Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird How Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 4: And I'm Joe McCormack, and today we're going to be
Speaker 4: talking about the nineteen forty size related thriller Doctor Cyclops.
Speaker 4: You know that line, that classic Hollywood line about how
Speaker 4: I stayed big it's the pictures that got small. Well,
Speaker 4: you can't say that about this movie, because this movie
Speaker 4: is really truly about actors getting small.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: This is our first nineteen forties film. I mean barely
Speaker 2: since it's a nineteen forty release. But yeah, this is
Speaker 2: one I was not familiar with. I've never heard of it,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that it has a pretty famous director
Speaker 2: who we'll get into more about in a second. But
Speaker 2: it's Ernest B. Showedsack, who if that name doesn't ring
Speaker 2: a bell, I think his most famous film will for you.
Speaker 2: It was, of course King Kong.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this this movie I thought was a real firecracker. Like,
Speaker 4: it looks great, it has amazing special effects. The story
Speaker 4: isn't as complex as you might hope. But then again,
Speaker 4: I mean, this was a I don't know, a horror
Speaker 4: thriller of the of the nineteen thirties and forties, of
Speaker 4: the of the Hayes Code era, so you can only
Speaker 4: expect so much moral and intellectual complexity. But just as
Speaker 4: a big special effects thriller, the kind of Transformers or
Speaker 4: Independence Day of nineteen forty, it's it's fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that's also only the way you
Speaker 2: have to approach it is a it is a nineteen
Speaker 2: forty special effects fiasco, and the special effects very much
Speaker 2: come first. And you know, by today's standards they might
Speaker 2: not look as you know, as amazing. But if you
Speaker 2: but that's again only if you're looking at it as
Speaker 2: a modern viewer and not thinking about the history of filmmaking.
Speaker 2: Because I think if you, if you sit there and
Speaker 2: watch the film in its entirety and keep reminding yourself
Speaker 2: like this is nineteen forty, you know, this is what
Speaker 2: had been done before with similar effects, and it will
Speaker 2: impress you.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 4: I think the special effects in this movie do look fantastic.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think they look so much better than
Speaker 4: the quote realistic CGI that floods the films of today.
Speaker 2: Well that's true, yeah, I mean, you know, it's very polished,
Speaker 2: you know, using the tools of the day.
Speaker 3: It creates I think some high quality visuals.
Speaker 4: So this is We've talked about a number of mad
Speaker 4: scientist movies, and I'm sure we will talk about many
Speaker 4: more mad scientist movies in the future. Mad Scientists are
Speaker 4: kind of the hub of the wheel of weird house cinema,
Speaker 4: and this particular mad scientist is a mad scientist who
Speaker 4: likes to shrink people with radiation.
Speaker 2: Yes, the villainous doctor Thorkol. And yeah, he's pretty great
Speaker 2: because he's you know, I guess his real defining characteristic
Speaker 2: is he's a complete lamaniac. You know, he already feels
Speaker 2: himself to be a giant among tiny people, and his
Speaker 2: super science just enables him to make that, you know,
Speaker 2: an objective reality.
Speaker 4: Now, I think doctor Thorkel would probably shrink you to
Speaker 4: death for the way he pronounced his name. Because of
Speaker 4: the one of the funny things in this movie, So
Speaker 4: his name is spelled t h o r k e L.
Speaker 4: So I read that in like any other normal American
Speaker 4: English speaker, I would think Thorkele.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if I had to go to an appointment with
Speaker 2: doctor Thorkele, I would call and be like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: a patient of doctor Thorkele's.
Speaker 4: But the characters in this movie make a really special
Speaker 4: effort to always emphasize the second letter. So it's like
Speaker 4: Sar Dough, no mister, accent on the doe. Here we
Speaker 4: get thor Kel, No mister, it's doctor accent on the kel.
Speaker 2: Doctor thor Kel. Yeah, and in this picture you can
Speaker 2: you can basically, well, here's the elevator Pitch, a mad
Speaker 2: scientist working in the south of Maria and jungle miniaturizes
Speaker 2: his colleagues when he feels his megalomania is threatened. So
Speaker 2: it's basically it's apocalypse now, but with doctor thorp Kel
Speaker 2: instead of Colonel Kurtz. Science instead of war, and miniaturization
Speaker 2: instead of the horror.
Speaker 4: Let's say that's about accurate. Yeah, and well, and instead
Speaker 4: of Martin Sheen, it's a ragtag team of the world's
Speaker 4: greatest scientists and a mule guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And instead of spending like a large portion of the
Speaker 2: film about the journey, that journey is really quick in
Speaker 2: this they just skiffy right through it.
Speaker 4: Should we hit that trailer audio, Yeah, let's hear it.
Speaker 2: Then a crocodile becomes as huge as a prehistoric monster.
Speaker 4: A rifle as unwieldy as a siege gun, a.
Speaker 3: Terrifying black cat whose jaws lee den a dog looms
Speaker 3: larger than an elephant.
Speaker 4: Then in the hands of a ruthless monster.
Speaker 2: All right, So let's talk about the people involved here. Really,
Speaker 2: the one we're going to spend the most time on is,
Speaker 2: of course, the director Ernest B. Schodsak.
Speaker 4: I know almost nothing about the life of Shodzak except
Speaker 4: that he is involved with one of the great early
Speaker 4: special effects and I don't know what you might call
Speaker 4: it science fiction horror films of the big studio era,
Speaker 4: which is King Kong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean really, King Kong, despite being very much
Speaker 2: a genre film, it transcends genre like it is that
Speaker 2: film is an icon of cinematic history itself. You know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of it's kind of difficult to overstate its
Speaker 2: importance in the history of film. But he and certainly
Speaker 2: I think you, mister you science Theater three thousand fans
Speaker 2: would agree it is a great eight movie. But shod
Speaker 2: Sack also directed another great eight movie, and that would
Speaker 2: be Mighty Joe Young. So if you're not familiar with
Speaker 2: King Kong for reasons unimaginable, then perhaps you've heard of
Speaker 2: Mighty Joe Young.
Speaker 4: Did that get some kind of remake in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Yes, it did. Goodness, I forget who was in it,
Speaker 2: but they had. Mighty Joe Young is a is an
Speaker 2: enlarged ape as well, but not nearly as enlarged as
Speaker 2: King Kong.
Speaker 4: It's a medium enlarged ape.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think I've seen some comparisons. Just in
Speaker 2: the same way that Godzilla keeps getting bigger and bigger
Speaker 2: in films, King Kong also inevitably just gets bigger and bigger,
Speaker 2: but Mighty Joe Young was always a smaller giant ape.
Speaker 4: So some of this guy's big movies seem all focused
Speaker 4: on changes in size perspective, either really big creatures or
Speaker 4: really little creatures smaller than they're supposed to be. And
Speaker 4: this is funny because I think there were This is
Speaker 4: sort of the A list version of that kind of director,
Speaker 4: but there were also B list versions of that kind
Speaker 4: of director, because you get people like Bert Eye Gordon,
Speaker 4: who made B movies, almost all of which are about
Speaker 4: creatures of unusual size, either like a person or a
Speaker 4: creature that gets shrunken down or creatures that get blown up.
Speaker 2: Real big Yeah, and you know, I think ultimately Bird
Speaker 2: Eye Gordon was able to make some really interesting films,
Speaker 2: but they're generally not put on the same pedestal as
Speaker 2: King Kong.
Speaker 4: None of them look as beautiful as Doctor Cyclops does.
Speaker 4: Another thing that Doctor Cyclops really has going for it
Speaker 4: with the modern release, especially or at least the blu
Speaker 4: ray of it that we watched, it has three color Technicolor,
Speaker 4: and the technicolor is gorgeous. The colors are just dripping
Speaker 4: off the screen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a similar way to Doctor X, though that
Speaker 2: was not technicolor. That was what two tone technicolor.
Speaker 4: Two color technicolor. Yeah, this is three colors. So this
Speaker 4: is like the color you know, color films that would
Speaker 4: come later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's a certain unreality to it, but it's
Speaker 2: beautiful and it's certainly I mean, I find it more
Speaker 2: engaging than a lot of black and light films of
Speaker 2: the period. Just you know, Yeah, I guess it depends,
Speaker 2: like you wouldn't want to see Mad Love and color.
Speaker 2: Mad Love belongs in black and white, like that is
Speaker 2: the world of that film, but this one really benefits
Speaker 2: from the.
Speaker 4: Color well and taking place in the jungle. I feel
Speaker 4: like there are a lot of shots in it that
Speaker 4: I wonder if they were only included to take advantage
Speaker 4: of that beautiful three color technicolor. Like there are parts
Speaker 4: where it will just cut away to some kind of
Speaker 4: tropical bird that is squawking in a tree, and you know,
Speaker 4: we see all of its beautiful feathers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, sort of. You know before three D there
Speaker 2: was there was technicolor.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Again, it's quite quite a beautiful looking film. So let's
Speaker 2: let's talk about the director behind it again.
Speaker 3: Ernest B.
Speaker 2: Showed Zach who lived eighteen ninety three through nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: We're not going to really be able to touch on
Speaker 2: his entire biography here, but if if you want a
Speaker 2: good one, you know, you can go to the usual places.
Speaker 2: I found Britannica had a nice one online. But here's
Speaker 2: some of the interesting points, sort of the bullet points
Speaker 2: of his life that I think are with driving home here. So,
Speaker 2: first of all, he ran away from home as a
Speaker 2: teenager and worked as a surveyor in San Francisco. He
Speaker 2: got a job as a cameraman from with help from
Speaker 2: his brother in nineteen fourteen, and then during the First
Speaker 2: World War he served as a cameraman in the Signal
Speaker 2: Corps in France. He stayed in Europe. After that he
Speaker 2: got involved in adventure filmmaking. So this is interesting because
Speaker 2: it makes sense given the nature of films like King Kong.
Speaker 2: But it also, you know, it seems to run against
Speaker 2: the grain if you think about his success in fiction,
Speaker 2: because earlier on it's less purely fictional. There's a certain
Speaker 2: documentary aspect to it, like fictionalized documentary work. So he
Speaker 2: served with the Red Cross in nineteen nineteen, helped refugees
Speaker 2: from the Russo Polish War, and he also filmed this
Speaker 2: conflict as well as the Greco Turkish War of nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty one through twenty two, And in this he essentially
Speaker 2: wound up working as a conflict journalist and was then
Speaker 2: sponsored by the New York Times as a cameraman on
Speaker 2: an around the world expedition.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: So he worked on this. He worked with a pilot
Speaker 2: by the name of Marion C. Cooper, and they began
Speaker 2: producing what they called natural dramas, which were a kind
Speaker 2: of combination of travelog and drama. This is super fascinating
Speaker 2: given what we've covered stuff to blow your mind before.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty five, he joined William Beebe's expedition to
Speaker 2: the Galapagos Islands as a cameraman.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 4: Now William Beebe was, if you'll recalled the was he
Speaker 4: a marine biologist. He was a researcher who got down
Speaker 4: into a basically a gigantic metal ball that just was
Speaker 4: dangled down deep into the ocean to see what kind
Speaker 4: of life could be observed through a tiny window in
Speaker 4: this ball at depths that had never before been documented firsthand. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the bathosphere horrifying because this ball had no means of
Speaker 4: self propulsion. It was not a submersible, It was not
Speaker 4: a submarine. It was just a hollow metal sphere and
Speaker 4: dangling by a chain. So if the chain breaks, you
Speaker 4: just sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 2: Yes, but he was as we discussed in past episodes
Speaker 2: of Stuff to Blow your Mind. He was also notable
Speaker 2: because he tended to surround himself not only with technicians
Speaker 2: on these expeditions, but also artists like people who could
Speaker 2: write about it, people who could illustrate what was going on.
