Susie Brown takes a page from Bettie!

Yesterday I read about JaneDear, the country-rock act. Susie Brown, with the Bettie Page hair, is a local girl, and once was in a musical act with the rest of her family. I'm sure I've never seen her before, but even if I had, at the time she performed locally she was about 10, and not as noticeable as she is 15 years later.


I'm not up on today's music, but I'm sure in this instance it's not the music that attracts me.



The comparison with Bettie Page is inevitable, because she had the hairstyle. But Bettie also had other things worth looking at:

Bettie's bodacious booty!

Good golly, great gams!

Hot heels!

Miss Bettie Page...just your average exhibitionist girl next door!

"I cannot tell a lie" is a lie we cannot tell...

From the website, The Phrase Finder:

Q: Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree?
: A: Probably not. The story was likely invented by a man named Mason Weems shortly after Washington's death. Ironically, the story was intended to show how honest Washington was: George confesses to his father saying, "I cannot tell a lie."

: From http://www.virginia.edu/gwpapers/faq/index.html More about the fable is at http://www.virginia.edu/gwpapers/documents/weems/index.html

Parson Weems was a man bent on the Moral Uplift of Children, so he wrote a fictionalized biography of America's first president, including a number of fanciful stories intended to polish George's reputation. He succeeded so well that the book was a staple of American education for much of the 19th century, and the legends took root. Today, in a more skeptical age, we tend to dismiss all legends and reduce all historical figures to their all-too-human ordinariness. The story is dying out, in other words. I think it's only older Americans who recall the "I cannot tell a lie" story. The ironic thing is, George doesn't need the help. Although some historians would disagree, he's a pretty admirable character in many ways. For example, in how many revolutions, before or since, has a leader won two elections, then at the peak of his popularity, refuse to run for a third term, voluntarily stepping aside?

Well, if Washington didn't tell a lie, then he was the only president who didn't. Presidents usually keep big secrets, and aren't above telling whoppers when the facts would compromise national security, cost them an election or even personal embarrassment. "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

The truth is we lie all the time. "How you doing?" "Great!" Actually, you may be not doing well at all, but this lie is so much a part of us we don't think of it as lying. We don't like to be lied to, but we don't think twice about lying our way out of a situation. "No, honey, that skirt does not make you look fat." "I only had one beer, officer."

So if George Washington, even in a fable like the cherry tree story, was that morally upright that he could not tell a lie, then he wasn't human. Show me someone who doesn't lie and I'll show you someone who can't be trusted!

De Palma's Fury

According to the Internet Movie Database Brian De Palma (sometimes spelled "DePalma") has directed 37 movies and short films, going back to 1960. De Palma is a director whose work runs hot and cold for me. I love some of his work (Sisters, Carlito's Way, Wiseguys, parts of Scarface), hate some (Body Double, Carrie) or yawn my way through, like I did yesterday when I watched The Fury on DVD. I found myself fast forwarding way too often, because the story seems to drag in too many spots.

The screenplay was written by John Farris, based on his novel. The plot element of ESP in The Fury, and the ability to cause injury and death* via mind power is a very provocative theme, but hard to believe. Stephen King wrote Firestarter after The Fury, which repeated some of Farris' themes.

It's been 33 years since 1978 when The Fury was released, and the themes seem outdated. The occult, ESP, supernatural plots are still around, but seem old hat. The main thing I found interesting about The Fury is Kirk Douglas in a role as protective father, searching for his son, Robin, kidnapped by evil U.S. government black ops agents. Douglas is believable, even if the government as enemy is a cliché that has been played to death.

I also enjoyed John Cassavetes' performance. Some of the actors in The Fury are now deceased (Carrie Snodgress, Cassavetes), and some are now very old (Douglas and Charles Durning).

I won't go into the plot. Many reviews of the movie on IMdB complain of it being "boring," "long," "talky," and it is those things in spots. There is at least one WTF moment in the film, when one scene follows another and contradicts the preceding scene. Toward the end Kirk Douglas goes into a house where his son, Robin, played by Stevens, has been held in a sort of "honey trap," seduced by an older woman in order to keep him complacent. Robin catches on and kills the seductress, making a bloody mess of the room.

When Kirk Douglas, as his dad, enters the darkened room with a flashlight, Robin is shown levitating near the ceiling.

