Time Hoppers: The Silk Road

If you remember the "Tomorrow People" (1973) then you will get the gist of this family adventure. "Layla" and her father have been forced to hide out at a secret lab with her cousin "Khalid" and where she swiftly befriends "Aysha" and "Abdullah". What goes on in this place? Well it turns out that they are soon to be guinea pigs in a time travel trial. You see, they get a special watch that they can adjust, join hands then off they go. On one such trip, they accidentally travel back to a Baghdad of the 9th century. No problem, they simply have to recalibrate their gizmos and return home. Well, no - not quite. One of them has managed to lose his and it has fallen into the malevolent hands of the disgraced alchemist 'Fasid". Once he figures out just what this does, he realises that he can use knowledge from the future to influence the past and, of course, make him filthy rich and extremely powerful. The kids now have to use their base-tracker to find where "Fasid" is going and then track him down to retrieve their device before his nefarious scheme quite possibly robs them of their own futures, too. Now the execution here isn't the best and there is a great deal of dialogue, but the formula of sending them to and fro along the timeline gives them (and those watching) a gentle history lesson about the great cultures of the Middle East whilst ensuring there is plenty of "Scooby Do" style mischief; a dastardly villain and some adequately animated slapstick thrown in, too. Whether it will hold the attention of youngsters today is a fair question, but for a film that can't have had much of a budget nor did have much by way of creative impetus, it's still quite a watchably episodic feature.