Speaker 2: And it turns out showed Saq was one of the
Speaker 2: creatives that he brought a board to document the work.
Speaker 2: At least on one of the expeditions.
Speaker 4: Now, I think the bathisphere of observations were not in
Speaker 4: the Galapago, so that was somewhere in the Atlantic of itself,
Speaker 4: what Bermuda or somewhere in the Bahamas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe. So this would have been a Yeah,
Speaker 2: this would have been a different journey. But still it's
Speaker 2: wonderful how these two came together. I wasn't expecting him
Speaker 2: to come up in this. So anyway, from here showed
Speaker 2: Sack and Cooper. They go on to produce a natural
Speaker 2: drama titled Chang, a drama of the wilderness from twenty
Speaker 2: set in nineteen twenty seven. This earned a nomination for
Speaker 2: Best Picture at the very first Academy Awards. He then
Speaker 2: directed The Four Feathers in nineteen twenty nine, based on
Speaker 2: the nineteen oh two novel, shot in California and the Sudan.
Speaker 2: And then he shot Rango in Sumatra, which is a
Speaker 2: film about and this just sounds like super ambitious for
Speaker 2: any filmmaker because it's about a boy and a rangutang
Speaker 2: and a tiger, filmed in thirty one. Again, then he
Speaker 2: shot The Most Dangerous Game in thirty two.
Speaker 4: Oh, okay, wait, didn't we just talk about no We
Speaker 4: talked about Ernest Dickerson's Survivor is it Surviving the Game?
Speaker 3: Surviving the Game?
Speaker 4: Yep, the Iced Tea movie, which is sort of based
Speaker 4: on the similar concept the novella or novel The Most
Speaker 4: Dangerous Game, which is about a human who hunts men.
Speaker 2: Yes, and so it's been popular for a while. It's
Speaker 2: one of those stories that's going to keep getting adapted
Speaker 2: in one form or the other. Now, from here, Showtek
Speaker 2: and Cooper moved on to what would be the most
Speaker 2: famous motion picture that they worked on, and that was
Speaker 2: King Kong of nineteen thirty three, and then they followed
Speaker 2: this up with The Sun of Kong, which also came
Speaker 2: out in nineteen thirty three, And then they did they
Speaker 2: also did a movie titled Blind Adventure, which also came
Speaker 2: out in nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 3: So it was quite for these.
Speaker 4: Two regular Roger Corman over here. This is like Roger
Speaker 4: Corman's in nineteen fifty seven or whatever your year it
Speaker 4: was that he made like fourteen movies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, an impressive year. They were really
Speaker 2: just firing on all cylinders. Now, in nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 2: they made a film titled The Last Days of POMPEII,
Speaker 2: and this was ultimately, at least a commercially a failed
Speaker 2: attempt at an historical epic. So after this, you know,
Speaker 2: they were kind of I guess in some version of
Speaker 2: director's jail. He ended up doing smaller pictures. But then
Speaker 2: he got another shot at a big genre film, a
Speaker 2: special effects feature, and that is nineteen forty's Doctor Cyclops.
Speaker 2: And Cooper was an uncredited producer on this film. Now,
Speaker 2: of course we'll get back to Selector Cyclops in depth here.
Speaker 2: But World War II broke out and Shoudzak was, like
Speaker 2: a lot of people sucked into the war machine anew
Speaker 2: and while testing photographic equipment at high altitude for the
Speaker 2: US Army Air Corps, he suffered a severe eye injury.
Speaker 2: I was trying to get like a firm account of it.
Speaker 2: If there's a good biography about Shodzak, I wasn't able
Speaker 2: to find one, like a you know, like a book
Speaker 2: length biography. I believe what happened is he accidentally dropped
Speaker 2: his face mask. And I'm a little foggy on the
Speaker 2: exact nature of what the injury was. If we're talking about, like,
Speaker 2: you know, some sort of a light blast based injury
Speaker 2: or of its pressure based, but the end result was
Speaker 2: severely damaged his eyesight, and he only directed a couple
Speaker 2: of additional films. Really only one notable film after that,
Speaker 2: and this was Mighty Joe Young in nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 2: which featured OSCAR winning special effects by O'Brien and Ray
Speaker 2: Harry Housen. Oh god, yeah, yeah, so another big name.
Speaker 2: And then he finally directed a portion of This Is
Speaker 2: Cinerama in nineteen fifty two, uncredited to promote the Cinerama
Speaker 2: widescreen projection process. But that was pretty much yet like
Speaker 2: after this eye injury, you know, he just wasn't able
Speaker 2: and or you know, or didn't want to direct. I
Speaker 2: think it was, you know, more about ability. And then
Speaker 2: he died in nineteen seventy nine. Cooper died in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy three. He did a bit more work after Mighty
Speaker 2: Joe Young came out, including serving as executive producer on
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six as The Searchers, directed by John Ford
Speaker 2: and starring, of course John Wayne.
Speaker 4: This is a fantastic coincidence how this story about his
Speaker 4: damaged eyesight connects to the plot of Doctor Cyclops. It
Speaker 4: almost makes me wonder do you know what exactly the
Speaker 4: time of his injury was. Could it have been before
Speaker 4: Doctor Cyclops or was it after?
Speaker 2: I believe that's the weird thing about this. I've not
Speaker 2: been able to find like a firm date for this injury,
Speaker 2: you know, like a statement, you know, in this year
Speaker 2: or in this month, this is when showed Sack suffered
Speaker 2: the eye injury. It's it's my understanding that that the
Speaker 2: the eye injury occurred after Doctor Cyclops.
Speaker 4: Wow. Because so we'll get into this a little bit
Speaker 4: more when we discussed the plot, But one of the
Speaker 4: main uh situation points of Doctor Cyclops is that the
Speaker 4: the titular doctor uh doctor Thorkel is a is a
Speaker 4: brilliant scientist, but he's limited by damage to his eyes.
Speaker 4: He has got poor eyesight already and relies on these
Speaker 4: really thick glasses.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this is this is just mysterious to me, Like
Speaker 2: it's either an amazing coincidence or I have it wrong
Speaker 2: and there is more connective tissue here, like you know,
Speaker 2: maybe he had you know, previously damaged his eyes in
Speaker 2: some fashion, or his eyesight was already fading. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure you know what the answer is here, but as
Speaker 2: it turns out, like his actual biography and the and
Speaker 2: some of the plot elements in Doctor Cyclops do line up.
Speaker 4: Now, he did not write Doctor Cyclops though.
Speaker 3: Correct right.
Speaker 2: Doctor Cyclops was and by a writer by the name
Speaker 2: of Tom Kilpatrick who lived eighteen ninety eight through nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty two, and you can look him up on IMDb.
Speaker 2: But basically he wrote various crime in Western screenplays and
Speaker 2: tell a plays, but nothing that really jumped out to
Speaker 2: me personally.
Speaker 4: I mean, the script here is not really anything to
Speaker 4: write home about, except in the skillful way that it
Speaker 4: string that it efficiently strings together excellent special effects set pieces.
Speaker 4: But you're not going to like run into interesting character
Speaker 4: development or like super witty dialogue in this movie. This
Speaker 4: is a very much a sets and special effects driven film.
Speaker 4: But I will give the script credit for connecting each
Speaker 4: one of those things to the next in a very
Speaker 4: fast paced and enjoyable way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, well, let's talk about Doctor Thorkel. In
Speaker 2: this film, he is played by an actor by the
Speaker 2: name of Albert Decker who lived nineteen oh five through
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight. He was a Broadway star turn film actor,
Speaker 2: and later in his life he served on the California
Speaker 2: State Legislature and largely transitioned back to stage in his
Speaker 2: later career. He often played aggressive characters, and this is
Speaker 2: probably due to his great size. So he was he
Speaker 2: was six two, which granted isn't like super tall, but
Speaker 2: it's that's I mean, it's reasonably tall. I'm six two
Speaker 2: or so, and I bought my head way too often.
Speaker 4: It's big in this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think part of that too is that
Speaker 2: not only is he six two, but he's he's got
Speaker 2: kind of a thick physique, like not you know, not
Speaker 2: obese or anything, but like he's he looks at he
Speaker 2: has this kind of he looks kind of beefy, especially
Speaker 2: for a mad scientist in a movie.
Speaker 3: Usually they're a bit.
Speaker 2: Scrawnier, and like doctor Thorkel looks like he could really
Speaker 2: throw down.
Speaker 4: You would not want to tangle with Thorkel, right.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, this guy, Albert Decker played him. Notable roles
Speaker 2: for him include roles in Kiss Me Deadly, and East
Speaker 2: of Eden, which was fifty five I believe, as well
Speaker 2: as his his last film role, which was in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty nine's The Wild Bunch. Ah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the hyper violent Sam peckinpah movie in which I
Speaker 4: think he plays. He plays some kind of like railroad
Speaker 4: policeman or like a railway detective. He's hunting the outlaws
Speaker 4: in the movie. If I recall.
Speaker 2: Ah, it's one that I have. Somehow I managed to
Speaker 2: get through my twenties and thirties without seeing The Wild Bunch.
Speaker 4: It is a dusty, dirty, nasty, violent movie. It makes
Speaker 4: you need a bath. In fact, I would say the
Speaker 4: full vibe of that movie is summed up in one exchange.
Speaker 4: The outlaws arrive at the compound of this powerful guy
Speaker 4: and the guy says to them, like, you're filthy, you
Speaker 4: need baths. And one of the outlaws says, we don't
Speaker 4: want baths, we want women.
Speaker 3: It sounds delightful.
Speaker 4: One sentence that communicates a lot.
Speaker 2: All right, well in this film. Yeah, Like we've said,
Speaker 2: he's delightful. He's got this wonderful, imposing physical presence. He's
Speaker 2: got these you know, these scheming eyes that are accentuated
Speaker 2: by his his his glasses, bald head in evil mustache.