However, in the very next scene his dad is holding his arm lest he fall to his death off a roof. If he can levitate why did he fall to his death?

In the final scene Irving, as Gillian, uses her mind to blind and then blow up the evil Childress, played by Cassavetes.

Obviously they used a dummy, designed by Rick Baker. They blew it to pieces, but included 13 (and yes, I counted) clips of the dummy blowing up, shot from every conceivable angle. It was done, probably less for impact on the audience who wanted some good gore, but probably also because this was an expensive effect, and having many cameras cover it was a hedge against one camera failing while the one-time effect was filmed. It was, in the literal sense of the word, overkill. The goriest part is Childress's head blowing off his body, which, because I know you like this sort of thing, I've got on screen capture.

*This reminds me of the question on the psychology test: "If you could kill someone with the power of your mind and no one would know, would you do it?" According to what I read on this, most people answer "yes," which means more people would kill if they didn't fear punishment.

Billy Ray Cyrus has a duh moment

I just want to know, Billy Ray, who signed those contracts for your minor daughter that put her on this path to stardom and the attendant problems thereof?

-

I spy with my little eye...

I watched a couple of spy movies, very different from each other, over the weekend. RED, starring Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and Karl Urban, is a loud, in-your-face, illogical thrill-ride of a movie. I hadn't realized until the I saw the DC Comics logo in the opening credits that it was based on a comic book. Oh, excuse me. I mean graphic novel. No, forget that. The plot is strictly out of a comic book.

It has what I call the A-Team effect. Remember that old TV Show? Bullets flew everywhere, but none struck our heroes. RED has a hero who is able to physically disarm a whole platoon of trained commandos who have descended on his house in a suburban neighborhood, shooting it to pieces with thousands of rounds of machine-gun fire. As my wife asked while the gunfire roared, "Didn't his neighbors hear that?"

Bruce Willis, who is getting on in years, might be toward the end of his comic book hero roles, like Die Hard, of which RED is a lineal descendant. Willis is a known quantity as an action hero, so the audience has some character shorthand built into his part. We know he'll kick ass.

Malkovich is a quirky actor, and true to form he's quirky in this movie. Morgan Freeman is in so many movies he's like Michael Caine was for decades, in every other movie released. You wouldn't guess it by seeing him in this costume for this scene, but Freeman brings dignity and calmness to his parts.

The only actor who plays a surprising character is Helen Mirren, because she doesn't have a movie persona like the other actors. She can play any part. It looks like she took this part because a) it was fun; she got to shoot a .50 caliber machine gun and a sniper rifle and b) she got paid copious amounts of money.

Another surprise was the inclusion of Ernest Borgnine in a small part. Not a cameo, but a character part, which shows that Borgnine might be old--born in 1917--but he still has all his faculties about him.

New Zealand native Karl Urban plays an American CIA agent. I like Urban, but honestly, what is it about actors from Down Under playing Americans? Urban, Eric Bana, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe...the list goes on.

RED is silly, but it knows it, and plays much of the story for laughs while dolloping on the action scenes. I quite liked the movie, in that way I sometimes like goofy movies if they entertain me from start to finish.

One final note: the title is an acronym: Retired Extremely Dangerous.

On the other hand, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, from the novel by John Le Carré, was made in gritty black and white in 1965, and showed a more realistic type of spy, the Cold Warrior who carried out his business in secret. It was released during the Sean Connery years of the James Bond franchise. Richard Burton was no Sean Connery, nor did he try to be. He is shown as worn and dissolute, the character of Alec Leamas probably more like the real-life Burton than Sean Connery was like James Bond.

The plot of Spy is complex, somewhat simplified for the movie. Le Carré, real name Peter Cornwell, was a diplomat and had worked in British intelligence. His novel, while not giving away any official secrets, caused his superiors problems and the release of the book was held up while they worked it out amongst themselves. They ultimately allowed its release as written.

In a lengthy interview on a second disk of this Criterion Collection DVD, Cornwell/Le Carré said he worked on the movie as it was being filmed. Burton, in one of his I-am-the-star tantrums, had insisted that only LeCarré write the dialogue for his character, Leamas. Le Carré admitted that he liked the script by Paul Dehn, and just jiggered Dehn's dialogue a bit, removing some commas and rearranging some sentences, to satisfy Burton. Burton and producer/director Martin Ritt had a personality clash. Burton was there for star power, but was not Ritt's first choice for the part.

