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The Thing from Another World (1951)
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 12:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
From the view from the windows, Tex is in an observation/control tower room.

David.

By gum, that's IT!

He was in the "control tower" using THAT radio when he talked to the guys in the plane, but later he was in the "radio room", which has no windows. I'm not sure why the facility had two places with radios, but that must be it.
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Krel
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 2:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
I'm not sure why the facility had two places with radios, but that must be it. Very Happy

I know why that tower doesn't look too well insulated. It probably gets pretty cold up there. I would think that the tower is used when they know that aircraft are coming in, or there are outside operations. Also, the radio in the tower looks to be smaller (less powerful) than the one in the second room, which would be more powerful and have a longer range.

David.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 02, 2017 2:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

scotpens wrote:
Bud Brewster wrote:
Even though I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the shooting location was surround by a cyclorama, I still find it hard to believe that the snow wasn't real and the actors were just acting when they kept rubbing their hands together, shaking them to get the blood flowing, and blowing on their gloves, as we often see Douglas Spencer doing.

That's why they call it "acting."

In any case, wherever the scene was actually shot, it can't have been very cold. The actors' breath doesn't show.

I learned that the scene was shot in the summer, and the temperature was in the 90s!
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
Bud Brewster wrote:
Holy cow, the Russians! Of course! The story could involve a struggle between the Americans and the Russians to get the ship!

That could have been an interesting movie. Captain Hendry and the scientists are battling the Thing, when the Rooskies show up. Not knowing what is happening, the Thing slaughters the Soviets and steals their equipment. Now the fight for survival really begins! Or, the Soviets capture everyone, including the Thing, then torch the base to cover-up that they were there. Now it is three sides opposing each other.

I was reading your interesting suggestions again today and started thinking about the possibilities of a new story, set in the 1950s, with clearly acknowledged similarities to The Thing, but not really intended as a remake.

One idea I had was that a ship crash lands in the arctic and the alien survives, but it's unconscious, and the ship is not badly damaged.

Russian and American groups arrive separately and start squabbling over possession the ship and the alien. Tensions mount, because both groups are under strict orders to acquire this tremendous find.

But the alien revives, escapes, and begins killing the humans in their separate camps. The two groups realize that if they don't cooperate, none of them will survive. So, putting their differences aside, they unite to battle the common threat.

What do you think?
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 2:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds a lot like ICE STATION ZEBRA !
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Maurice
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also a bit 2010.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Enjoy this article from Famous Monsters from Filmland, which printed the first half of Who Goes There? in issue #12. The second part was promised in the next issue.




















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Maurice
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 12:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The second half is indeed in issue 13, and can be found here on on the Internet Archive.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 9:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Thanks, Maurice!

The remainder of the article is a condensed version of the short story, and I'm sure we'd all rather read the complete story rather than an edited version.

I thought we had a link to that story somewhere on All Sci-Fi. Does anyone know where that is? I remember reading it on line a few years back.

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


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Wed Nov 15, 2017 8:44 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 6:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Thinking Outside the "Plot"!
________________________________

Well, heck . . . it only took me 66 years to realize that The Thing from Another World has several common assumptions which simply fall apart the minute one looks at them closely! Shocked

These are assumptions, not plot elements that were stated in the film, and as such they can be challenged without casting a single dispersion on this fine movie. It's not the film's fault that most people never stopped to wonder if their initial interpretation of the story was correct or not.

Amazingly enough, all the more likely interpretations of the plot elements described below are WAY more interesting than the simple (and obviously erroneous) ones.

Here's what I mean. Very Happy
________________________________

~ Common Assumption 1# - The alien came from Mars.

None of us smart guys here ever assumed this of course, but John Q. Public took it for granted the minute Scotty said, "A man from Mars! Holy Cow!"

But if the alien didn't come from Mars, then where is he from? Certainly not from a planet in our solar system.

Actually, we don't have to look any farther than Alpha Centauri B, where astronomers have found a rocky Earth-sized planet which they named Alpha Centauri Bd. It's just four light years away, as the crow flies. Practically spittin' distance!

But how did the alien ship get here. Did it have hyperdrive?

Nope, it didn't need it. Let's assume that the ship got a tremendous boost from a launch system when it left Alpha Centauri B, and it tore off towards Earth at a healthy 1% the speed of light. Since Alpha Centauri is 4 years away at the speed of light, the journey would take 400 (. . . ish) years, along with a few years for deceleration as well.

~ Common Assumption 2# - There was only one alien in the crashed saucer.

Nope. There were 10 ( . . . ish). Yes, I know, the ship was little, but that's okay because (Drum roll, please! Very Happy) they were all in suspended animation!

