ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Another ride through Sequel City with your friendly tour guide, Bud Brewster!

Ladies and gentlemen, our first attraction is the imaginary sequel to the 1925 classic, The Lost World, in which several teams of scientists set up base camps on the famous plateau to study the prehistoric critters.

Next we'll tour the sequel to The Invisible Man Returns and learn how one invisible man could prevent WWII!

Finally, we'll take a gander at a sequel to Dr. Cyclops, in which his People Shrinking Ray could be used to move soldiers around the globe quite economically!

Yep, there's nothin' like an imaginary sequel to stimulate your gray matter!
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The Lost World (1925)

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For decades I've been under the misconception that in The Lost World (1925) the volcanic eruption on the plateau wiped out all the dinosaurs!

Today I watched one of the YouTube versions and learned that the volcano only caused a dino stampede, after which we see scenes of the survivors, including a wonderful shot of a several young T-Rex feeding on the carcass of a dead dino!





So, at the end of the movie the world knows about this incredible scientific discovery — a complete prehistoric ecosystem which includes many species of dinosaurs, along with primitive ancestors of mankind!

Now that the world is aware of this amazing discovery, what will the global scientific community do?

Obviously they would organize an international team of scientists for an expedition to the plateau. It would be fully equipped to set up a permanent base so that scientists from all over the world could visit it and study this remarkable discovery!

This concept provides opportunities for numerous sequels!

The goal of the authorities who manage the base camp would be to insure that this prehistoric world would be carefully preserved without being damaged by the presence of humans.

And right there is the conflict we need to make this sequel (and others that follow) sufficiently dramatic and exciting!

The most obvious threat would be the theft by poachers of baby dinosaurs and dinosaur eggs.

With that in mind, please watch the version of the movie below after you've downloaded it and played it on your TV — not on your computer! You must turn the color all the way down, the way I did on my television in my living room, shown below.





Doing this will remove the horrible color tinting of this version, which absolutely destroys any chance of enjoying the beautiful B&W photography of this classic!

Some of the other YouTube versions offer it in B&W, but they don't have the magnificent music this one does — and some of them are not even the complete version of the film! Note the differences in the running time.

The Lost World l Adventure/Fantasy/Sci-Fi (restored)


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The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

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Today it occurred to me that this movie did something significantly different than the original movie did.

Claude Rains stated that it took him weeks to attain total invisibility. He said that he had to bleach out his skin and do several other things to finally be totally transparent.

In The Invisible Man Returns, Vincent Price seems to become invisible very quickly, without the long and complicated process which Claude Rains described.

I realize that the movie wanted to begin with the wonderful scene in which Vincent seems to have suddenly escape a few seconds after walking into a small side room within his cell. But even if he was supposed to have done all the preparations which Rains did prior to the moment he vanished, the guards would have noticed the gradual changes in him during the days before his "escape".

Rather than regard this as a bit of "cheating" on the part of the filmmakers to streamline the plot, I'd rather theorize that Dr. Jack Griffin's brother — Dr. Frank Griffin — managed to make some improvements in his brother's invisibility formula that sped up the process.

Unfortunately he wasn't able to eliminate the need for the drug monocane, and that meant Vincent was doomed to go insane if he didn't get a blood transfusion in time to restore his visibility and save his sanity.

Having said all that, consider this.

~ A Question for the Members: If Dr. Frank Griffin and a team of brilliant scientists (generously funded by the government) could perfect the invisibility process so that it was safe, what would the government do with this amazing ability.

~ Here's what I came up with.: The year this movie came out was 1940. Germany was working overtime to achieve world domination, and America was about a year away from a Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor!

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churhill would just love to have invisible secret agents who could lurch around Europe and find out what Hitler and all his top generals were planning to do next. And if one of those agents should happen to sneak up on old Adolf while he was asleep in his bed, he could hold a pillow over der Fuhrer's face and save a few million lives!

Doing the same thing to Japanese Emperor Hirohito might have a similar effect on the bloody carnage which took place in the Pacific theater during WWII, perhaps even making it unnecessary to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Gentlemen, I'm not suggesting that a sequel would have all these ideas in one story, but a movie about a "Manhattan Project" to develop a safe invisibility process would be interesting if it included some of the reasons the project was so important to the people working on it and the nations who could use it.
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Dr. Cyclops (1940)

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~ A Question for the Members: If the process which was invented by Dr. Cyclops became known to the scientific community in 1940 (the release date for this movie), could it have been used in several ways by the American military and its allies in WWII?

~ Here's what I came up with.: During WWII the transportation of troops in large numbers from America to Europe was done with "troop ships" that were commandeered for this tasks.

For example, RMS Queen Mary holds the all-time record for the most troops on one passage — 15,740 on a late July 1943 run from the U.S. to Europe.





Unfortunately, these troop ships would sometimes be sunk by German submarines or aircraft, causing the deaths of all aboard.

However, imagine the advantages of being able to shrink down hundreds of soldiers and then place them into large aircraft — like the B-17 Flying Fortress, or the commercial transatlantic aircraft like the one shown below!

During WWII, Transworld Airlines (TWA) opened regular transatlantic service in 1942. But it transferred its entire fleet of five Boeing 307s, along with their flight crews, to the ATC (Air Transport Command)!





Yes sir, you could pack each one of those babies with a few hundred teeny tiny soldiers and fly 'em over to England on a regular basis.

Then they could unshrink the brave doughboys and send 'em out to kick the kraut's Aryan asses all the way back to the freakin' Fatherland!

The baffled Nazis would scratch their blond heads and wondered where the hell all those American soldiers suddenly came from!

Wouldn't this concept make a nice feature film for the war-weary folks back home during the dark years WWII?
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)