ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

John D. MacDonald's highly enjoyable novel became this reasonably amusing TV movie with Robert Hayes (Airplane! and Pam Dawber (Mork and Mindy).

The premise is so unique, it might actually be the only one! (Just kidding, but the novel brilliantly written.)

Robert Hayes inherits his millionaire uncle's seemingly ordinary pocket watch — which turns out to be a device which drastically slows time for the whole world, while Robert is free to movie around normally.

What the movie leaves out is the way the main character learns that the rules of physics still apply to the objects around him. So, in order to move an object or a person he has so exert enough force to "speed it up" in the real world, even though for him it's like pushing something through molasses!

However, once he's through moving it, he has to "slow it down" by pushing on the other side long enough to cancel the inertia!

One scene in the novel has him picking up several fist-sized rocks, suspending them in the air, and then shoving on them for several seconds in the direction of a locked wooden door he wants to open.

When he clicks the watch to restart time, the rocks shoot through the air at bullet speed and smash the door!

Naturally this modestly budgeted TV movie includes none of this. We get lots of jump cuts, the before-and-after moments when the main characters uses the watch to do things we rarely get to see.

There's a few scenes with actors on the sets holding really, really still while the sped-up main character walk around normally doing mischievous things.

If that sounds familiar, you saw it in The Twilight Zone episode called A Kind of a Stopwatch in 1963. By a strange coincidence, MacDonald's novel was published in 1962.

Click the image below to get a copy of the novel from Amazon for $16.00.

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Enjoy the TV promo and a disappointing VHS copy of the movie.

_ The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything 1980 TV promo


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_ _______The Girl the Gold Watch and Everything


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

[scotpens]