And these clever aliens didn't have to waste a dime on complex cryogenic equipment, either. They just put nine of the ten crewmen in a tank barely large enough to hold them all, and then . . . they topped it off with water . . . and didn't bother to heat it!

Yep. They just exposed the interior of the ship to the vacuum of space, and the water in the sealed tank froze solid. After all, we know for a fact that these aliens can sleep like little lambs in a block of ice! So, freezing them for 400 years would be as easy as tossing bag of Bird's Eye peas into your freezer!



Remember, the original story states that the alien had been frozen in the Antarctic ice for eons, but once it thawed out it was all set to convert every living being on Earth into close cousins, whether they wanted to be part of the family or not!

Meanwhile, the tenth alien is the designated driver when the ship reaches Earth, so he's put into a separate tank equipped with a timer, set to go off in 400 years so that when the ship reaches the Sol system he gets a wake up call and a warm bath, while the cabin is being pressurized and heated up, just for him!

Presto! Captain James T. Karrot of the starship Eggplant, on final approach to Earth!

His mission: to seek out one world and one civilization! To boldly go where no mango has gone before! Laughing

~ Common Assumption 3# - Only one ship came from the alien world.

Golly, I've always thought it would be mighty dumb for the aliens to invade Earth with just one ship and one lone pilot! But I realized today that neither of those assumptions are logical.

I think the Alpha Centaurians sent 10 ( . . . ish) ships, a meager fleet of those small spacecraft to be sure, but certainly better than just one! And since each ship has 10 aliens in those very inexpensive cryogenic chambers, that means there are 100 invading aliens!

But what happened to the other nine ships?

Well, during a 400-year journey across 4 light years, plenty of bad luck can occur. Hitting any little pebble in space at 1% the speed of light would cause a lot more damage than just a cosmic fender-bender!

Or the wake-up timers might not have worked on a few of the ships, so they just sailed on past Sol and kept right on going.

Plus we know that the ships were nuclear powered (hence the radiation the alien emitted all through the movie), so one-or-more of the ships' atomic engines might have melted down and fried the crew like battered squash in a hot frying pan! Shocked

The aliens' invasion plan, of course, was for Captain Karrot and his colleagues to pilot the fleet into low Earth orbit and then start surveying the surface, shopping for real estate that had warm, sunny weather and fertile soil.

Of course, the only thing the Alph Centaurians knew about Earth was just what we know about Alpha Centauri Bd — that it's a planet the right size and distance from the sun to support life.

In view of that, just imagine how pleased the alien captains would have been when they looked down and saw places like Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma (where the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain! Very Happy)



Yes, indeed! This was an invasion of agriculturally-minded space explorers — an army of Agri-nauts one might say — whose motto was (in Latin):

Veni, vidi, coluerunt!

"We came, we saw, we cultivated!"

On the planet below them they could see miles and miles of incredibly fertile fields, all tilled and ready for the corn and wheat and alfalfa to be plowed under and replaced by a huge bumper crop of Alien Baby Plants, fed by the nutrients obtained from countless cows, chickens, pigs, and red-blooded farmers who would be forced to show the aliens how to drive the tractors before they where hung upside down in the barn with their throats cut . . . like the rest of their families! Shocked



Unfortunately for poor Captain Karrot, when he woke up from his 400-year nap he found himself all alone in space. The rest of his fleet was MIA, for reasons unknown! Sad

And to make matters worse, his own starship was limping along on an engine that wasn't hitting on all eight atomic cylinders!

Desperately he tried to find a landing place that was remote enough to hide in, but still fertile enough for him and his still hibernating popsicle crew to start a small farm and raise a little family which included a few hundred blood-thirsty alien children to help him conquer the Earth!

Ah yes, Captain Karrot did his heroic best, but he overshot his intended landing area — Alaska (which is listed as one the ten most fertile states in the U.S.), and he crash-landed near the North Pole.

Bummer . . .



That would have been all she wrote for poor Captain Karrot, but he had one last bit of luck when he was rescued by the folks in the movie and given one last chance to turn all the scientists, GI's, Eskimos, and sled dogs into Gerber's Baby Food and salvage the ambitious invasion plans of his intelligent race.

But, as we all know, the clever humans proved conclusively that a group of America's best military men, teamed up with the finest scientific minds on the planet, were capable of barely defeating one lone, desperate alien in a last ditch effort which — if it had failed — would have meant the end of mankind.

Gee, when you put it that way, we didn't do all that great, did we? Shocked

Like Scotty said, we need to watch the skies, everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.



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


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Sun May 21, 2023 1:03 pm; edited 5 times in total
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alltare
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
~ Common Assumption 3# - Only one ship came from the alien world.

Golly, I've always thought it would be mighty dumb for the aliens to invade Earth with just one ship and one lone pilot! But I realized today that neither of those assumptions are logical.