Speaker 2: And I have to say he was reminding me of
Speaker 2: somebody as I was watching this, and I figured out
Speaker 2: who it is. It's British actor Julian Barrett, who mighty
Speaker 2: Boosche fans out there. You might recognize him as the
Speaker 2: actor who played Howard Moon, but he also showed up
Speaker 2: on Dark Place with Darth Morangi.
Speaker 4: As a priest, okay, and he also.
Speaker 2: Was in something recently he was. He was the titular
Speaker 2: character in Mindhorn, which I've heard good things about.
Speaker 4: I never caught him in Dark Place, but I should
Speaker 4: go back and watch that whole series again in one sitting.
Speaker 2: It's ironically it is the ape heavy episode I believe.
Speaker 4: Oh interesting.
Speaker 2: So anyway, Howard Moon or Julian Barrett same height as
Speaker 2: as Albert Decker, and I feel like Doctor Thorkel could
Speaker 2: have easily been a Julian Barrett character. I included a
Speaker 2: photos here if you can compare the two like they
Speaker 2: they have very similar physicality, facial features. Both are prone
Speaker 2: to wearing a mustache, so I include that for what
Speaker 2: it's worth.
Speaker 4: Yes, I can see and like Doctor Thorkel, he's gonna
Speaker 4: hurt you real bad.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: So there are other humans in this film, and we'll
Speaker 2: touch on them with in less detail because there's not
Speaker 2: much else for non Doctor Thorkel characters to do in
Speaker 2: this film.
Speaker 4: I mean, I would say they execute their functions correctly,
Speaker 4: which is to move the plot from one fantastic set
Speaker 4: and prop sort of extravaganza to another.
Speaker 2: Yes, and do so, you know, with a serious look
Speaker 2: on their face. So the first one to mention here
Speaker 2: is Thomas Coley, who plays Bill Stockton. He lived nineteen
Speaker 2: thirteen through nineteen eighty nine. This was his very first
Speaker 2: film role, followed by mostly a lot of TV work.
Speaker 2: His part partner was actor and writer William Roorick. And
Speaker 2: Roorick was a theater actor on Broadway who is also
Speaker 2: in Not of This Earth.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, So that was the nineteen fifty seven Roger
Speaker 4: Korman movie that we have covered on a previous episode
Speaker 4: of Weird House Cinema. It was, I believe, the b
Speaker 4: side to Attack of the Crab Monsters. So if in
Speaker 4: fifty seven you went out to a drive in theater
Speaker 4: to watch a sci fi double feature, you may well
Speaker 4: have seen Attack of the Crab Monsters and then Not
Speaker 4: of This Earth with this guy what was his name again,
Speaker 4: William Roick?
Speaker 3: Yeah, William Roorick.
Speaker 4: He was the doctor in the movie. I think, not
Speaker 4: to be mean, I think we did not draw a
Speaker 4: lot of attention to his performance in the movie, because
Speaker 4: there's not much to say about it except his character.
Speaker 4: If you recall, he played doctor Rochelle, who was the
Speaker 4: blood clinic doctor who gets hypnotized by the alien so
Speaker 4: that he's unable to talk about the alien's blood condition.
Speaker 4: So other characters, you know, they'd be sitting at a
Speaker 4: table in a restaurant and the other characters would be like,
Speaker 4: don't you think it's strange that that man had alien blood?
Speaker 4: And Doctor Rochelle would be like, you guys, want to
Speaker 4: get some appetizers.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, I wasn't the most memorable of roles. But Rorick
Speaker 2: was in a number of interesting films, though several of
Speaker 2: which I've seen. He was in God Told Me To
Speaker 2: This was the with the Larry Cohen film about alien Messiah's.
Speaker 2: He was in Day of the Dolphin. He was in
Speaker 2: The Wasp Woman. And he was a friend. This is
Speaker 2: interesting biographically. He was a friend of author I m
Speaker 2: Forrester and Coley and Rorick, apparently they call it. They
Speaker 2: would like, you know, entertain him when he was in town,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. They'd go out and see shows
Speaker 2: and stuff. But yeah, that's the connect they're all connected
Speaker 2: here to Cooley. Coley is the one in this film,
Speaker 2: not Rorick, but the two of them apparently collaborated on
Speaker 2: various projects over the course of their careers and lives together.
Speaker 4: Coley plays the the like sort of lead of interest
Speaker 4: in the movie. He's the only character who's hunky enough
Speaker 4: to potentially end up falling in love with the one
Speaker 4: female character, so you kind of know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very g golly role. And again, this
Speaker 2: was his first screen role to boot, so the results
Speaker 2: are very wooden. There's just not much to this part here,
Speaker 2: but that still seems like you had an interesting life
Speaker 2: and career. All right, let's talk about what the sole
Speaker 2: female character in this film. The character is doctor Mary Robinson.
Speaker 2: The actor is Janie Logan. She was born in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifteen died in nineteen sixty five. She only appeared in
Speaker 2: six films, and this was her third. But here here's
Speaker 2: again a nice connection to the previous episode of Weird
Speaker 2: House Cinema. Her last two film roles were both Mexican
Speaker 2: films directed by Renee Cardona.
Speaker 4: The director of Santo in the Treasure of Dracula.
Speaker 2: Exactly yes, a major name in Mexican cinema, so both
Speaker 2: were of these films were from nineteen forty four. One
Speaker 2: the translated name is The Black Ace and the other
Speaker 2: is Summer Hotel, and I was looking this up. The
Speaker 2: Black Ace also featured a Dutch occultist and magician named
Speaker 2: David Tobias Bamberg who built himself as Fu Manchu and
Speaker 2: Bamberg also co wrote it. But yeah, which I don't know.
Speaker 2: It sounds like he was sort of an occult star
Speaker 2: or would be star of the day, and so he
Speaker 2: just I guess he wound up in Mexico City and
Speaker 2: was like, hey, let's do a movie.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Logan is also rather wooden in this role, but it's
Speaker 2: not like the film gives her much to do other
Speaker 2: than scurry around and try not to be grabbed by
Speaker 2: giant hands or eaten by giant cats. Then we have
Speaker 2: the character of doctor Bullfinch played by Charles Halton who
Speaker 2: lived eighteen seventy six through nineteen fifty nine, actor of
Speaker 2: stage in film. I would say he has a little
Speaker 2: more to do in this. He's actually pretty funny because
Speaker 2: he's this stuck up professor through and through even after
Speaker 2: he's been reduced to a tiny human wearing a handkerchief toe.
Speaker 4: Yeah. He refuses a lot of things in the movie,
Speaker 4: Like he's constantly being told to do things and saying like.
Speaker 2: I refuse yes on scientific grounds, Doctor Thalkel. I absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 2: that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's see.
Speaker 2: Then we have the character of Steve Baker, played by
Speaker 2: Victor Achillian who lived eighteen ninety one through nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: He was in films like Only Angels Have Wings and
Speaker 2: the ox Bow Incident. He wound up blacklisted from Hollywood,
Speaker 2: presumably for political beliefs, but he ended up doing a
Speaker 2: lot of TV and stage work instead after that. And
Speaker 2: I mean he's all right in this He's also it's
Speaker 2: a very typical type of performance and role for this
Speaker 2: time period.
Speaker 4: He's the mule guy. He's all about the mules.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right. Next, we have an actor by the
Speaker 2: name of Frank Jacanelli who plays the character Pedro.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: This guy lived eighteen ninety eight through nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: He was an.
Speaker 2: Italian born World War One vat who became a natralized
Speaker 2: US citizen, and he was a vaudeville performer later a
Speaker 2: USO tour manager. He played a lot of Italian characters,
Speaker 2: as one might admit, but he also expect rather but
Speaker 2: he also seemed to have a lot of roles in
Speaker 2: films playing stereotypical Mexican characters, And in this film he
Speaker 2: plays Pedro, which is very much a goofy stereotype character.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they don't say what nationality Pedro is supposed to be,
Speaker 4: but he is playing a Latin American character, Pedro, who,
Speaker 4: at least definitely in the first half of the movie
Speaker 4: movie is the butt of some jokes yeah about like
Speaker 4: trying to find his lost horse, which has actually been
Speaker 4: shrunken with a shrink ray.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you know, this was a you know, a
Speaker 2: casting situation that definitely made me sigh a bit. But
Speaker 2: if you want to know more about Jack and Ellie,
Speaker 2: I did find a page on Bewesterns dot com like
Speaker 2: bee Hyphenwesterns dot com that that has like seems to
Speaker 2: be the only place I could find online. Like you
Speaker 2: can only much of a biography of him on IMDb,
Speaker 2: but this site gets a little more into like his
Speaker 2: what kind of audeville acts he was involved in, and
Speaker 2: he did seem to kind of make a career in
Speaker 2: places out of playing a Mexican stereotype, and certainly that's
Speaker 2: what more or less he's doing in this film. Now,
Speaker 2: another interesting character that is involved in this film ultimately uncredited,
Speaker 2: but there's a guy by the name of Charles Gemora
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen oh three through nineteen sixty one, and
Speaker 2: he's an uncredited makeup artist on this film. Were you
Speaker 2: familiar with this guy before, Joe.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess by his work, but not by name.
Speaker 2: Okay, So he was born in the Philippines. He was
Speaker 2: a Hollywood makeup artist who became known as the King
Speaker 2: of the Gorilla Men. And it's interesting how this came
Speaker 2: to be, Like, apparently he's a guy who would he
Speaker 2: would hang around outside the studio and he would he
Speaker 2: would offer to paint for you or draw for you,
Speaker 2: like he had sort of an innate and I'm guessing
Speaker 2: kind of like self taught artistic ability. And of course
Speaker 2: people eventually notice this and they're like, Oh, bring this
Speaker 2: guy in, we got some stuff to paint. Let's get
Speaker 2: him going. And I guess he was up for anything.
Speaker 2: And at one point in one of these films they
Speaker 2: busted out a gorilla suit and he's like Hey, that
Speaker 2: should be me. I'm the right just the right height.
Speaker 2: I've got the physicality to carry this heavy suit. Let
Speaker 2: me get in there. And so that's what he did.
Speaker 2: And aside to doing a lot of he did a
Speaker 2: lot of monster makeup in other films. But he has
Speaker 2: and he has sixty makeup credits on IMDb, but he
Speaker 2: also has sixty acting credits, most of which are playing
Speaker 2: gorillas wearing gorilla costumes. And so if I do recommend
Speaker 2: looking him up because it's kind of amazing, Like, if
Speaker 2: there was a gorilla costume in a film, this was
Speaker 2: often the guy that was wearing it. In addition to
Speaker 2: some you know, aliens here and there, he definitely did
Speaker 2: some alien costumes and other kind of like humanoid monster costumes,
Speaker 2: but his specialty was the gorilla costume.
