No Time for Nuts 2006

Between Ice Age 2 and Ice Age 3, Scrat, voiced by Chris Wedge, embarks on a frantic quest to protect his acorn after reclaiming it. His accidental discovery of a buried, ice-encased time machine sits atop the remains of a human time traveler, and the machine awakens with a voice that stamps the moment in time: the date May 26, 20,000 B.C. A stray press of a button zaps the acorn away and sails Scrat through a cascade of eras, setting off a domino of slippery misadventures across history.

First stop is the Middle Ages, where Scrat lands amid stone fortresses and archers’ volleys. The acorn, wedged beneath a massive rock, catches his eye, and he clutches the opportunity to claim it using Excalibur—the legendary sword in the stone. With the blade in paw, he heaves the rock free and retrieves his prize, but not without trouble: his tail gets caught, and chaos erupts as a volley of arrows flies his way. He narrowly blocks the danger with the sword, freeing the acorn and dashing off only to find himself slipping into the barrel of a lit cannon. The blast hurls him toward a storm of arrows, and the time machine activates once more, hurling the acorn through time again.

Next, Scrat lands in the grandeur and danger of Ancient Rome, inside the bustle of the Coliseum. A passing horse-drawn chariot snags his tail, pulling him into a chaotic ride through the arena. He experiences a rough, comic deflation—his crotch colliding with a rock—yet spots the acorn again just as a victory fanfare swells. The crowd’s roar echoes as a distant predator growl hints at danger from a large cat tunnel. Scrat fires the time machine once more, only to tumble onto an ice field and realize he’s not home at all. The RMS Titanic materializes out of nowhere, bearing down in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912. Scrat is pressed into the iceberg by the ship’s bow, and the time machine zaps the acorn and Scrat as they tumble away from the sinking vessel. In a startling turn, past and present collide when Scrat’s past self materializes and the two Scrats clash over the acorn, with Manny, Sid, Diego and Roshan looming in the background. The machine is knocked around in the melee, and both Scrats are jolted away when the present Scrat is also yanked by the voyager’s energy.

From there, the time machine flings Scrat through a parade of perilous eras: the Space Race with a Saturn V launch, a glinting modern jewelry store where misidentifying a diamond as his acorn triggers a cascade of alarms, a present-day girl’s locker room where a roller brush meets him, a hanging guillotine during the French Revolution, Benjamin Franklin’s kite-flying stunt, a wrecking ball demolishing an old brick building, the terrifying moment in the path of the Hiroshima bombing, a Wild West steam locomotive barreling toward him, and even a misadventure near Michelangelo’s David—the groin moment that’s more embarrassing than dangerous. Frustrated and spooked, Scrat punches the machine in a bid to reclaim control, only to tumble into a bizarre dimension crowded with countless timepieces.

In that clockwork realm, Scrat briefly splits into clones due to a clock’s spell before snatching the acorn once more and being drawn into a wormhole along with the time machine and his prize. He awakes in front of a colossal oak, surrounded by countless acorns, and his own is suddenly superseded by a revelation: this is the distant future, where oaks—and thus acorns—are extinct. Scrat discovers that the acorn he carried is the last real one left, and a frantic dash ensues as he tries to seize it again. Yet the time machine fires one final time, snatching the acorn away from his paws just as the machine collapses into fragments.

Stranded in a world without acorns, Scrat lets out a piercing cry of frustration, a sound that lingers as the screen fades into the end credits. The lone acorn drifts behind the credits, a haunting reminder of the endless chase and the impossible luck of a little sabre-toothed squirrel.