Old Science Fiction Films –

First – the DrinkTank fanzine publishes its annual Hugo Awards Handicapping issue (a great read btw) and includes a wonderful piece from Cheryl Morgan that injects a bit of British electioneering into the mix.? You can read them both here.

DrinkTank gives Glyer the win for File 770 (that’s great) but he still needs the votes, so if you have ballots check him off and send them in!)

Today I’m going to try something a bit new.? I’ve been gathering a heck of a lot of ‘new’ films for the Classic Science Fiction Channel (notable adds are Destination Moon, The Omega Man, Pal’s War of the Worlds) and have been watching them on a laptop before going to bed at night (stealing my reading time – sigh) and I have of course recognized that some of them may be dated in places.

Then it occurred to me – what a great way to edumacate the youngsters!? I can recommend a movie and provide them with all of the background about the era that it was filmed in, explain the cultural sensitivities, the technologies (or lack thereof) and a little bit about the politics of the era.? That way, they’ll feel sorry for those of us who had to suffer through dial telephones, entrenched chauvanism, institutionalized racism and the absence of cable channels.? In feeling sorry for us, they’ll miss the ‘bad’ parts of the film and be distracted into giving it an honest viewing, freed from the baggage of historical perspective.

So today I bring you DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS.

(click the poster to watch the film)

The Day of the Triffids has been filmed three times now, the last as recently as 2009 for television.? The original movie – based on the John Wyndham novel – was released in 1962.

Aaaah – 1962 – the middle of the Cold War.? For those of you without personal experience:? The Soviet Union (the BAD GUYS) was a country that occupied the place on the world map now filled by – Russia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan?- it really was a lot easier just to be able to say USSR (which stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – otherwise known as CCCP – which you may have seen on some Che t-shirts) wanted to drop nuclear weapons on us.? They wanted to do this so badly that they hooked up with Cuba – the island in the Caribbean 90 miles away from Florida that used to be owned by the Mafia – so they could base bombers and missiles there and bomb us faster than flying all the way over from Uzbekistan.

This made our then President – John F Kennedy (the guy of grassy knoll fame and the former President that Obama is most like except for Lincoln) – very angry and a little later on in the year we got into a thing called the Cuban Missile Crisis that, interestingly enough, involved shoe banging (as opposed to actual shoe throwing – how’s that for history repeating?) that had all of us practicing our emergency drills at a feverish pitch.

Emergency drills?? Yeah, kind of like getting patted down before you get on an airplane these days – except a lot different.? We got to keep our shoes on.? Instead of electronic and canine sniffers we had geiger counters and our drill was to roll under our desks in the classroom and hope that they were strong enough to stop the ceiling from crushing us.? See, nothing was going to protect us from the nuclear blast, the heat, the radiation, so they had us drilling for things they could (maybe) protect us from, like the school collapsing all around us because we were lucky enough to be far enough away from the bomb blast not to get flashed into ashes.? (Come to think of it, it’s pretty much like today: they can’t really protect you, so they give you things to do to distract you from that fact – but back then we trusted the government a whole heck of a lot more than we do now, so we all blindly followed instructions and never asked – out loud – the questions that were giving us nightmares.)

President Kennedy’s anger at Cuba (for being friends with the CCCP) is the reason why we can’t go to Cuba or smoke Cuban cigars today.? And you thought all this stuff was in the past.

People, particularly in Europe, were STILL recovering from World War II – which was still less than two decades in the past.? The Coventry Cathedral’s (which you’ll see in the film) rebuilding (following its destruction during the blitz – look it up) was completed and the cathedral consecrated that year.? Lots of folks in business and industry are former vets of World War II and the influence of ‘the greatest generation’ was never stronger.

Here’s one for you – the sexual revolution (a time before AIDS when condoms were optional and most SDDs were curable with an injection of penicillan – which was still a relatively new wonder-drug!) was really just getting underway, helped along by a Supreme Court decision that rules that pictures of nude men were not obscene.? On the other side of morality, the Lutheran Church came into existence as a denomination, this year.