I think the Alpha Centaurians sent 10 ( . . . ish) ships, a meager fleet of those small spacecraft to be sure, but certainly better than just one! And since each ship has 10 aliens in those very inexpensive cryogenic chambers, that means there are 100 invading aliens!

But what happened to the other nine ships?

Well, one of those other ships could have been the one in the Science Fiction Theatre episode "Y.O.R.D.". It also made it to Earth, but crashed in an unknown location.

On the other hand, maybe it's the same ship. YORD could well have been the prequel to the movie (even though it was aired 4 years after The Thing).
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Krel
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If the movie were made today, they would cut from Scotty's speech to a jungle setting, where there is an Alien. Growing a crop of new Aliens.

David.
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Maurice
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
Common Assumption 2# - There was only one alien in the crashed saucer.

...They just put nine of the ten crewmen in a tank barely large enough to hold them all, and then . . . they topped it off with water . . . and didn't bother to heat it!

Yep. They just exposed the interior of the ship to the vacuum of space, and the water in the sealed tank froze solid.

Sadly for your idea, that probably doesn't work.

In an enclosed tank not exposed to vacuum, it's going to take a while for that water to freeze because the surrounding vacuum is a poor conductor. This means the Vegetons have to be able to stay alive during this slow process. Let's hope they don't need to respirate.

(Exposing liquid water to a vacuum is even worse, because, without pressure, liquid water actually boils off, turns to vapor, then immediately freezes, so you end up with a cloud of fine crystals and not a block of ice.)

So, if you want to ice your Vegetons, you probably want them flash-frozen in a block of ice in a pressure-sealed container for the trip, and a vacuum is unnecessary.

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 16, 2017 9:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
If the movie were made today, they would cut from Scotty's speech to a jungle setting, where there is an Alien. Growing a crop of new Aliens.

I considered what places on Earth would be best for the aliens to raise their Vegton army, and I remembered that the Amazon jungle actually has poor soil (for reasons I don't understand). Plus there's too many insects there that would feed on the Alien Baby Plants! Shocked

No, I think the best place, agriculturally and dramatically, would be smack in the middle of The Bread Basket of the World! Imagine a few acres of Alien Baby Plants hidden in the middle of a giant corn field in Oklahoma.

After all, in Oklahoma the "corn is as high as an elephant's eye", so it would be well hidden!

Hey, maybe that's why aliens make crop circles! They're doing cultivation experiments! Laughing



__________
____ ~ In the alien's language, this means "Plant the kids here!"

Maurice wrote:
Bud Brewster wrote:
They just exposed the interior of the ship to the vacuum of space, and the water in the sealed tank froze solid.

In an enclosed tank not exposed to vacuum, it's going to take a white for that water to freeze because the surrounding vacuum is a poor conductor. This means the Vegetons have to be able to stay alive during this slow process. Let's hope they don't need to respirate.

So, if you want to ice your Vegetons, you probably want them flash-frozen in a block of ice in a pressure-sealed container for the trip, and a vacuum is unnecessary.

Excellent thinking, Maurice. I'm so glad you guys are having fun with the stuff I came up with! Very Happy

Naturally I just took the idea from what happened in the movie. The alien left the sinking saucer and tried to swim through the pool of melted snow (water which was right at the freezing point), but the water refroze before the alien reached the edge.

As I mentioned, the tanks would be sealed (not exposed to vacuum), and the metal itself would deliberately be subzero in temperature when the tanks were pumped full of near-freezing water.

We all know what happens when near-freezing water contacts metal which is below 32??. In fact, it even freezes to tree limbs and roads during ice storms! So I'm sure the water in the subzero metal tanks would freeze even faster than the large pool of water around the saucer.

As for respiration, obviously The Thing didn't need any air, because Scotty mentioned that "he got along all right for over twenty-four hours in block of ice!" So, apparently the Vegetons just hibernate when frozen.
Very Happy
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

From : https://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/

Quote:
In the 1951 movie, The Thing from Another World, in describing the Thing itself one characters says, "An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles." And so the portrayal in Get Lost #3 (1954), with their satire.

"The Some-THING" was drawn by Ross Andru ( co-publisher of Mikeross Publications with Mike Esposito) and inker Martin Thall. As a Mad imitator, Get Lost was probably better than at least 50% of the other Mad knockoffs, attempting to capture some of the lightning in a bottle from the Harvey Kurtzman creation. A problem for Mikeross was it entered the comic book field during a time when the market was experiencing a glut of product, and shelf space was hard to find. The other problem is, as John Benson, author of The Sincerest Form of Parody, put it, is that a large group of Mad's readers were reading it because it was hip. They didn't normally read comic books, including Mad imitators.

This story was reprinted with some other stories from Get Lost in Marvel Comics Arrgh! #2, 1972






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