Wayback Machine (Peabody's Improbable History)

The Wayback Machine or WABAC Machine is a fictional time machine from the segment "Peabody's Improbable History", a recurring feature of the 1960s cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The Wayback Machine is a plot device used to transport the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman back in time to visit important events in human history. The term has acquired popular or idiomatic usage as a way to introduce events or things from the past.

The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive was named after the Wayback machine from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

In the 1960s cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, the Wayback machine was a central element of the "Peabody's Improbable History" cartoon segment.^[1][2] The machine was invented by Mr. Peabody, a genius, polymath, and bow tie-wearing beagle, as a birthday gift for his adopted pet boy, Sherman. By allowing them to visit famous historical people or events, the Wayback provided educational adventures for Sherman.^[3] At the request of Mr. Peabody ("Sherman, set the Wayback machine to..."), Sherman would set the Wayback controls to a time and place of historical importance, and by walking through a door in the Wayback machine, they would be instantly transported there. Examples of places or people visited are the Marquess of Queensberry^[4] and the rules of boxing, the imprisonment and memoirs of Casanova,^[5] Jim Bowie and the Bowie knife,^[6] and the "Charge of the Light Brigade".^[7]

During a voyage back in history, the Wayback conveniently and automatically translates all languages into English. During such visits, the historical figures and situations encountered are distorted in some crucial way. The main focus of Mr. Peabody and Sherman's adventures is thus the restoration of historical events to their proper course, albeit in a characteristically frivolous and anachronistic way. The machine apparently later returned Mr. Peabody and Sherman to the present, although the return trip was never shown. The segment traditionally ended with a bad pun.^[8][9]

Either of the names Wayback or WABAC are in common usage, with the term "WAYBACK" explicitly indicated during the segment in which Mr. Peabody and Sherman visit the "Charge of the Light Brigade". The precise meaning of the acronym WABAC is unknown. According to Gerard Baldwin, one of the show's directors, the name "WABAC" is a reference to the UNIVAC I.^[10] Mid-century, large-sized computers often had names that ended in "AC" (generally for "Automatic/Analogue Computer" or similar), such as ENIAC or UNIVAC. The term "Wayback" suggests the common expression "way back in [some former time]".^{[citation needed]}

The concept or term "Wayback machine" has been adopted in popular usage as a convenient way to introduce issues or events of the past,^[11] often employing the original line "Sherman, set the Wayback machine to...". For example, this introduction was used by the character Kevin Flynn in the film Tron.^[12] Another example occurred in a 1995 episode of the television show NewsRadio, "Goofy Ball" (Season 2, Episode 2), in which station owner Jimmy James (Stephen Root) says: "Dave, don't mess with a man with a Wayback Machine. I can make it so you were never born".^[13] As in the original cartoon, the Wayback Machine is often invoked to suggest the audience follow the narrator back to the past. Frequently such visits to the past are trips of nostalgia, remembering times, places, or things of the not-so-distant past.^{[14][15][16][17][18][19]}

The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive was named after Peabody and Sherman's Wayback.^[20][21]

An animated film based on the original Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon entitled Mr. Peabody & Sherman was released by the movie studio DreamWorks Animation on March 7, 2014.^[22][23] The WABAC machine was a central element to the plot. In the movie, the acronym WABAC was revealed to stand for Wavelength Acceleration Bidirectional Asynchronous Controller.