Speaker 4: Oh and I see what do you know? He's in
Speaker 4: at least one adaptation of The Murders in the Room Morgue.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In addition to being an actor and an artist,
Speaker 2: he was also an inventor and he held actually held
Speaker 2: a couple of patents, including a I would look these
Speaker 2: up on Google scholar, a sanitary pad holder, and a
Speaker 2: tissue dispenser.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so interesting fella. Now again he was just a
Speaker 2: you know, makeup guy in this The two main special
Speaker 2: effects names were of Farcio Edward and Gordon Jennings. These
Speaker 2: were the two that were nominated for an Oscar for
Speaker 2: the special effects in this film for the thirteenth Academy Awards.
Speaker 2: Now they ultimately lost to the Thief of Baghdad. But
Speaker 2: these are some impressive special effects. Like we said, they're
Speaker 2: impressive for their time. It's not the first time that
Speaker 2: we see miniaturized humans or giant animals in a film.
Speaker 2: Certainly Todd Browning's nineteen thirty six film The Devil Doll
Speaker 2: predates it, but this film makes some impressive use of
Speaker 2: supersized sets, giant hands, creative combinations of footage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the special effects in this film are really top notch.
Speaker 4: I was trying to think of earlier examples of really
Speaker 4: good looking special effects for miniaturized humans, and I recall
Speaker 4: the main example I could think of. There are the
Speaker 4: excellent shrunken human effects in Bride of Frankenstein. Oh Yes,
Speaker 4: by James Whale, which was released in nineteen thirty five. Now,
Speaker 4: you might remember in that movie when we first meet,
Speaker 4: you could argue the villain of the film. Doctor Septimus
Speaker 4: Pretorius also just one of my favorite mad scientists in movies,
Speaker 4: Doctor Thorkel and doctor Septimus Pretorious. They're really up there
Speaker 4: in the canons of mad science in the first few
Speaker 4: decades of studio motion pictures.
Speaker 2: I love doctor Pretorius because in the Frankenstein film Brida Frankenstein,
Speaker 2: he's such a mad science enabler.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yes, Frankenstein is like, I can't do it anymore. I'm
Speaker 2: emotionally rotted from that last film, and he's like, no, no,
Speaker 2: we've got to get you back in there. We've got
Speaker 2: to get you back in there. You can do it.
Speaker 3: Let's do some evil.
Speaker 4: There's also a great part in right of Frankenstein where
Speaker 4: we see doctor doctor Pretorious just going down into a
Speaker 4: crypt just to have like a midnight snack. Like he
Speaker 4: goes down into a crypt at night for a picnic.
Speaker 4: He lays out a spread with like food and wine
Speaker 4: and stuff on a big tombstone. It's wonderful.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I forgot about that part.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I think it's like, right when we first
Speaker 4: meet doctor Pretorius in the movie, I think, what is it,
Speaker 4: who is it who's playing doctor Frankenstein in the movie.
Speaker 4: Is it Colin Clive, Yes.
Speaker 3: That's Cly.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So he's meeting with Colin Clive and he's like
Speaker 4: showing off his latest work, which are these jars of
Speaker 4: homemade homunculi. So he's got like tiny humans in jars,
Speaker 4: and I think he has like a tiny king in
Speaker 4: one glass vial, and a tiny queen and another. I
Speaker 4: don't really recall the special effect relating to the plot much.
Speaker 4: Maybe I'm forgetting how it connects, but it no.
Speaker 2: It doesn't really. It's just like, look at what I
Speaker 2: can do. Yeah, I'm pretty great. You're you're great. Let's
Speaker 2: work together and you will do great mad science things.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems like one of those things that I
Speaker 4: suspect often happened in early special effects driven movies like this,
Speaker 4: which is that somebody had figured out how to do
Speaker 4: a certain kind of effect in a way that looked good,
Speaker 4: so you just find a way to work it into
Speaker 4: the movie. It's like, well, we can do it, why
Speaker 4: not do it? So let's get a homunculus in this movie. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And I didn't look deep into it. But as a
Speaker 4: side note, I think those homunculous effects in Bride of
Speaker 4: Frankenstein were done by John Fulton and David Horseley, and
Speaker 4: that was it was done by like combining different different shots,
Speaker 4: so you'd have a you know, a shot of people
Speaker 4: inside full sized glass jars with a certain kind of background,
Speaker 4: and then that was matted over the full shot, you know,
Speaker 4: at normal distance, with the actors looking huge in comparison.
Speaker 2: All right, well, let's get into the plot of Doctor Cyclops.
Speaker 4: Okay, here's the full plot breakdown. You know, we always
Speaker 4: have to comment on the opening credits, and this movie
Speaker 4: also has excellent opening credits. Like a lot of the
Speaker 4: weird older movies we have watched, I feel like opening
Speaker 4: credits used to be really cool for weird sci fi movies,
Speaker 4: and then they got kind of whatever, you know, it
Speaker 4: just be some like words on the starfield background for
Speaker 4: a few decades, and then they just started doing away
Speaker 4: with opening credits altogether.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but for a while, certainly in this age, it
Speaker 2: feels like the opening credits were treated like the poster,
Speaker 2: you know, as if you might be walking by the
Speaker 2: projection screen and deciding whether you're going to stop and
Speaker 2: finish watching. I mean, that's the ultimate weird I guess
Speaker 2: you get in the audience revd up. But it's like
Speaker 2: they've already paid their money, they're already in the seat,
Speaker 2: They're they're clearly they're not going to walk out yet,
Speaker 2: but I guess it's about just preparing them for what's
Speaker 2: to come.
Speaker 4: Well, there's actually a kind of visual continuity from the
Speaker 4: open credits to the opening scene in this movie, because
Speaker 4: you've got While the credits are rolling, there is this
Speaker 4: flickering light effect that creates a kind of auroral unease
Speaker 4: that is then replicated again once you get to the
Speaker 4: opening scene. It's like the same shimmering flickering light effect
Speaker 4: carries over into the scene of a bald man in
Speaker 4: welding goggles who is leaning over a table examining a
Speaker 4: fluorescent green tube in a room lit by this shimmering
Speaker 4: green light. And of course this is doctor Thorkel, and
Speaker 4: the movie gets right to it because his colleague Mendoza
Speaker 4: enters the room, and of course, I my brain every
Speaker 4: time somebody said Mendoza, my brain kept going to the Simpsons.
Speaker 4: But his colleague Mendoza enters the room and he says
Speaker 4: to doctor Thorkel, how much longer will you struggle before
Speaker 4: you realize you can't do it, and thor Kel says,
Speaker 4: no longer, my dear Mendoza, because I have done it.
Speaker 4: Look for yourself. So, you know, they examine what it
Speaker 4: is that thor Keeke has been looking at, and Mendoza
Speaker 4: is aghast. He has shaken. Thorkel says, there should be
Speaker 4: sufficient radium to tear it to shreds, and yet it's
Speaker 4: still alive. And we don't know what they're talking about.
Speaker 4: But Mendoza is horrified. He's terrified of the power of
Speaker 4: whatever they've discovered. And he says, he starts saying like,
Speaker 4: you must destroy your slides, you must burn your notes.
Speaker 4: And then we get some classic backstory through utterly implausible dialogue,
Speaker 4: you know, and somebody says something to another character that
Speaker 4: that person would have no occasion to say to them,
Speaker 4: just obviously for the benefit of the audience. So Mendoza says,
Speaker 4: when I discovered this gigantic radium deposit, I first thought
Speaker 4: of you, doctor Thorkel, my teacher of doctor Thorkel, the
Speaker 4: great biologist. I sent for you to counsel me. I
Speaker 4: began to imagine here in the jungle, the Thorkel Institute,
Speaker 4: a palace of healing to which all might come, and
Speaker 4: it was very much like Grandpa Seth has been dead
Speaker 4: for three weeks now. It's been hard on all of us,
Speaker 4: including me his daughter.
Speaker 2: That is correct Joe, my podcast partner who has podcasted
Speaker 2: with me for many years.
Speaker 4: At this point, but Thorkel is immediately dismissive of Mendoza's concerns.
Speaker 4: He's like, you know, bah, we now have the very
Speaker 4: cosmic force of creation itself. We can shape life like clay.
Speaker 4: And then Mendoza again with the classic sci fi movie line.
Speaker 4: He says, you are tampering with powers reserved to God,
Speaker 4: which is almost verbatim the last line of Bride the
Speaker 4: Monster by Ed Wood. You remember that.
Speaker 3: Part, Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 4: The movie with Bella Legosi and Tor Johnson. And at
Speaker 4: the end of the movie, Bella's mansion explodes. I don't
Speaker 4: remember why. There's a giant octopus attack and the mansion explodes,
Speaker 4: and then a guy just kind of soberly looks at
Speaker 4: the camera and says he tampered in God's domain.
Speaker 2: So Mendoza is like, we shouldn't tamper in God's domain.
Speaker 2: But doctor Thorkel was like, yeah, that's what we're doing
Speaker 2: and we're gonna do it.
Speaker 4: He literally says. He says, like you're tampering with powers
Speaker 4: were served to God. And Thorkel says, that is good,
Speaker 4: that is just what I am doing. And so Mendoza
Speaker 4: tries to forbid it, but Thorkel he's tasted the God
Speaker 4: power now and there's no going back. So it is
Speaker 4: time to murder. And the Mendoza murder is a very
Speaker 4: cool scene. I thought. Thorkel shoves Mendoza's head through this
Speaker 4: radioactive green tube he's been looking at, and then there's
Speaker 4: a photographic effect where Mendoza's face is just gradually layered
Speaker 4: over by skull paint.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 2: It's a weird scene. Apparently this one was removed from
Speaker 2: some TV airings of the film, so I don't know
Speaker 2: if they found it, like maybe it was for time
Speaker 2: or it was just considered too graphic. There is a
Speaker 2: like a severity to it, like it firmly establishes doctor
Speaker 2: Thorkel as a guy who will murder for you know,
Speaker 2: for for his science. And we'll really not think it's
Speaker 2: not like there was a struggle or some sort of accidents.
Speaker 2: It wasn't one of those situations where oh, I've stumbled
Speaker 2: into murder and now this is who I am. He's like,
Speaker 2: got to kill you now, and he does it right.
Speaker 4: So next we cut to some guys in a fancy
Speaker 4: study and it's a room that sort of reminds me
Speaker 4: of M's office in the Sean Connery James Bond movies.
Speaker 4: But weirdly, despite what you might assume about the sort
Speaker 4: of pipe tobacco drabness of such an environment, the first
Speaker 4: thing I couldn't ignore was how much the colors drip
Speaker 4: just in this scene in a study. Because the opening
Speaker 4: scene is very much shimmering green and black. It's actually
Speaker 4: sort of closer to the look of the two color
Speaker 4: Technicolor range in Doctor X, which we watched for a
Speaker 4: previous episode. Remember how that whole movie was very had
Speaker 4: a kind of diseased green and orange palette without the
Speaker 4: full range of a full color Technicolor. This has all
Speaker 4: the colors. Now now that we're in the office, and
Speaker 4: the greens, the reds, blue, and orange, the color is
Speaker 4: almost violent and it is really beautiful, Pops. But anyway,
Speaker 4: so we're in the study now and these two stuffy
Speaker 4: old guys are discussing attempts by Thorkel to recruit them
Speaker 4: by mail for research at his remote institute in the Amazon.
