ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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YouTube has a number of episodes from this great show, and the picture quality suggests that they're from the restored DVDs sold by Shout Factory.

Science Fiction Theatre - Jupitron S2 E57


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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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This is an unusual episode with an imaginative concept and a noble message. The way it's presented isn't exactly exciting, but I'm sure it inspired young minds when it first aired on August 17, 1956 — just one day after my 8th birthday!

The story begins with a scientist and his wife (Bill Williams and Toni Gerry) telling the dean of their university science department (Michael Fox, who ALWAYS plays doctors of some kind) about a strange experience they had the night before. The couple was on a beach when a mist drifted in from the ocean and put them both to sleep.

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But it did much more than that — it transported them from the beach to a strange laboratory on an alien world.

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Bill pokes around the lab, studying the complex equipment, and he accidentally alters the atmospheric controls, increasing the percentage of the argon in the air to the point where he and his wife begin to suffocate. (This scene is cut out of the Youtube video below. Thank the SciFi Channel for that. )

Shortly thereafter a man enters the lab and introduces himself as Dr. August Wykoff (Lowell Gilmore), a famous scientists who vanished ten years ago.

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Wykoff explains that the couple has been transported to a moon of Jupiter so that he can demonstrate a fantastic formula to Bill that is capable of providing an abundance of food for all mankind.

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The alien inhabitants of Jupiter's moon brought Wykoff there ten years earlier because they needed his help with a problem which threatened their environment, and in return for that help, they now wish to offer "Jupitron", a formula that greatly accelerates plant growth.

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Wykoff demonstrates the effectiveness of Jupitron on a sweet potato, and the time-lapse shots used for this demonstration mesmerized kids like me in 1956.

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Bill is told enough about the formula for Jupitron to know that he can duplicate it on Earth, and minutes later he and his wife are teleported back to the beach. They discuss the "strange dream" they seem to have shared, and they go to Dean Michael Fox to report this bizarre incident. But naturally he's not convinced it was real.

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So Bill and Toni go to the Bio-Physics Laboratory of the University so Bill can test a theory he has which might prove the incident really happened. A blood sample from him and Toni reveals that they both have an impossibly high concentration of argon in their blood from the brief incident on the moon of Jupiter when they nearly suffocated.

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The episode ends with Bill vowing to create Jupitron and use it to provide Earth's population with an unlimited supply of food.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

Hey!.....Isn't that the centrifuge from GOG ???
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Bud Brewster]

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Well, the centrifuge from Gog isn't in this episode, Gord, but
it is in several ohers.

While spending all day yesterday in hog heaven watching episodes of Science Fiction Theater and adding posts to this forum, I did see it in numerous shots in Project 44, which was about astronauts training for a Mars mission.

Ivan Tors was the producer of this series and Gog, so it's no surprise that the infamous "sideways mini-centrifuge" would show up in this series.

I tend to scream at the television whenever that ridiculous contraption is shown. For God's sake, didn't the designer and the rest of the film crew realize that real centrifuges were much larger than that silly thing?

And the people in a real centrifuge are seated with their backs to the outside of the spinning machine so that the centrifugal force pulled them "down" into their seats to create G-forces higher than Earth's gravity.

But in this ridiculous device, the riders are sitting SIDEWAYS, which meant they would quickly be thrown off the damn thing!





The picture above is obviously a publicity shot with the device motionless, because it isn't blurred and the rider on the right doesn't have his left hand gripping the bar next to his seat to keep from being flung off.

In Gog you can see the poor guys hanging on for dear life, even though all the scenes of the centrifuge moving fast are obviously sped-up shots of the machine turning slowly.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)