travel back and forth in time and succeed in changing both the past and the future.
Science Fiction, Adventure, Family, Fantasy, Mystery
Before you choose
What kind of time-travel story is this?
Time travel drives much of the story.
Meets the archive’s time-travel criteria. The mechanism is classified as Mechanical.
Why the archive makes this assessment (spoilers)
The children repeatedly use the elevator between 1998 and 1881 to change their parents' family problems in both eras.
A physicist modifies a building elevator into a time machine linking 1998 and 1881.
Check the supporting sources ↓An editorial assessment based on the archive’s documented plot research.
Explore other films in this classification →Scale, legacy & time
The scores
Weighted archive score
high confidence
Aggregate source ratings
How Titan works
Titan combines the archive’s quality, audience and legacy base with the significance of time travel. It is an index, not a score out of 100, and is distinct from the FMV archive’s scoring model.
Titan = base × [0.20 + 0.80 × (time-travel score ÷ 10)²]
This film: 34.29 base × 71.2% weighting.
Partial inputs flag incomplete source metadata. Provisional weighting flags a time-travel assessment that remains uncertain; it receives no additional confidence penalty.
The evidence
Research & sources
Research notes may reveal plot details.
These sources support the plot facts and catalog research. The numerical scores are the archive’s judgments, not ratings supplied by these sources.
Cast: Timothy Busfield, Elisha Cuthbert, Gabrielle Boni, Matthew Harbour, Lynne Adams
Edition by edition
Releases & formats
0 cataloged editions. Narrow by format, then check region, audio and subtitles. Missing specifications mean unknown, not absent.
No release editions are cataloged for this film yet. This does not mean that no release exists.