Speaker 4: I think it's supposed to be in Peru. And this
Speaker 4: is doctor Bullfinch we're meeting. He's one of these two
Speaker 4: guys here and they're discussing the pros and cons of
Speaker 4: joining doctor Thorkel's jungle institute. Pros are that he is
Speaker 4: the greatest living biologist, so be good to work with him.
Speaker 4: Cons are at he's a strange man, secretive about his experiments.
Speaker 4: You already get the impression that these guys suspect he
Speaker 4: may kill them. And I love the strong vibe from
Speaker 4: the very beginning that this is going to be like
Speaker 4: the fire Festival of scientific research. It's just like lure
Speaker 4: everybody to a remote location and then just watch it
Speaker 4: all go to hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty obvious where this is, at least in general,
Speaker 2: where this is going, like mad scientist is up to
Speaker 2: bad stuff in the middle of nowhere, where where they're
Speaker 2: there is no law but his own. Let's go, let's
Speaker 2: go hang out with him and see what happens.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then there's a sort of recruiting montage.
Speaker 2: These scenes are they're brief there's not much to them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like, hey, if you paid your hotel bill, no, well,
Speaker 2: better join up with us then, right.
Speaker 4: So we get doctor Bullfinch, and then we get doctor
Speaker 4: Mary Robinson, who's writing a letter saying she's joining the team.
Speaker 4: I think letter, yeah, I think the letter says something
Speaker 4: like should should be no problem or something. And then
Speaker 4: we see the recruitment of a good for nothing, deadbeat
Speaker 4: geologist named doctor Bill Stockton. This is the guy played
Speaker 4: by Thomas Coley, and he has pulled in on the
Speaker 4: promise of having his mini IOUs remitted. So when we
Speaker 4: meet him, he's lounging in a patio recliner. And I
Speaker 4: don't know if you noticed this. Did you notice that
Speaker 4: there are just in at least one of these shots,
Speaker 4: there are bugs crawling all over his lap.
Speaker 3: No? I did not notice that.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's easy to miss. It goes by pretty quick,
Speaker 4: and I don't think it's supposed to be like that.
Speaker 4: I think it's just something that happened to get caught
Speaker 4: by the camera. But in one of the shots there
Speaker 4: are at least three flies simultaneously, a couple around his
Speaker 4: belt buckle. Ones kind of to the side of his crotch,
Speaker 4: and it makes me wonder, like, what did he spill
Speaker 4: sugar water and his lap or something in an earlier take.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I mean, is he shirtless in the scene?
Speaker 4: No? No, no, no, he's got a shirt on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I was thinking maybe they oiled him up
Speaker 2: a bit, you know. Okay, but who knows.
Speaker 4: But yeah, So they're recruiting him because I think there
Speaker 4: was supposed to be another mineralogist or geologist and that
Speaker 4: person fell through. So now they're trying to get the
Speaker 4: deadbeat guy. But he's a handsome dead beat. And then
Speaker 4: finally they're out in the field in Peru and Bullfinch,
Speaker 4: Robinson and Stockton recruit a minor slash mule wrangler named
Speaker 4: Steve who has a lot of mule thoughts and he
Speaker 4: wants to get rich. And there's a mule hagling scene
Speaker 4: between Bullfinch and Steve, which is pretty funny. Steve's like,
Speaker 4: you can't have the mules. I need him for something,
Speaker 4: and then all these eggheads are like, but doctor Thorkel
Speaker 4: is the greatest living authority on organic molecular structure, and
Speaker 4: the muleman is not very impressed, but eventually they get
Speaker 4: him to go along by promising him riches and saying
Speaker 4: that he can come with them to I guess make
Speaker 4: sure the mules are okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it doesn't make tremendous amount of sense, but okay,
Speaker 2: he's coming.
Speaker 4: Along, right, So they journey through the jungle. They arrive
Speaker 4: at doctor Thorkell's compound. Thorkell's assistant Pedro, comes to inform
Speaker 4: him that they've arrived, and when Thorkell is interrupted, I
Speaker 4: just want to say he's wearing an awesome helmet slash suit.
Speaker 4: Rabbi attached to a picture I found of the helmet
Speaker 4: for you to look at. Here is it's just like
Speaker 4: it's just like a can, just like a straight up
Speaker 4: thick can with two eye holes surrounded by glass and
Speaker 4: then the kind of rounded top. It's not very elaborate,
Speaker 4: but it looks great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looks kind of I mean, finds me a
Speaker 2: lot of some of the stock rocketmen and robot costumes
Speaker 2: of the of the day. You know, it looks a
Speaker 2: little bit like a medieval night as well.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's kind of the night guarding the bridge and
Speaker 4: Monty Python and the Holy Grail and so they get
Speaker 4: there and they all meet doctor Thorkel, and doctor Thorkel
Speaker 4: is a creep from the first minute. They do not
Speaker 4: like ease into it. He's got the unholy combo of
Speaker 4: a huge head with tiny glasses, and he's he's huge
Speaker 4: in general. But it's just this like large bulky bald
Speaker 4: man grabbing people by the arm and moving them around
Speaker 4: and saying like, I'm so glad you've come. He might
Speaker 4: as well be saying, you know what lovely cells you're
Speaker 4: made out of. And so we find out the doctor
Speaker 4: Thorkel sent for the assistance of the other scientists because
Speaker 4: of damage to his eyes. The damage to his eyes
Speaker 4: no longer allows him to use the microscope. But I
Speaker 4: was wondering, wait a minute, then, if that's the only problem,
Speaker 4: why did he send for three different scientists. Then it
Speaker 4: almost seems like the imply is that doctor Thorkell thinks
Speaker 4: that if he had fully functioning eyes, he would be
Speaker 4: worth four scientists put together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense, or you know, or maybe it's
Speaker 2: it's he doesn't expect all of them to live that long.
Speaker 2: You know, he needs multiple sets of spare eyes.
Speaker 4: Well, this is weird because so here's a question I
Speaker 4: have he is a creep from the beginning, but the
Speaker 4: movie does not suggest that he planned to kill them
Speaker 4: all along. Like the fact that he kills them does
Speaker 4: genuinely seem to be an unexpected development for him. He
Speaker 4: kills them because they discover his secrets.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess he what he
Speaker 2: I think has revealed that he he sort of needed
Speaker 2: a mineralist, a mineral specialist to weigh in on some
Speaker 2: of his work. He needed somebody with a biology background.
Speaker 2: But I don't know about the professor, did he. I
Speaker 2: mean just sort of brought him into the boast to
Speaker 2: him about like maybe part of it is like ultimately
Speaker 2: he needs an audience, like he's he's doing amazing thing.
Speaker 2: So yes, I need I need a basically a team
Speaker 2: of judges to come here and tell me how great
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 4: I think we're sort of rewriting the script as we go,
Speaker 4: But that's I think you're onto something there that that
Speaker 4: is part of it. Like he as a megalomaniac, he
Speaker 4: needs people to witness his greatness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's one of the downsides to working out
Speaker 2: in the jungle, is that in the jungie, is you
Speaker 2: occasionally have to bring people in to recognize your greatness.
Speaker 4: Right, And so they're there and they recognize his greatness,
Speaker 4: but he wants them to get right to work. So
Speaker 4: he has them look at some stuff in a microscope
Speaker 4: and Stockton, the deadbeat hunk, he sees some iron crystals
Speaker 4: under the microscope. This is like minutes after they've arrived,
Speaker 4: and he says, yes, it's iron crystals in the microscope.
Speaker 4: And doctor Thorkel is like, ah, eureka, okay, that's it. Well,
Speaker 4: I'm done with you guys now. But Bullfinch, which is funny,
Speaker 4: I mean very funny, Bullfinch is mad. He immediately gets
Speaker 4: super indignant, starts yelling and he's like, you can't do
Speaker 4: this to us. At one point, Bullfinch is like are
Speaker 4: you Are you intimating that you brought us here just
Speaker 4: for five minutes of work, and Thorkel is like, I
Speaker 4: am not intimating. I am merely stating a fact. Which
Speaker 4: that's man. That's one of my favorite types of statements
Speaker 4: in English, the like I'm merely stating a fact, like
Speaker 4: that wasn't a threat, it was a promise. I'm not
Speaker 4: suggesting anything. I'm merely stating a fact. I wonder when
Speaker 4: was the first instance of that.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this seems like at least an early variation on
Speaker 2: the theme.
Speaker 4: But anyway, Bullfinch and Robinson they are mad and they
Speaker 4: want to know what it is that Thork is working
Speaker 4: on before they leave. Steve the mule guy, he thinks
Speaker 4: he knows. He thinks the answer is that there is
Speaker 4: a mind full of precious ore somewhere around here. Stockton
Speaker 4: doesn't seem to care much. It seems like he's fine
Speaker 4: to just like get his bill settled and then leave.
Speaker 4: You know, all he wants to do is lay around
Speaker 4: in a chair basically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the other two it is kind of like
Speaker 2: they thought they thought this was going to be Thorkel
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, they thought.
Speaker 4: They were going to go author credit, yes exactly.
Speaker 2: But no, there's only one author on Thorkel research, and
Speaker 2: that's doctor Thorkel.
Speaker 4: Now you might know more about this than me. I
Speaker 4: was kind of curious about this movie's abundance of unflattering pants.
Speaker 4: There are multiple characters wearing pants that have like big,
Speaker 4: saggy butt and thigh areas that sometimes make it look
Speaker 4: like they're wearing like a weird sort of diaper or
Speaker 4: just sort of just have a saggy butt in the pants?
Speaker 4: Are these some specific kind of rugged outdoor pants of
Speaker 4: the era, like the go into the jungle pants. I
Speaker 4: didn't know what the deal with this was.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I just I just thought maybe that
Speaker 2: was the style of the day. You know, he just
Speaker 2: wore big balloony pants. But I could be wrong. Maybe
Speaker 2: maybe the pants experts out there can weigh in.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: Anyway, Steve the mule guy goes out snooping at night
Speaker 4: the day before Thorkel has told them they're supposed to leave.
Speaker 4: Thorkell says, you need to leave tomorrow, and so it's
Speaker 4: that night and Steve goes out snooping around. I think
Speaker 4: he wants to track down the mine. So while Thorkel
Speaker 4: is inside wearing his crazy helmet and doing science work,
Speaker 4: Steve is snooping around this big hole in the ground
Speaker 4: that has a giant like rigging over it and with
Speaker 4: some kind of rope dangling something down in the hole.