Burton was in the midst of a turbulent time in his life and his career. He and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, were the most famous movie stars of the era. They were splashed all over the tabloids every day. Burton, a hard drinker, not only drank in real life, but the character drank. It perfectly matched Burton's real-life looks, which was of a man whose bad habits show on his face. LeCarré called those looks "pocked beauty."

It's hard to believe Burton, born in 1925, was only forty when Spy was made in 1965.

Both movies, despite their more obvious differences, have something in common, which is a mistrust of government and intelligence programs. There is a paranoia about spying: do you know if the government is coming after you? I enjoy this sort of plot even if it makes me feel a bit creepy, and look around myself to see if anyone is watching.

Happy Valentine's Day

Idiot lapse in judgment

When it comes to sex scandals, it's become so common amongst politicians that maybe we should re-categorize it. Rather than "adultery" or "fooling around" we should file it under "idiot lapse in judgment." The latest to be filed under that heading is Rep. Chris Lee, Republican of New York, who was outed with a bare-chested self-pic he sent a woman he met on craigslist. As pictures go it wasn't that bad; at least he wasn't exposing his private parts. The picture looks like a guy showing off his sleek physique. His more serious lapse came when he told the woman he was a divorced lobbyist.

Faces match. That's a problem.

"Lie-face! Lie-face!" as the kids would chant when we'd get caught in a lie. Within a couple of hours holier-than-thou House Leader John Boehner leaned on Lee to resign and he did. Lee is married with a small child. I guess we'll see how much longer he'll be married.

An editorial on Technorati.com about Lee aims at the hypocrisy angle: "Yet another case of 'family values' expert caught for naughtiness. When will the GOP stop the blatant hypocrisy?" I'm a Democrat, but think that's a disingenuous characterization, considering a lot of Democrats have been caught in the idiot lapse of judgment trap. I don't think sex recognizes one political party over another.

It's not that the public doesn't send risqué, even pornographic, images of themselves over the Internet or via their phones. It just takes a couple of clicks on the Internet to find hundreds or thousands of images of people who have taken naughty pics of themselves in the mirror. It's just that those everyday folks, lapses in judgment notwithstanding, aren't charged with writing the country's laws, as was Congressman Chris Lee.

If you're going to engage in this sort of thing, I have some advice for would-be self-picture takers: don't show your face.

See, now no problem!

Do genitals resemble their owners?

I admit to being intrigued by a book of poetry with scratch 'n' sniff pictures of vaginas. I read this interview with the poet who created the book. She even worked with a company to provide the scratch 'n' sniff stickers.

It's audacious, but it's also a great gimmick, you've got to agree.

Click on the image to enlarge it, and read the interview for yourself.


I'm also intrigued by her statement that she could identify her friends from pictures of their vaginas. "It's a resemblance, like a mother-to-child resemblance," she claims. Huh! Who'd have thought that? If a vagina resembles its owner, then does a man's penis resemble him? Women, when you call your husband/boyfriend a "dickhead" is it because his little guy looks like him? If he in turn calls you a "c*nt," is it for the same reason? Perhaps someone could come up with one of those matching games. They could post eight pictures of genitalia, then have eight faces, and the player would have to match them by drawing a line from the genitals to the face.

Wayne is locked out again

The other day I reported that when I turned on my cell phone I had a text message from an area code in Virginia, obviously a wrong number.

Yesterday I turned on my cell phone and got the jangle telling me I had a message, a voicemail. When I listened it was a man's voice, in an exasperated tone:

"Look, Wayne's locked out again. I'm really sorry to bother you, but could you run over there and let him in?"

I don't know anyone named Wayne, so it was another wrong number. It was a call from the local area code. I don't know where Wayne was, but at least the caller was in my part of the state. The message was also from the preceding night, about 12 hours before I turned on my phone and listened to it. I pictured Wayne by a locked door, shivering through the freezing night, waiting for someone to unlock the door.

Wayne, in the one-in-ten-zillion chance you read this, have you learned something? Can you pass it along to the person who called me for help? I've left a very clear message on my phone. It gives my name. I just listened to it and it sounds good to me, so whoever it was that called for help on whatever you were locked out of, your car, your apartment or house, just ignored my message and went ahead and left his own.

