5 Questions: Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann

Today is the 72nd birthday of Mr. Fred Ward.

Ward is known for such films as Tremors, Escape From Alcatraz and one of my all-time favorites, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins…

But in this edition of 5 Questions, I’m going to query a Fred Ward movie that may have slipped under most moviegoers radars, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann.

I first discovered Timerider while watching THIS TV. In Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, Ward plays the titular character, Lyle Swann, a motocross champion who while racing in the Baja 1000 finds himself transported back to 1877.

1) To prevent something like this from happening, shouldn’t the company conducting this experiment have built a fence around the testing area?  

We find out as the movie progresses that the company has done other time travel experiments but this is the first time they were going to use a living subject, in the form of a monkey named Esther G. If they have done multiple experiments, that tells me they have some pretty good funding behind them. This isn’t some Kickstarter project, they’ve got serious backers. And I imagine in the grand scheme of things a simple fence would likely be one of the least expensive things the company would have had to invest in. Yes the experiment was being conducted in a remote part of the desert, but still safety first people!

2) Could a motorcycle have changed the outcome of the Civil War?

As you might imagine the people of 1877 are astonished by Lyle Swann and his “firehorse”. They had obviously NEVER seen anything like it. The main outlaw in the film, Porter Reese (played by Peter Coyote) wants to use this machine for his own gain, he even theorizes that if General Lee had the machine he would have won the war.

I’m no Civil War buff, but I don’t believe a single motorcycle would have changed the outcome of the war. Maybe if the entire Confederate army had motorcycles, but they didn’t even have the gasoline to fuel a single motorcycle back then. Historians please feel free to discuss.

3) What does the LQ stand for?

Aside from the aforementioned Ward and Coyote, Timerider boasts a pretty impressive cast including the late, great Ed Lauter, Richard Masur, Belinda Bauer and L.Q. Jones. I’ve seen L.Q. in a lot of movies including River of Death with Michael Dudikoff and Bulletproof with Gary Busey but I’ve never figured out what the L.Q. stands for.

He was born Justus McQueen but took the name L.Q. from a character he played in Battle Cry. But that still doesn’t tell me what the L.Q. stands for and I don’t think it is Low Quality like our espionage expert, Matt Spector, believes.

4) Which sense would you rather be without, sight, sound or smell? 

At one point in the film Belinda Bauer’s character Claire is attacked by Carl Dorsett (played by Tracey Walter). During the skirmish, he gets his nose shot off for his trouble.  Which made me think about the senses and how the sense of smell would be the one to lose if you had to lose one. Especially back in 1877, I can’t imagine people smelled too good and there was probably a lot of horse dung all over the place.

5) Did Lyle Swann get seduced by his own great grandmother?

This is probably the most disturbing question I’ve asked in 5 Questions history. And even more disturbing is all signs point to yes. I thought it was bad when Belinda Bauer was doing The Old Man in Robocop 2, but that corporate ladder climbing pales in comparison to incest! It would make Lyle Swann his own great grandfather but I’m not sure how that is even possible and now I’ve given myself a time travel headache trying to figure it all out.