Speaker 4: And then he's almost caught by Thorkell. Thorkel comes out
Speaker 4: and Baker hides and it is revealed that Thorkell is
Speaker 4: operating some kind of awesome giant copper drill in the
Speaker 4: Thorkel super deep borehole. He's like drilling down into the
Speaker 4: earth and getting something out of the earth. I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think maybe it's the radium samples.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's this.
Speaker 2: They don't talk about it that much, but there's this
Speaker 2: sense that he's somehow absorbing radiation out of the ground itself,
Speaker 2: you know, by lowering this probe down into it. That's
Speaker 2: kind of the sense I was getting from it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And then we see at some point Thorkel is
Speaker 4: alone in his lab later and it reveals that he
Speaker 4: has created a tiny pony. This is very much like
Speaker 4: the Septimus Pretorious images. So there is somehow they've superimposed
Speaker 4: footage of a full sized pony kind of neighing and
Speaker 4: clumping around, but they have matted that onto the shot
Speaker 4: of Thorkel sitting at a table, and so it looks
Speaker 4: like the pony is on the table and it looks great.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But then later we check in. I guess this is
Speaker 4: the next morning. Bullfinch is examining some pig remains that
Speaker 4: he came across, and it claim he claims that he's
Speaker 4: discovered a new species of pig that is only four
Speaker 4: inches long at maturity, and Bullfinch tries to name the
Speaker 4: species after himself, like you do, and then Thorkel rolls
Speaker 4: up on them, and he's immediately like, haha, you weak
Speaker 4: minded fool, you think you've discovered a new pig. And
Speaker 4: he said, I wrote down this quote. Strange how as
Speaker 4: absorbed man has always been in the size of things.
Speaker 2: Yes, because of course he knows what this is. This
Speaker 2: is not a new species of pig. This is just
Speaker 2: a normal pig that he shrank down.
Speaker 4: He's been shrinking pigs for months, and they're all here amazed,
Speaker 4: thinking they've discovered new species of pigs. And he's like, ah,
Speaker 4: you idiots, you don't understand pig shrinking. I'll tell you
Speaker 4: about pig shrinking. But Bullfinch retorts, he says that size
Speaker 4: is the chief difference between mammals. I wrote down this
Speaker 4: quote as well. He says, in all essentials, a mouse
Speaker 4: and a whale are identical. Yeah, so Bullfinch, I guess
Speaker 4: he's supposed to be like the second best biologist in
Speaker 4: the world, but I'm not sure about that one.
Speaker 2: There was a big gap between first and second greatest
Speaker 2: biologists of the time, I guess, yeah, no, I don't
Speaker 2: think there were. I think gray Bao just in real life.
Speaker 2: Before these guys would have argued, no, a mouse isn't
Speaker 2: in a whale or not essentially the same creature there is,
Speaker 2: there are some major differences.
Speaker 4: But after this, I like this Thorkel, like we said,
Speaker 4: even though he is very much a creep from the beginning,
Speaker 4: he does seem to give them another chance. He tries
Speaker 4: to send them away again. He's like, be on your way,
Speaker 4: but Bullfinch is just so mad he refuses to leave
Speaker 4: until he finds out what's going on, and then Thorkell
Speaker 4: begins to threaten them. He's like, if you do not
Speaker 4: leave within the hour, you will remain at your own peril.
Speaker 4: So there's some snooping around. After this, Thorkel goes back.
Speaker 4: I guess, assuming that they're supposed they're going to leave,
Speaker 4: but they end up investigating. They're too curious for their
Speaker 4: own good. They hear some horse sounds and they end
Speaker 4: up spying on Thorkel appearing to like search around for
Speaker 4: a horse in tall grass. So they all start to think, okay,
Speaker 4: Thorkell has gone mad, but Pedro explains that actually he
Speaker 4: has delivered a bunch of animals to Thorkell, and he
Speaker 4: doesn't know where they are now. He's delivered rats and
Speaker 4: chickens and dogs and cats, and he doesn't know where
Speaker 4: they are now except for uh, there's this cat, Satanas,
Speaker 4: and oh my god, Satanas is a good cat.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Upon just mere introduction of Satanas by doctor Thorkel, I
Speaker 2: I instantly laugh, in part because just seeing a cat
Speaker 2: just sitting there looking slightly bored in a film is
Speaker 2: always a light but also because it does it doesn't
Speaker 2: take take much to realize where this is going. You
Speaker 2: know that cat is going to try and eat a
Speaker 2: tiny person at some point in this film.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, which is a brilliant idea for for a
Speaker 4: horror movie. By the way, I mean, a cat of
Speaker 4: sufficient size to attack you is a terrifying proposition.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Like anybody who owns a cat can can attest to this,
Speaker 2: because you know, sometimes they will They will hunt the
Speaker 2: feet of full sized adults like me. Uh, and their
Speaker 2: their speed. The reflexes are terrifying. Despite how much time
Speaker 2: they spend, you know, laying around doing nothing and sleeping.
Speaker 2: When they want to move, they can do so with
Speaker 2: just incredible speed. So it's easy to imagine yourself as
Speaker 2: a small creature and having to face, you know, the
Speaker 2: ferocity of a domestic cat. You know, you wouldn't you
Speaker 2: wouldn't stand a chance your your only chance really would
Speaker 2: be that it would grow bored and torturing you to death.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I would say seek out water because
Speaker 4: you know, a lot of a lot of domestic cats
Speaker 4: don't don't really like getting too wet. I guess there's
Speaker 4: some exceptions, but you know, they can be scared about
Speaker 4: getting too close to water. But then again, if you're
Speaker 4: very small, I guess water would probably like a shrunken
Speaker 4: human might very well be in extreme danger from water.
Speaker 4: We can talk about this more as we go on,
Speaker 4: but I recall again the JBS Hall day and Essay,
Speaker 4: you know, on on being the Right size, where he
Speaker 4: talks about how getting wet is an entirely different proposition
Speaker 4: for a small animal than it is for a larger
Speaker 4: animal because like, if if a rat gets wet, like
Speaker 4: a huge percent of its body weight is now clinging
Speaker 4: to the outside of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But anyway, so there's this question, like where did all
Speaker 4: the animals go? You know, all the animals that Pedro
Speaker 4: delivered and where are they now? Pedro says, I don't know.
Speaker 4: But Satanas every day she gets more fat.
Speaker 2: She is really living her best life here. She's getting
Speaker 2: to kill, to hunt, and kill so many animals that
Speaker 2: she wouldn't get to otherwise.
Speaker 4: Shrunken pigs, shrunken horses. It's all gravy for Satanas.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But anyway, so they're packing up to actually leave this time,
Speaker 4: I think, But then they discovered that they keep finding
Speaker 4: reasons to stay. They discovered that the ore that they've
Speaker 4: been finding around this place contains radium, which at this
Speaker 4: time they're like, whoa, that's worth a lot of money
Speaker 4: and it's very important for scientific research. I guess this
Speaker 4: would have been on the cusp of the era of
Speaker 4: the discovery of nuclear power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so certainly you know that the scientists are like,
Speaker 2: this is great for science. And then mule guy is like, like,
Speaker 2: there's there's that's some expensive radium.
Speaker 3: I want a piece of it.
Speaker 4: Yes, get me the money, And so they start snooping
Speaker 4: around in Thorkell's stuff and then there's a big confrontation.
Speaker 4: They find records of him saying that he has shrunk
Speaker 4: things and they're like, well, he's obviously lost his mind,
Speaker 4: and they and then he comes in and discovers them
Speaker 4: going through his stuff that they have a confrontation and
Speaker 4: he's like, here, well let me explain everything to you.
Speaker 4: Come into this room and look at my condenser. And
Speaker 4: so they all go in there, Robinson, Bullfinch, Steve Stockton
Speaker 4: and Pedro.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: At last, he's like, Pedro, get in here this room.
Speaker 4: Yeah, tru Yeah, everybody cray him into this, into this room.
Speaker 4: Don't be suspicious. Just look at the condenser. And then
Speaker 4: he slams the door on them and shrinks them, and
Speaker 4: now we've reached the situation of the film. Everybody except
Speaker 4: Thorkel has been shrunk to about thirteen inches tall. And
Speaker 4: so after this, you know, they're in a room having
Speaker 4: been shrunk, and Thorkel is like doing some playful diagnostics,
Speaker 4: saying like wow, you know, oh your vocal cords still work,
Speaker 4: and oh you're of this size, and he's crowing over
Speaker 4: his victory over them while the rest of the main
Speaker 4: characters scamper around on the floor trying to hide and escape.
Speaker 4: And here's where the special effects just get wonderful, because
Speaker 4: a lot of what you have here are fully built
Speaker 4: sets to make actors that normal size appear to be like,
Speaker 4: you know, somewhere between like six and thirteen inches tall
Speaker 4: according to perspectives. So they were like giant chairs and
Speaker 4: they'll go up to one of the legs of the
Speaker 4: chair and crouch behind it, and giant books and things
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it when films would do this, and
Speaker 2: I guess they still do variations on this. But I
Speaker 2: talked to a guy once in real life who had
Speaker 2: previously worked in special effects, and he had worked on
Speaker 2: the film Stephen King's Cat's Eye, which you might remember
Speaker 2: doesn't have any miniaturization occurring, but it does have a
Speaker 2: troll creature, which was of course played by like an
Speaker 2: adult in a full size costume. In order to make
Speaker 2: him seem like a tiny creature, they had to build
Speaker 2: like an enormous child's bed for this actor to prance
Speaker 2: around on. So I got to see some behind the
Speaker 2: scenes photos of that he had in an album and
Speaker 2: it was super cool.
Speaker 4: I love it. I love it. I really really missed
Speaker 4: the era of special effects through built sets and built environments.
Speaker 4: I do feel like something really is lost, no matter
Speaker 4: how good an animated environment can look. I mean, the
Speaker 4: green screen world I do feel like has lost something beautiful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a craftsmanship to it. I mean not to
Speaker 2: say there's not a craftsmanship in creating virtual environments, but
Speaker 2: there's a physical craft to it that perhaps is kind
Speaker 2: of lost.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: One thing I noticed at the very beginning is that
Speaker 4: as soon as we come on the new characters, I
Speaker 4: guess they are too small for their original clothes now.
Speaker 4: So instead the characters have all replaced their original clothes
Speaker 4: with like togas. They're like little torn pieces of cloth
Speaker 4: that they're wearing like like togas and stuff. And this
Speaker 4: really I think heightens the connection to the Odyssey.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: And of course the film will continue to it will
Speaker 2: let you know that it is referencing the Odyssey. It's
Speaker 2: going to be very direct about it. But yeah, this
Speaker 2: may be the first sign that they're going in that direction.
Speaker 2: So I love this because they their clothes were not shrunk.
