ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

James Arness (The Thing from Another World) is a swashbuckling hero, Laura Elliot is the heroine who's been kidnapped by Australian pirates. They all end up shipwrecked on an uncharted island populated by dinosaurs.

Unfortunately the monsters are borrowed from every filmmaker's stock-footage-grab-bag, One Million B.C., and the movie is three-quarters over before it even gets to the island. Even then, the stock footage is used sparingly.



The rest of he film is padded out with scenes from Captain Fury (1939) and Captain Caution (1940). Later during the same year he made Two Lost Worlds (1951), Arness starred in a real science fiction film, The Thing from Another World.

Directed by Norman Dawn.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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Here's a wonderfully hokey, happy trailer for this movie that will prove it's the only film to offer sword fighting pirates on a burning ship and dinosaurs battling amidst an earthquake!

I want to see this movie, but I can't find it anywhere, and the DVD from Amazon is $14.99.

* Notice the typos in the on-screen blurb. Instead of calling the monsters "Dragon-Lizards" it says "Dragons-Lizards" — and it spells "lizard" wrong!

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Rick]

In 6th Grade, a new kid in our class turned out to be a comic book fanatic almost as much as myself, so we bonded over that and I drafted him into a love for monster movies and the like. We'd discuss favorites, make lists, analyze the latest TWILIGHT ZONE.

But then, after only one year, he moved to another city about 100 miles away. We couldn't afford long-distance calls and there was no email, God knows (this was about 1962, after all), so we resorted to that age-old means of communication — What movies we'd seen, what comics we'd acquired.

The fascinating thing (and, for me, frustrating) was that he'd moved to a town with no TV stations close enough to pick up. So the town had an early form of Cable tv. Essentially, there was just a big antenna system to drag in as many stations as they could which were then cabled out to all the houses.

As a result, my friend suddenly went from our two-channel system to a choice of about ten or twelve stations from several different cities. He immediately started racking up incredible numbers of monster movies seen, while I still muddled along with crumbs.

I had given him, as a going-away present, a handwritten list of all the monster movies I knew of at the time, so that he could be on the lookout. And he started crossing off those titles at an incredible rate.

Me being what I am, and however maddening it was, I kept a running list of the movies he was able to see, and in my letters I'd ask him questions about the movies.

Then, one day, I actually got a long-distance call from him and he was a little upset. He told me he'd seen TWO LOST WORLDS on one of his stations, and it was lousy. Worst of all, there were no monsters in the damn thing. "Why did you put it on your list? It's just a stupid thing with ships and pirates."

I couldn't answer him. All I knew was that there were supposed to be dinosaurs in the thing.

It would be another ten years or so 'till I got my chance to see TWO LOST WORLDS. After a look at it, I decided that my friend had seen the result of some station, probably to fit it into the time allotted, simply dropping the last reel or so.

Goodbye, ONE MILLION B.C. dinosaurs.

Frankly, I was not impressed with TWO LOST WORLDS ("You weren't" — "Why, no, I wasn't.") I sort of wished that my TV station had dropped the first six or seven reels and retained only those slurpasaurs.

Yeah, it's much better as a childhood memory than as a movie memory. Gonna keep it that way.
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Man need not kneel before the angels,
Nor lie in death forever,
But for the weakness of his feeble will.

[Robert (Butch) Day]

Here is the island:



Here are your "missing" dinosaurs:






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Common Sense ISN'T Common

[Bud Brewster]

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Nice pictures, Butch. But the last one is from The Lost Continent (1951).

I had a similar experience with King Kong on TV in the early sixties. After airing the movie in it's complete form twice (about a year apart), the local station started showing it every few months in the afternoons.

Except that these matinee shows were sort of their Reader's Digest condensed version. After Ann Darrow's rescue party left the village and set off into the jungle, the stations would cut to a commercial. When the movie came back, the men would be running up to the log! No stegosaurus and no brontosaurus.

After the T-Rex battle, another commercial would come on, and when the movie returned, Kong would be on ledge with Ann. No snake-monster in the cave.

I don't remember if any of the earlier scenes on the ship were cut out, but if the morons at the station hadn't possessed the brains of a stegosaurus, that's where they would have amputated the fifteen minutes they apparently needed for commercials.

Oh, well. The men who committed this atrocity have long since become extinct, and their bones are now fossilized in some grave yard. A thousand years from now, archeologist will dig up the bones, examine them carefully, and then say something like —

"Judging from the size of the cranium, these specimens had very low intelligence."

But heck fire, Rick, my lame little story doesn't hold a candle to the one you told. Your tale of loyal friendship and a shared passion for an American art form is the stuff of which great biographies are made!

In fact, I think I'm going to put all your great stories together (after you've added a few more in a year or so), and then we can publish them in a book, using the same Amazon service that put my own two novels on the market.

Hell, I've already got the cover ready to go!

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* We'll use you're real last name on the actual book, of course.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

This is getting into cross-threading, but on the topic of movies edited for TV, I was once all ready to record the audio from a broadcast of Forbidden Planet. (This was well before videotaping.) I started the tape recorder, the titles and opening credits rolled by, then it cut to "Whatever that lunch was, it was certainly delicious!"
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...or not...

WayneO
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[Gord Green]

That brings back a most treasured memory.

Back before the vhs days, around 1980, I too recorded Forbidden Planet on an audio cassette recorder. My second son was only a few months old so my older son (then about 10 years old) and I went on a weekend camping trip.

There, around a campfire, beneath stars unhampered by ambient city lights, we listened to the audio together. He was spellbound by the story and sat there quietly looking at the stars as the epic unrolled.

To this day as an adult, he often recalls it as a treasured memory of his childhood.

Gord - Star Pirate

[orzel-w]

The electronic tonalities of the FP soundtrack must have been really effective in such a setting, Gord.
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...or not...

WayneO
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[Gord Green]

The sound of the creature from the id was sooooo awesome in the deep dark forest at night. Bet it scared all the critters away!

Gord - Space Pirate

[Custer]

I remember setting up the microphone for the reel-to-reel tape recorder fairly close to the television... but somehow, I found afterwards that it had managed to tune in to a radio show instead...

[Bud Brewster]

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Yep, I can just visualize it. A wonderful memory — that required years of expensive therapy to deal with.



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

[Custer]

Hey, it was reel-to-reel, before cassettes came along, so I was young, just putting the microphone near the TV seemed the do-able thing to, er, do... I have no idea what the programme was! I may still have some old tape reels put away somewhere in the attic; I think there was a Ray Bradbury adaptation radio tape that used to live on a bookshelf.

Technology moves on...

[Custer]

A friend at another site managed to provide me with a copy of the full 71-minute Two Lost Worlds... and for a limited time I've put it in my Dropbox for downloading, here...

[Bud Brewster]

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Thanks, Custer!

I downloaded Two Lost Worlds and watched a little of it with the VLC player on my laptop. The picture is flawless.

I tired to upload it to YouTube, but they won't take a VLC file. I haven't been able to master the conversion process that turns a VLC into an AVI or MP4 file yet. If you can do this and make the file available to me, I'd take a shot at putting it on YouTube, and then we could all enjoy it.

What do you think?
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)