A good time-travel story does not need a science degree, just a little imagination and a way to break the clock.
That is why some of the best cartoons about time travel come from kids’ TV and the world of Saturday morning cartoons, where a school bus, a magic tape measure, or a badly worded wish can fling a character straight into the dinosaur age or a thousand years into the future.
The catch is that plenty of shows get lumped in with time travel when they are really about portals or parallel worlds, which is a different trick entirely.
This list sticks to the real deal: cartoons where characters truly move through time, from Gravity Falls and Phineas and Ferb to SpongeBob and The Magic School Bus.
Every pick below sends someone to the past or the future on screen.
The Best Time Travel Cartoons
The Magic School Bus
Ms. Frizzle’s field trips ignore the normal rules of space, and sometimes time. In the episode “The Busasaurus” and the special The Magic School Bus in the Time of Dinosaurs, the bus drives straight into the prehistoric past so the class can watch real dinosaurs up close. It is time travel dressed up as a science lesson, which is exactly why it sticks.
My take: still the friendliest on-ramp to time travel a curious kid could ask for.
How they time travel: Ms. Frizzle’s magic school bus.
When they go: Back to the age of the dinosaurs.
The Fairly OddParents
Timmy Turner’s fairies can grant almost any wish, and more than once that wish is a trip through time. Riding the Time Scooter, Timmy zips back to meet his own parents as kids, and back again to the day a young Mr. Crocker lost his fairies and turned into Timmy’s fairy-obsessed teacher. The same reckless wishing that conjured his comic hero, the Crimson Chin, keeps rewriting his present by accident.
My read: proof that a time machine is only as safe as the ten-year-old holding it.
How they time travel: A wish plus the fairies’ Time Scooter.
When they go: The past, from his parents’ childhood to Crocker’s, and the future.
Ben 10
Ben Tennyson’s Omnitrix is famous for turning him into aliens, but this Cartoon Network mainstay leans into time travel too. In “Ben 10,000,” a young Ben is thrown roughly twenty years into the future to meet his burned-out adult self. Later series introduce Professor Paradox, a scientist who strolls calmly through history after an experiment left him unstuck in time.
My take: the future-Ben episode hits harder than a kids’ action show has any right to.
How they time travel: A leap to his future self, plus the time-walking Professor Paradox.
When they go: About twenty years ahead, and across all of history.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
Equestria runs on magic, so of course that magic can bend time. In “It’s About Time,” a frazzled Twilight Sparkle gets a panicked warning from her own future self.
The stakes explode in the finale “The Cutie Re-Mark,” where the villain Starlight Glimmer casts a time-travel spell that rewrites the past and drags Twilight through a string of ruined alternate timelines.
Where I land: the Cutie Re-Mark two-parter is a surprisingly sharp time-travel story hiding inside a pony show.
How they time travel: Unicorn time-travel spells.
When they go: The past, and a chain of broken alternate timelines.
Steven Universe
Steven mostly warps across space with the Crystal Gems, but one early episode turns him into a time traveler. In “Steven and the Stevens,” he stumbles onto a magical time-travel device and keeps hopping back to redo the same day.
Before long he has assembled a whole band of duplicate Stevens pulled from different points in time, plus a paradox he has to clean up.
My read: a goofy premise that quietly sneaks in a real lesson about letting go.
How they time travel: A magical time-travel device.
When they go: A few minutes into the past, over and over.
Phineas and Ferb
The stepbrothers build something impossible every single day, so a working time machine was only a matter of when. In “It’s About Time!,” they repair a museum time machine and travel back to the age of the dinosaurs, while “Phineas and Ferb’s Quantum Boogaloo” flings them decades into the future.
Naturally, Candace still finds a way to try to bust them across the timeline.
My take: the museum time machine is one of their most rewatchable builds.
How they time travel: A rebuilt museum time machine.
When they go: The dinosaur age and the far future.
SpongeBob SquarePants
SpongeBob’s most famous brush with time travel belongs to Squidward, not the sponge himself.
In the classic episode “SB-129,” Squidward hides in the Krusty Krab freezer, gets frozen solid, and thaws out two thousand years in the future before overshooting back into a blank, prehistoric Bikini Bottom. It is strange, iconic, and the source of about a dozen internet memes.
The kicker: SB-129 might be the single most quoted time-travel episode in cartoon history.
How they time travel: An accidental deep-freeze in the Krusty Krab.
When they go: Two thousand years forward, then to the prehistoric past.
Gravity Falls
No cartoon plays with time travel more cleverly than Gravity Falls. Dipper and Mabel Pines swipe a tape-measure time machine from Blendin Blandin, a bumbling agent sent from the distant future to erase the anomalies the twins keep leaving behind.
In “The Time Traveler’s Pig” they rewind the same afternoon again and again, and in “Blendin’s Game” they get dropped into a far-future time tournament called Globnar.
The show treats time travel as both a running joke and a real emotional gut-check.
My read: the rare show where messing with time really costs the characters something.
How they time travel: A tape-measure time machine from the future.
When they go: Back to relive recent days, plus a far-future time arena.
That is the beauty of cartoons about time travel: a tape measure, a school bus, or a single wish can send a character spinning through history without one law of physics getting in the way.
The best of them use the trick to say something real about regret, growth, and the messes we would all love to undo.
So which time-travel episode is your favorite?
Drop your pick in the comments and tell me what you would go back and change. The best answers might shape the next update.