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I am trying to find the name of a old cartoon on Saturday mornings where I think a professor pulled the handle on a time machine and showcased historical times like dinosaurs, the western migration across America and like?

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    Was the professor covered in shaggy white hair and beard? Were there kind-of-recurring villains with prominent noses?
    – o.m.
    Dec 8, 2018 at 18:09
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    Was the professor actually a dog wearing glasses?
    – Spencer
    Dec 9, 2018 at 0:55
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    I know the series you're looking for but I can't remember the title either. I have a feeling that it wasn't its own show but a segment in another show. What happened in the show is a kid would come in to the professors lab and ask him a question that he didn't know the answer to, the professor would then go to his time machine to get the answer. The professor would then say something like "Let's ask my time machine" go over to the machine and pull the handle. We would then get the machine showing us pictures of whatever thing in history we were learning about while a voiceover told the story.
    – Michael Z
    Apr 26, 2020 at 1:23
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    I’m looking for this too. It’s not Peabody, or timberwood, or B2TF. There was no dog. He used to do this joke once in a while “ask a stupid question, you’ll get a smart answer”.
    – Dave
    Dec 31, 2020 at 17:29
  • Did each episode end with "Trizzle, trazzle, trozzle, trome, time for this one to come home" when the protagonist got into too much trouble?
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Dec 9, 2021 at 15:16

9 Answers 9

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How about Mr Peabody’s Improbable History? Fits your description, although it’s humorous and you didn’t mention that the professor is a dog.

wayback machine

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  • Worth noting that I've only ever seen this as part of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show -- usually with a segment of the titular serial, and one or more of this, Fractured Fairy Tales, and similar fare.
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Dec 9, 2021 at 15:07
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It is called The Wonderful Stories of Professor Kitzel.

The format of each short (5 minute) episode, of which one hundred and six were produced in all, was generally an opening discussion by the professor introducing the subject. He would then take the viewer to his time machine, pull a lever and the first series of drawings and commentary related to the subject would begin. Halfway through the story, the professor would interrupt the commentary to make some humorous remark, before returning to the narrative with an invitation to "Let's see what happened next." Each episode concluded with some humorous closing sequence.

One of the episodes

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7

Maybe it was Once Upon a Time... Man? Children's programming, history, a professor, a kind-of-time-machine.

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I hesitate to mention one of the worst cartoon series of all time but could it be The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang? (It matches the time frame and involved time travel).

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It could be Timberwood Tales (1991)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285407/episodes?season=1

It is about professor who is teaching kids about animals and dinosaurs. It is a mix of cartoon animation and live action images.

Look at five minute mark here:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4ps0qq

The other option is Back to the future - Tv Series (1991-1993)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_(TV_series)

It follows time travel adventures of Doc Brown and his sons Jules and Vernes.

Episode example:

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  • Can you split this into two answers so that it's clearer which is to be accepted?
    – FuzzyBoots
    Apr 26, 2020 at 16:24
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Adventurers: Masters of Time This the cartoon you have been searching I am searching for this year's finally found

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    Welcome to SciFi.SE! Can you explain how this matches the information provided in the question?
    – F1Krazy
    Dec 9, 2021 at 15:06
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    Please edit your post to explain why you think this matches.
    – Null
    Dec 9, 2021 at 15:09
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Though it only ran for 39 episodes in 1960-1961, Tooter the Turtle was an included short series that ran as part of King Leon and His Short Subjects (very memorable theme music, "Dance the Bongo Konga"). King Leon was a lion, king of a land seemingly near the Congo in Africa. The program was overall structured much like Rocky and Bullwinkle, having a framing story interspersed with cartoon shorts, and predated the much better known show featuring a flying squirrel.

The shorts for Tooter the Turtle featured "Mister Wizard, the Lizard" (with a fake German accent, as I recall) sending the titular character to various places and times, as I recall to satisfy his curiosity about this or that. Tooter always managed to get into some kind of trouble, and since Mister Wizard watched him through a crystal ball, he'd wave his want and chant "Drizzle, Drazzle, Drozzle, Drone, time for this one to come home," and thus pull Tooter out of whatever mess he'd gotten into and back to the wizard's lab.

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It was Max The 2,000 Year Old Mouse. Made by the sane folks that produced Professor Kitzel.

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    Hi, welcome to SF&F! Can you add some details of how this matches the question? It sounds from a description I read that the narrator is not pictured: only snippets of Max (who is a mouse, not a professor) are shown.
    – DavidW
    Apr 2 at 16:32
  • The Wonderful Stories of Professor Kitzel seems to more closely match the description given by the OP. Apr 2 at 16:47
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Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales (1963)

The protagonist is a penguin, who is always plotting ridiculous "get-rich quick" schemes. For technical information, he visits his friend Phineas J. Whoopee, the “Man with All the Answers".

Phineas pulls out his "Three-Dimensional Blackboard" and expands it. Then he lectures on scientific or medical topics, showing diagrams and/or videos on the blackboard.

enter image description here

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    Where's the time travel element in this? I used to watch Tenessee Tuxedo all the time, and don't recall time travel being a major factor...
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Jul 16, 2021 at 16:09

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