Speaker 2: Doctor Thorkel is picking up their clothes and putting them
Speaker 2: in a bag later, but I guess he left either
Speaker 2: pristine handkerchiefs in there and some sewing equipment at scale
Speaker 2: for them, or he had pre arranged clothing made from
Speaker 2: handkerchiefs for them one or the other because they seem
Speaker 2: to fit rather well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so Thorkel says that, you know, he's like, well,
Speaker 4: I've been working for days without rest, and now I'm
Speaker 4: going to fall asleep. So he falls asleep, and while
Speaker 4: he's asleep, they escaped the room by building a tower
Speaker 4: out of books and using a match stick to draw
Speaker 4: back the bolt on the door. And then there's a
Speaker 4: there's a great moment I loved where they're trying to
Speaker 4: sneak around outside once they've gotten out, and there are
Speaker 4: some chickens just like ye, giant chickens and giant chickens. Eh,
Speaker 4: that would be really scary. I mean that's like a dinosaur.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would be terrified, Yes, like a like a
Speaker 2: big feathered t rex. And you know, I guess with
Speaker 2: any of these animals, you have to ask yourself, what
Speaker 2: is the threshold of miniaturization at which I am identified
Speaker 2: as potential prey by this animal?
Speaker 4: Right? And the chickens never try to eat them, but
Speaker 4: the implication is there, I mean I really do.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So if you were thirteen inches tall and you were
Speaker 4: walking past a chicken, I mean that'd probably be like
Speaker 4: a human walking past a dynonicus or something like therapod dinosaur,
Speaker 4: the predatory one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if it decided you were worth a pack, I
Speaker 2: mean that could that would be death.
Speaker 4: But they do a thing that really did make me laugh.
Speaker 4: They do the just tack natural walk while they walk
Speaker 4: past the chickens like pretend like we're supposed to be here,
Speaker 4: and then they get attacked by Satanas the cat, and
Speaker 4: they have to hide among a bunch of cactus, which
Speaker 4: I thought was a cool idea. Yeah, and Pedro's dog
Speaker 4: Tipo eventually comes to the rescue, chases off Satanas, and
Speaker 4: here we get we here we get the movie, I
Speaker 4: guess offering thoughts about how you would be treated differently
Speaker 4: if you were miniaturized by a cat versus by a dog.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was fun because I've heard this this many
Speaker 2: times before, people commenting that, Okay, if you were to
Speaker 2: suddenly be you know, an inch tall or whatever, your
Speaker 2: your dog would still be your friend, but your cat
Speaker 2: would just eat you immediately. And and I don't disagree
Speaker 2: with that principle, though I do. If I'm going to
Speaker 2: seriously consider the question, I'm going to wonder if a
Speaker 2: dog would be able to recognize you by side or
Speaker 2: by smell in a miniaturized form, Like if you start
Speaker 2: asking hard scientific questions about all.
Speaker 4: Of this, I don't know. I am a dog lover,
Speaker 4: but I kind of think the dog would eat you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess it. Were more inclined to believe and
Speaker 2: want to believe, the dog would be like, oh, master,
Speaker 2: why are you so small? Let me help you, whereas
Speaker 2: there's no doubt with the cat, Like the cat would
Speaker 2: be like, sorry, the table has turned, and you know
Speaker 2: what I have to do.
Speaker 4: The cat would one hundred percent each you. I feel
Speaker 4: like I'm at about eighty percent, and the dog would
Speaker 4: eat you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In a way, it's like that slight level of uncertainty
Speaker 2: that makes it more terrifying, Like if you were suddenly
Speaker 2: miniatized in your home, you'd be like, oh crap, I
Speaker 2: got to avoid the cat at all costs because that
Speaker 2: is death. But then you're like, I don't know about
Speaker 2: the dog. The dog could be my savior, but the
Speaker 2: dog might just eat me anyway, or at least put
Speaker 2: me in his mouth for a while.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So after this we get a little interlude where we
Speaker 4: see the humans sort of adapting to their new scale,
Speaker 4: and it sort of turns into one of those recapitulation
Speaker 4: of the discovery of technology narratives like you get in
Speaker 4: stories like the Swiss Family Robinson. I think that's really
Speaker 4: part of the pleasure people get in a lot of
Speaker 4: castaway stories. Is they really like that, like watching people
Speaker 4: rebuild technological capability out of the materials available to them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like a Robinson Crusoe or to a certain extent,
Speaker 2: Flight of the Phoenix was like that. I think they
Speaker 2: remade it at some point, but the original was like
Speaker 2: a god was it a not to be twenty four?
Speaker 2: It was a B oh, it was a B twenty nine.
Speaker 2: Of course B twenty nine crashes in the desert and
Speaker 2: then they have to take it apart and try and
Speaker 2: build a new airplane out of this four prop engine
Speaker 2: airplane and then fly out of the desert in it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So obviously, the fact that this type of narrative
Speaker 4: recurs so much, I mean, I do think it's clear that,
Speaker 4: like some people really enjoy watching this sort of thing happen.
Speaker 4: It's some kind of fantasy fulfillment, and this movie has
Speaker 4: stuff kind of like this, except instead of a desert
Speaker 4: island where you're trying to recreate known technology and solutions
Speaker 4: and stuff out of I don't know, coconuts or whatever. Instead,
Speaker 4: it's on a tiny scale, so you see them figuring
Speaker 4: out how to use a needle as a giant drill
Speaker 4: or a scissor handle, was a sword and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Oh, man, you know, I have to jump back in
Speaker 2: and say, I'm mistaken. It was not a B twenty
Speaker 2: nine and Flight of the Phoenix. It was a C
Speaker 2: eighty two. But I think I'm confusing it with some
Speaker 2: Disney film that came out where they the characters did
Speaker 2: a similar thing and turned a B twenty nine into
Speaker 2: a sailing vessel of some sort. But at any rate,
Speaker 2: it's a it's a trope. It's a fun thing that
Speaker 2: you see in a lot of films.
Speaker 4: Is that water World.
Speaker 2: They might have had one of these in water World,
Speaker 2: but it was a different film that I don't think
Speaker 2: I ever saw, but I vaguely remember the VHS box
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 4: Wait, it's the version of Noah's arc made made with
Speaker 4: John Voight. I'm pretty sure that had some aircraft in it.
Speaker 2: Actually, I've looked it up, Joe, and it is the
Speaker 2: Last Flight of Noah's Arc from nineteen eighty. It starred
Speaker 2: Elliott Gould and A B twenty nine.
Speaker 4: The Last Flight of Noah's Ark. You're not kidding.
Speaker 2: I'm not kidding. That was the name of it was
Speaker 2: a Disney film. I don't think this one has been
Speaker 2: added to Disney Plus yet.
Speaker 4: I was joking the job Void. Noahs Arc does have
Speaker 4: pirates in it, but I don't recall aircraft.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, anyway back to miniaturize people. They're making tools,
Speaker 2: they're rediscovering what they can use for a weapon, et cetera.
Speaker 2: They're making new clothes, all while doctor thorkel Is is
Speaker 2: snoozing off his latest science bender.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and when he does wake up from the Science Bender,
Speaker 4: he has got a bit of a science hangover. He's
Speaker 4: he's kinda he's kind of frisky, but he's also kind
Speaker 4: of mad, and he's like, what is he going to
Speaker 4: do with these these with these shrunken people, And doctor
Speaker 4: Bullfinch starts he's still just like mouthing off to Thornell.
Speaker 4: He's like, he's like, we are prisoners in cyclops cave again,
Speaker 4: recalling the story from the Odyssey where where ulysses or
Speaker 4: he calls him Ulysses. In the movie Ulysses may be
Speaker 4: better known today as Odysseus and his crew are are
Speaker 4: captured within the cave of Polyphemus the Cyclops I don't
Speaker 4: remember on some island and and they have to find
Speaker 4: a way to escape, and they end up blinding the
Speaker 4: Cyclops by stabbing him in the eye. But Odysseus has
Speaker 4: said that his name is no One. So when somebody
Speaker 4: comes to ask if the Cyclops needs help, the Cyclops says,
Speaker 4: no one is hurting me. Very clever, yes. But doctor
Speaker 4: Thorkel ends up catching Bullfinch in a net oh after
Speaker 4: a part where Bullfinch tells off a chicken. He's like,
Speaker 4: go away, you ridiculous vowl. And Bullfinch, as always, is
Speaker 4: extremely uncooperative. Thorkel is like he brings him inside to
Speaker 4: measure him in various ways, and then Thorkel expresses disappointment.
Speaker 4: This is privately just between him and Bullfinch all the
Speaker 4: other people are still outside. He says, you know what,
Speaker 4: your bodies are growing. Your bodies are reacting as if
Speaker 4: you have reverted to childhood, and you will eventually grow
Speaker 4: back to regular size. And Thorkel of course can't allow
Speaker 4: this because then they would interfere with his work again.
Speaker 4: So Thorkel turns to murder once again. We've seen him.
Speaker 4: We've seen him murder to solve a problem at the
Speaker 4: beginning of the movie. And his eyes, his eyes become cold,
Speaker 4: and he's like, I'm going to do it again. And
Speaker 4: he gets a cotton swab and puts it in some
Speaker 4: kind of chemical and smothers Doctor Bullfinch with it and
Speaker 4: kills him. And there's like a giant fake hand for
Speaker 4: Bullfinch to be held in. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2: It's a great scene and again very brutal, you know,
Speaker 2: just despite the sanitized nature of this film as a whole,
Speaker 2: it's just a cold murder of the of this professor.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: But also during this scene, I was thinking about what
Speaker 2: doctor Thorkel said about how you're going to grow as
Speaker 2: if you were children into adult form again, which in
Speaker 2: this movie all it means is you're going to get
Speaker 2: big again. By the end of the film and the
Speaker 2: end it's saying like if you had hidden, you would
Speaker 2: have just returned to normal anyway, but instead you came
Speaker 2: back to me, and now it will kill you. But
Speaker 2: I had a moment there where I was imagining, like
Speaker 2: what does this mean? Because a baby is not like
Speaker 2: a miniature adult. You know, it changes a lot as
Speaker 2: it becomes a grown person. So I was trying to
Speaker 2: just contemplate, like what would that mean if you were
Speaker 2: a miniaturized person and then you grew Like what monstrous
Speaker 2: full sized forms would they grow into?
Speaker 4: You're gonna have skull plates fusing together? Again, like what's
Speaker 4: going on?
Speaker 2: Like, so I that was kind of a nightmare scenario
Speaker 2: that this film does not explore, but I had a
Speaker 2: moment there I was like, oh my god.
Speaker 4: Doctor Bullfinch say hello to a second round of baby teeth.
Speaker 4: And then so we mentioned that scene is kind of brutal,
Speaker 4: there's another there's a lot of imployed Like this is
Speaker 4: not a bloody film, but there's a lot of implied
Speaker 4: violence in it that is very brutal in its suggestions.