I also have to say he sounded pissed off. He's tired of you being locked out, Wayne. Next time put on your thinking cap. "What do I need before I leave the house? Oops! Better take my house key." Of if it was your car, get in the habit of taking the keys out and putting them in your pocket as you exit your vehicle. You don't know me, but you'll silently thank me if you just take elementary precautions to avoid lockouts.

Believe me, Wayne. I've been there.

Barack for Martin Beck

 

          "Barack?" said the waiter.

"What's that?" said Martin Beck, first in German, then in English.

"Very gut apéritif," said the waiter.

Martin Beck drank the apéritif called barack. Barack palinka, explained the waiter, was Hungarian apricot brandy.

The things you learn in books. I read the above in a Swedish police procedural by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, a novel starring Stockholm detective Martin Beck. The authors wrote ten novels featuring Martin Beck before Wahlöö died in 1975.


One of the novels, The Laughing Policeman, was made into a 1973 movie with Walter Matthau as "Jake Martin," the location changed from Stockholm to San Francisco. The authors used as their inspiration the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. Before McBain there just weren't too many detective novels that utilized real police techniques. Crimes aren't solved in 60 minutes, Despite the perception left by popular TV shows and movies. Most of detective work is legwork, talking to people. In 1969's The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, there is a certain plodding quality, replete with details. In both of the books in this omnibus from Mystery Guild, Martin Beck Mysteries, Martin is meticulous with details. The first novel, Roseanna, from 1967, is a step-by-step story of the process of finding out the identity of a murder victim, and then tracking down her murderer. Martin Beck is also a keen observer, as witnessed by this description of a witness he attempts to interview in The Man Who Went Up In Smoke:

The woman seemed surprised. Very likely, she had been expecting someone. She was wearing a dark-blue, two-piece bathing suit and in her right hand she was carrying a green rubber diving mask and a snorkel. She was standing with her feet wide apart and her left hand still on the lock, quite still, as if paralyzed in the middle of a movement. Her hair was dark and short, and her features were strong. She had thick black eyebrows, a broad straight nose and full lips. Her teeth were good but somewhat uneven. Her mouth was half-open and the tip of her tongue was resting against her lower teeth, as if she was just about to say omething. She was barely taller than five foot one, but strongly and hamoniously built, with well-developed shoulders, broad hips and quite a narrow waist. Her legs were muscular and her feet short and broad, with straight toes. she had a very deep suntan and her skin appeared soft and elastic, especially across her diaphragm and stomach. Shaved armpits. Large breasts and curved stomach with thick down that seemed very light against her tanned skin. Here and there, long and curly black hairs had made their way out from the elastic at her loins. She might have been twenty-two or twenty-three years old, at the most. Not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word, but a highly functional specimen of the human race.

"Highly functional specimen of the human race." I love that. You might also say that Martin Beck is a highly functional specimen of a police detective, going about his job methodically. So much so that his work interferes with his family life and later in the series he divorces. Martin also strikes me as depressed and obsessive-compulsive; not necessarily bad traits for a detective.

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard has reprinted all ten novels in paperback, and they are available through Amazon.com

The Utah state gun

Hey man, don't mess with us Utah folks. We're armed and shoot to kill.

Excerpts from a January 29, 2011 column by Gail Collins.

Copyright © 2011 The New York Times

. . . in Salt Lake City, the state legislature is considering a bill to honor the Browning M1911 pistol by making it the official state firearm.

Yes, a committee in the Utah House of Representatives voted 9-2 this week to approve a bill that would add the Browning pistol to the pantheon of official state things, along with the bird (seagull), rock (coal) and dance (square).

"This firearm is Utah," Rep. Carl Wimmer, the Browning bill's sponsor, told The Salt Lake Tribune.

Capitol observers say the Browning bill has an excellent chance of becoming law.

On Monday, the Utah State Capitol celebrated Browning Day, honoring John Moses Browning, native son and maker of the nominee for Official State Firearm. There were speeches, a proclamation, a flyover by a National Guard helicopter, and, of course, a rotunda full of guns. "We recognize his efforts to preserve the Constitution," Gov. Gary Herbert said, in keeping with what appears to be a new Republican regulation requiring all party members to mention the Constitution at least once in every three sentences.

