Timebusters
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Buster the Time Bus...
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A belated thank you for coming back and posting all the extra material, fivegoldstars. 'Unique insight' is a cliché but I think it applies here, so it's most welcome. Your shortlist letter is precisely 25 years old today.
I'm ashamed to admit that although I knew Timebusters involved a bus, somehow I hadn't spotted the wordplay. I was similarly slow off the mark with Duckula and Mr. Majeika. I think I got Knightmare and T-Bag though...
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OMG, someone finally found three episodes of this! (A two-parter from Series 1 and a complete adventure from Series 3, which is quite different and more fast-paced.) What a very '90s theme tune it had. Can't say I find the game particularly riveting now. No Knightmare actors in the first story, sadly, but it does feature Freyja Westdal who was the computer voice in The Satellite Game. There are a couple of familiar faces in the later one, though!
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James, as the first person ever to post about TimeBusters (Timebusters? Time Busters?) on this forum, it's fitting that you should be posting about it again now.
It's great to finally have all the Broadsword series - Knightmare, The Satellite Game, Cyberzone, Virtually Impossible, TimeBusters - represented online.
Issue 2-2 of The Quest promised a 'full cast list' for TimeBusters in the next issue but the article never appeared. If it had, interest in and recollections of the series might have been better.
A few thoughts on the TimeBusters episodes now online:
I preferred the Series 1 adventure (Episodes 3-4) to Series 3 (Episode 11).
I like the use of Knightmare's portal sound for Buster materialising and dematerialising in Series 1.
Somerweston Hall is in reality Somerleyton Hall.
The time travelling Professor McNulty, with his younger female assistant, reminded me of Doctor Who. No surprise given that Michael Troughton, who played the Professor, was the son of Patrick Troughton, who played the Second Doctor. If I didn't know better I'd say that Tim Child was inspired by Doctor Who in creating the characters of the Professor and Tee-Jay... but we do know better, because Tim told us in 2004 that:
I am not a Dr Who fan.
In the History of Knightmare on the website, Tim Child said that TimeBusters was 'nicknamed TIM-BUSTERS by the Broadsword crew - because one series almost killed me'. I can see why: the recurring combination of technology and filming on location must have been demanding.
Here in full is what Tim wrote about TimeBusters in the History of Knightmare:
This was intended to do for location-based role-playing, what Knightmare had done for studio-based TV.
TIMEBUSTERS ran for 3 series on BBC and provided some of the worst (not counting SG [The Satellite Game]) and best adventure-gaming we had ever conducted. The principle obstacle to its achievements was the fact that each game (and each featured team) had just one show (25 minutes) and 1.5 location game days, to complete their win-or-lose allotted task. There was no rolling gameplay as invented and allowed in Knightmare.
We could however exploit our Knightmare experiences, and our experienced interactors. Players such as Sam Perkins (Gundrada), Mark Knight (Lord Fear) and Michael Cule (Brother Mace), all appeared in TIMEBUSTERS.
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The TimeBusters episodes mentioned earlier in this thread are no longer online.
On the other hand, if you want to watch the TimeBusters opening titles from 1993, there's a clip in the BBC Motion Graphics Archive: https://www.ravensbourne.ac.uk/bbc-motion-graphics-archive/timebusters-1993
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The TimeBusters episodes mentioned earlier in this thread are back online, along with Series 2 Episode 13 featuring Iona Kennedy and Mark Knight.
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Really enjoyed the new episode with Iona and Mark, even if the latter's appearance was maybe a tad brief.
I informed Mr Knight himself about the episode, to which his response was "I'll check it out!". Hopefully he also enjoyed revisiting some memories from back in the day.
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Wish you could find the old episodes of Time Busters my brother was on it and would love to find that episode again
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