Speaker 4: So you see that the other humans after Bullfinch is murdered,
Speaker 4: they're hiding in this big thicket of cactus and then
Speaker 4: Thorkel comes out and I guess he's trying to kill
Speaker 4: them and he starts chopping up the cactus with a shovel.
Speaker 4: It's messed up. But uh, we find when he chops
Speaker 4: it all up and then finds they've escaped through a
Speaker 4: hole in the wall out into the jungle, and Thorkell
Speaker 4: taunts them over the wall, saying that they will never
Speaker 4: live half an hour out in the jungle, and sure
Speaker 4: enough there comes along a storm, which again to think
Speaker 4: about how terrifying of a threat a storm would be
Speaker 4: if you were tiny, if you were like, you know,
Speaker 4: six inches tall or a foot tall or whatever.
Speaker 2: This is yeah, I mean just on top of the
Speaker 2: jungle itself. Like when Thorkel said that, I was like, no,
Speaker 2: he's absolutely right, Like to go into the jungle at
Speaker 2: this size is just death, Like everything is going to
Speaker 2: potentially eat you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But and then on top of that the storm.
Speaker 4: Right, And again this comes back to the hall day
Speaker 4: and essay I mentioned earlier on being the right size.
Speaker 4: The thing about how when you're when you have a
Speaker 4: much larger surface area to mass ratio as smaller creatures do.
Speaker 4: There are advantages to that, Like you can fall off
Speaker 4: of a roof and probably not be hurt because you
Speaker 4: know the the amount of air resistance provided by the
Speaker 4: surface of your body will be enough to keep you
Speaker 4: going pretty slow actually as you fall compared to the
Speaker 4: mass in your body. But the downside are like getting
Speaker 4: wet is a terrifying proposition when you are tiny, like
Speaker 4: the surface tension of water clings to you like a
Speaker 4: kind of slime. And so imagine, Yeah, you're out in
Speaker 4: the jungle and the rain is coming down and there's
Speaker 4: rivulets everywhere. Very scary. So they end up coming across
Speaker 4: a boat in a river later on, and they try
Speaker 4: to use technology to free it, and they get attacked
Speaker 4: by a crocodilian. I think it's a crocodile. Might have
Speaker 4: been an alligator. I didn't check the nose shaped too well,
Speaker 4: But the crocodile attack sequence is great. They're trying to
Speaker 4: fend it off with fire, but they've got these like
Speaker 4: little tiny sticks that are on fire that are just
Speaker 4: not enough fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just kind of dropping it on the creature
Speaker 2: and doesn't seem to particularly care.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then eventually, after they chase it off by
Speaker 4: throwing a bunch of flaming sticks on it, Thorkel returns.
Speaker 4: He comes and finds them, and again it's brutal. Pedro
Speaker 4: heroically leads his dog away from them. Drawing off the
Speaker 4: smell and and so he saves the rest of the people,
Speaker 4: but Thorkel sees him and shoots him, and so Pedro
Speaker 4: has been murdered. And then after that, the rest of
Speaker 4: the people are hiding in some grass and Thorkel starts
Speaker 4: stomping through the grass and then when he can't find them,
Speaker 4: he burns the grass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's this inferno that he starts here, just
Speaker 2: trying to flush them out. Yeah, but he doesn't quite work,
Speaker 2: because they find another place that they can hide themselves, right.
Speaker 4: They stow away in his specimen box, the box that
Speaker 4: he was going to put them in when he found them.
Speaker 4: And so Robinson, Stockton and Steve the mule guy are
Speaker 4: the three people left alive. And they ride back in
Speaker 4: this box to Thorkell's hut and once they get there,
Speaker 4: they get out and Stockton decides, no, I'm gonna stand
Speaker 4: my ground this time. I'm not going to try to escape.
Speaker 4: We've got to kill Thorkel and the other to agree.
Speaker 4: So first they try to aim a shotgun like a
Speaker 4: cannon at his pillow in his bed, but then Thorkel
Speaker 4: doesn't go to bed and stead he falls sleep in
Speaker 4: his chair and then it really gets into the blinding
Speaker 4: of Polyphemus in the Odyssey because they steal his glasses.
Speaker 4: Remember it said at the beginning that he called them
Speaker 4: there because his eyes were so damaged he really couldn't
Speaker 4: see without his glasses. And they they know where he
Speaker 4: keeps his extra pairs of glasses because they find them
Speaker 4: when they're going through his stuff earlier, and they hide those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they stick them through like a hole on the
Speaker 2: floor of the wall. So now he has the you know,
Speaker 2: the only only the one pair, and they remove those
Speaker 2: as well. So yeah, suddenly you have this this blinded
Speaker 2: polythemous trope going on here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so Thorkel is enraged. He's smashing, you know,
Speaker 4: he's running around trying to destroy them. He does recover
Speaker 4: one pair of glasses, but one of the lenses is smashed,
Speaker 4: and he says, now you can call me Cyclops because
Speaker 4: I have one good eye.
Speaker 2: Thank you for being clear about the title of the film,
Speaker 2: doctor thorp Kel.
Speaker 4: I think they could have done without that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But so there's a final conference in the end. I
Speaker 4: won't spoil exactly how it happens, but there they are victorious.
Speaker 4: They end up they end up defeating doctor Cyclops here
Speaker 4: and in the end, the three remaining characters they regrow
Speaker 4: to full size and they travel back to civilization. And
Speaker 4: the main things now we find are that Stockton and
Speaker 4: Robinson are now in love because of course, and we
Speaker 4: find that Steve the mule guy does not like cats,
Speaker 4: Like he sees a cat back in the town they
Speaker 4: go to and he's like, scram.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe you remember this. I watched it last week
Speaker 2: and I think you watched it this morning. Did we
Speaker 2: ever get any real payoff with Satanas? No, Like, like
Speaker 2: it's not like they had a big throwdown with the
Speaker 2: Like they didn't have a big fight with the cat.
Speaker 2: They didn't have to like slay the cat or I
Speaker 2: think the dog just chased Satanas off and that was it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm glad they didn't have to kill the cat,
Speaker 4: because I mean, the cat's just being a cat.
Speaker 2: It's true, Yeah, I mean, but I also wonder, like
Speaker 2: was that like maybe something they wanted to do, but
Speaker 2: they just didn't have the effects, Like maybe that was
Speaker 2: just too much of an effects asked to have like
Speaker 2: a big fight with a giant cat. I don't know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know, because of you know, there are there
Speaker 2: were films that you know, they would later go more
Speaker 2: in that direction of having you know, the cat to
Speaker 2: aggressively go after tiny humans.
Speaker 4: Well like Cat's Eye the one you mentioned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4: Well not a tiny human, an evil troll and the cat.
Speaker 4: There is the hero going that's right, the evil tiny monster.
Speaker 2: So yeah, this is this is absolutely a fun film.
Speaker 2: You know, there's not not a you know, tremendous amount
Speaker 2: of depth to it. There's not a huge amount of
Speaker 2: monster science to discuss about it. I mean you can
Speaker 2: take various you can certainly get really pedantic on the
Speaker 2: idea of miniaturizing organisms and then how does that miniaturize
Speaker 2: organism react and and fit in with with an immediate
Speaker 2: environment that it was not miniaturized. And depending on how
Speaker 2: small you go, those problems can be you know, can
Speaker 2: be quite extreme. But then there are other directions as well.
Speaker 2: You know, we found this interesting paper we were both
Speaker 2: looking at titled Human Engineering and Climate Change by lal
Speaker 2: Sandberg and Roche. This was from twenty twelve published in Ethics,
Speaker 2: Policy and Environment, and it's pretty wild read. You can
Speaker 2: find it for free online. I think we founded at
Speaker 2: BLC dot Arizona Dot Edu. And one of the things
Speaker 2: they get into is like, if you were to shrink
Speaker 2: humans down, they would have less of an environmental footprint,
Speaker 2: so it would ultimately be better for the environment.
Speaker 4: This paper is absolute. This is something doctor Thorkel would write.
Speaker 4: I started reading it and I was just like, what
Speaker 4: it is interesting, but it is nuts And I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, it seems like there may be more direct
Speaker 4: things that could be done about climate change than saying, like,
Speaker 4: what if we were to shrink humans so that they
Speaker 4: consume fewer resources.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are other levers we should pull first. Certainly
Speaker 2: we shouldn't take the thorkelp that path Thorkel way on
Speaker 2: that particular problem.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's at least got to go like solar
Speaker 4: panels before shrinking people.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. All right, Well you may be wondering where can
Speaker 2: I watch Doctor Cyclops. Well, these things are always subject
Speaker 2: to change. But we actually had a hard time tracking
Speaker 2: this one down. We couldn't find it streaming anywhere or
Speaker 2: for digital purchaser rental. We couldn't even find a We
Speaker 2: couldn't find a physical rental either, So we actually bought
Speaker 2: it on special edition Blu ray from kl Studio Classics
Speaker 2: aka Keno Lorber. It's a brand new four K master.
Speaker 2: It also has an audio commentary by film historian Richard
Speaker 2: Harlan Smith. I didn't I didn't have a chance to
Speaker 2: listen to it, but it sounds like it would be
Speaker 2: pretty cool. The box art on this one is great.
Speaker 2: Unlike some of the other previous releases that have come
Speaker 2: out that had kind of like cheesy box art, like
Speaker 2: this one has that weird probe mechanism in the center
Speaker 2: that is lowered into the earth. You have a picture
Speaker 2: of doctor Thorkel there with it looks like lasers coming
Speaker 2: out of his eyes.
Speaker 3: It's pretty good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really good art.
Speaker 2: But then again, this is also a classic film by
Speaker 2: a notable director, so it's it's entirely possible you might
Speaker 2: be able to catch this one on one of like
Speaker 2: Turner Classic movies or something to that effect. I know
Speaker 2: we've we heard from some people after we did our
Speaker 2: episode on Mad Love chiming in and saying, oh, they're
Speaker 2: showing Mad Love tonight, so who knows. Maybe check your
Speaker 2: local listings, is what I'm saying. Well, let's do it. Then,
Speaker 2: let's go ahead and call it done. We're done with
Speaker 2: Doctor Cyclops here, but this was a fun one to watch,
Speaker 2: a fun one to discuss, and if you would like
Speaker 2: to listen to us discuss other films. You can catch
Speaker 2: other episodes of Weird House Cinema every Friday in the
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. So our core
Speaker 2: episodes are are about science and culture and those published
Speaker 2: on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do an artifact episode on
Speaker 2: Wednesdays listener mail on Mondays. But Friday that's when we
Speaker 2: get to cut loose and discuss some sort of a
Speaker 2: weird cinematic gem, generally from Yesterdayear.
Speaker 4: That's right, so keep tuning in. Huge thanks as always
Speaker 4: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 4: would like to get in touch with us to let
Speaker 4: us know feedback on this episode or any other, to
Speaker 4: suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 4: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 4: your Mind dot com.
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