It is generally not a good policy to dwell on the strange behavior of state legislators since it leads to bottomless despair. If I wanted to go down that road, I'd give you Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator who tried to improve upon the Browning Day celebrations by suggesting they be scheduled to coincide with Martin Luther King Day since "both made tremendous contributions to individual freedom and individual liberty."

But it's a symptom of a new streak of craziness abroad in the land, which has politicians scrambling to prove not just that they are against gun regulation, but also that they are proactively in favor of introducing guns into every conceivable part of American life. National parks. Schools. Bars. Airports.

"There is abundant research suggesting in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, goes down," Utah's new U.S. senator, Mike Lee, told CNN.

Boys will be boys, and must have their toys. This ad appeared in a 1946 comic, appropriately titled Silly Tunes. Maybe Rep. Wimmer had one of these.

(Remember to click on it to make it big enough to read.)

"Very well proportioned..."

I watched Oprah yesterday, a show following up on stories done over several years by Oprah about strange or bad marriages. In the case of actress Fran Drescher, her story is that after she divorced her husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, in 1999, he confessed to her he was gay.

So...OK. They seem to have lived through the trauma of divorce and now they talk about this aspect of their lives. I thought, "Why do people confess such intimate secrets? Why would I want to know whether Fran Drescher's ex is gay?" If you haven't seen comic actress Drescher before, she is a very pretty woman who opens her mouth and talks in a nasally voice that is nails on a chalkboard. Her laugh is enough to chase me out of a room. Frankly, I'm not sure how he survived being married to her as long as he did, gay or not.

Drescher explained she and Peter met when they were 15. They had been together since they were kids, growing up together. She was faithful to him, and during their marriage hadn't had sex with other men. When they divorced she had other relationships. That's when she said to the audience and to him that until she was with other men she didn't realize her ex was "very well proportioned." That's a euphemistic way of saying he has a large penis.

She was grinning ear to ear when she said that. He looked at her with kind of a sick smile, like, "Woman, you've embarrassed me once again." How much information is too much information?

It reminded me, because one thing always leads to something else in my brain, of what I had heard about the late Frank Sinatra, that he was "very well proportioned." Sinatra called his penis "Little Frankie," and wore special underwear to accommodate it.

From 1946. Is Frank smiling because he's thinking about Little Frankie?

Guys can obsess about the size of their penises. I don't know why anyone would talk about it on a syndicated talk show, but Drescher seemed more than willing to share that information. I don't remember Sinatra coming out on stage and talking about Little Frankie. Or maybe he did and I missed it, thank god.

While we're on the topic, here's some hidden porn from Life magazine, 1967:

We're living in a text mess age

My cell phone jangled the other night, that particular tone that means a text message has been received. I don't send text messages and no one sends them to me unless they're some phone solicitation or a wrong number. When I looked at the message it said:

oh my god!!!!!! Y the fuk are u saying all that stupid shit to make me have a dumb ass tutor!?!?!

It came from a Virginia area code, so I was sure it was a wrong number. Not that I didn't already suspect it, because I don't know anyone who writes like that. Or I should say, no one writes like that to me. Texting has its own language, and although I don't use it, I can read it. I even agree with some of it. Economy, using one letter, "y" for why or "u" for you, makes sense. "Fuk" seems strange--how hard is that word to spell?--but it's readable.

"Stupid shit" as used in this sense, doesn't mean unintelligent defecation, but is an overall term which means saying "things which can be used against me," the texter, so that it becomes the cause of the writer having to have special help from a "dumb ass tutor." "Dumb ass" in this context would mean someone you wouldn't want in your life, not that the tutor him/herself is dumb.

So the short note has phonetic spelling, colloquialisms, and is designed for impact. It's written as a accusation in the form of a question to which the asker already knows the answer. Reading between the lines, I believe someone said something to someone in authority, a school official, a parent, which caused them to determine that a tutor is necessary, based on the texter's academic needs. But the texter is not happy, which he/she declares immediately with the the exclamatory, "oh my god!!!!!!" The multiple exclamation points makes that clear to the receiver of this text. Attention is being shouted out for the message that follows.

What makes sense to the receiver, the texter and even me, wouldn't make any sense at all to someone who was trying to learn the English language.

One off the municipalities within our county decided to declare that everyone in their city should speak English. So they have a resolution that English will be spoken. Even the local daily newspaper picked it up and ran with it in an editorial, which decided that, in America where English is the official language, all people coming from other countries should speak it. It's the arrogance of Americans, even those whose ancestors came to this country speaking another language, who have decided that they shouldn't have to be bothered by non-English speakers. They will just wave a magic wand and make it so. My daughter-in-law, who came from Vietnam, has learned English by immersion over a period of several years. She's had to learn to read it and write it, because she's had to for the sake of her jobs. She also spends her day in a business setting where she speaks to Americans. But it all took time, and frankly, I've never asked her if she would understand a text message like the one I reproduced for you above. Do people waving those magic wands know how difficult it is to learn another language? Especially English?

Even English speakers have trouble with English. I've spoken English all my life, but when I was in the Army I stumbled when I read that if I lost any equipment issued to me I would be "pecuniarily liable." Eh? Say what? Pecuniarily? Going to the dictionary I found out that "pecuniary" means relating to money. Why not just say that? Well, because the writer thought it sounded smarter or more legal-sounding to say "pecuniary" than to say, "If you lose equipment issued to you, you will be required to replace it by paying for it."

oh my god!!!!! y do u need a dumb ass tutor to read that stupid shit!?!?

***********

This clever list is from an e-mail I received this morning:

FOR THE LEXIPHILES AMONGST US

To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A.

The professor discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.

The batteries were given out free of charge.

A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead giveaway.

If you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I'll show you A-flat miner.

You are stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.

Local Area Network in Australia: The LAN down under.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

Police were called to a day care where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the fellow whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.

If you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.

A bicycle can't stand alone; it is two tired.

In a democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism, it's your Count that votes.

When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye.

Acupuncture: a jab well done.

"Do you feel lucky...well, do you, punk?"

There's an old saying: Better to be lucky than good.

These folks must've cornered the market on four-leaf clovers, horseshoes and lucky rabbits' feet.

From the ocean, from the stars*

I'm fascinated by these underwater scenes by sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor. He has placed hundreds of life size statues under water. There natural processes begin and the statuary becomes a reef. The artist's vision extends beyond placing his work in a gallery or museum, but where it can do some good.

Visit his website for more information and lots more pictures of his work.

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/index.asp





When I was younger, during the late '60s, we used the word "cosmic" to indicate something was cool. Images from the Hubble telescope are truly cosmic, in the original sense of the word and in our usage.

A telescope like the Hubble is a time machine, reaching back as far as the beginnings of the universe, as light makes it way at 180,000 miles per second to us. It's as close as we'll ever get to looking into the past, and that's just...well, cosmic.







*I borrowed this from the title of an anthology of stories by Arthur C. Clarke. It seems appropriate here.

I wanted to believe...

Following up on my last posting about my science fiction double feature weekend:

In the mid-1950s the world envisioned by futurists was a technological promise on the verge of happening. In our future there were cars that would drive themselves or transform into helicopters, taking us above the traffic. In time there would be video telephones, robots to do our work, rocket ships with atomic motors that would take us to the moon for a vacation. As a young boy my head was full of these marvels. I was very anxious for all of it to finally happen, even asking my mother at one point, "So when is the future going to be here?" as if there was an actual date we'd all be transformed into a brand-new space age world.*

So when I saw Forbidden Planet, with its (then) futuristic sets, the flying saucer-style spaceship and especially Robby the Robot, I was very taken. I knew the rest of the high tech-looking sets were fake, but I believed that Robby was a real, functioning robot. Dad had a good laugh when I told him that. A year later we saw Robby in The Invisible Boy, but by then I wasn't so easily duped by the need of my imagination to make my fantasies reality.

This 1979 issue of Cinefantastique, with its special coverage of the making of Forbidden Planet, is fun to read, to see how they did behind the camera what later turned up on the movie screen.

The centerfold is the artwork for the Forbidden Planet movie poster. I don't know what advertising would have done if they didn't show such a cliché, a monster, a robot, an alien, etc., carrying a limp girl. Just once they couldn't carry a guy...?

The behind-the-scenes photo is of special effects technicians with the robot, and the tech who operated it. The inset is of actress Gale "My Little Margie" Storm with tech Eddie Fisher, who was Robby the Robot.

*In all of those predictions the futurists missed predicting cellular phones and the Internet.