Other highlights of this era include – the first mention of the term “personal computer”, John Glen becomes the first American to orbit the Earth, West Side Story wins the Best Picture Academy Award, Nehru becomes de facto President of India, Wilt Chamberlain scores 100 points in an NBA game, The Hulk debuts (as a comic, not a tv show), and

The Sunday Times prints the?first color Sunday supplement and – the Supreme Court rules that mandatory prayer in public schools is unconstitutional.

That’s a lot to swallow.? Imagine:? newspapers (on paper!? only in black and white!) kids forced to say the Lord’s Prayer right after being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and then quickly rolling under their desks as the nuclear war siren bleeps over the loudspeaker, individual astronauts circling the globe and people caring about it, sex without condoms, pictures of nude men legal to look at and a musical winning best picture of the year.

Things sure were different back then!

Some other things to keep in mind:

In the US, there were only three television broadcast networks, plus PBS and, depending on where you lived, a couple of UHF (?) channels.? Televisions had yet to see the remote control.? Believe it or not, there was no such thing as channel surfing.? When you wanted to change the channel, you had to get yourself up out of the comfy chair, walk over to the TV (usually occupying a central location in every American’s rec room or den) and physically turn a dial – click-click-click.? Going from Channel 3 to Channel 6 was not big deal, but if you had to go from 3 to 10, you quickly learned that going backwards was one click shorter than progressing in the normal fashion around the dial.? Tuning in the UHF dial was a different matter entirely – no clicks.? So you desperately turned and turned and turned until the channel came in nice and clear.? Or nice and grainy – it depended on the weather.

Things you don’t know about analog technology that would kill you to know:? you could go up on the roof and diddle with your antenna until you got channels broadcasting from another city.? This is one reason why TV Guide (the magazine, not the website) was so important to so many households.? You might live in Daytona Beach, FL, but if the cosmos cooperated (and you were sufficiently skilled with roof-walking and antenna diddling) you could watch programs broadcast out of Buffalo New York.

Here’s another cool analog rememberance.? Sometimes you could get the picture but not the sound – but no worries.? Plug the transistor radio in next to the TV and (using the analog, smoothly turning dial) you could tune in the audio.

Speaking of radios.? Once you were in the car – pure heaven.? The dial on the radio actually did something and it was possible to get that station that played your favorite music – even if it was ‘between stations’.? Today if the signal strength isn’t up to the program’s preferred level, the station doesn’t exist as far as your radio is concerned and YOUR RADIO WILL NOT LET YOU LISTEN TO THE MUSIC YOU WANT TO HEAR.? Talk about singularity, I think it is already upon us.

How about party lines?? No – not the 900 numbers that charge you $19.95 per minute.? Real party lines.? Whole neighborhoods sharing the same telephone exchange.? If you were a snoopy gus – heaven.? Carefully ease the handset up off the cradle and, if you were lucky, your next door neighbor was sharing intimate secrets with the lady that lived across the street.? It was that era’s pirated content and it’s equivalent of the loss of privacy.

Phones.? I loved dial phones.? Especially when the numbers had lots of zeros, eights and nines in it.? Operators were still human and it was often a lot quicker to get the operator to place the call for you than it was to dial yourselfl.? One consequence of which was that many more people learned first aid than do today: 9-1-1 would not be implemented for five more years and in the time it took for your ‘0′ to run around the dial and the operator to come on, people could die.

There were still vast swaths of the world that had no telephones, no television reception – no electricity.? The biggest thing going in transportation was the Boeng 707 (one of which you get to watch as it crashes in the film – and a lot of them were crashing in 1962).

Socialogically, things were way different.? WAY different.? Women were still mostly stay-at-home moms, ‘girls’ waiting to get married or poor old spinsters who were looked down upon and pitied.? This was a partial backlash against the wide employment of women in non-traditional jobs during WWII: the mentality was something like – now that the war is over, let’s get things back to normal.

Schools and much of the south were still segregated.? If you were to suggest that a black man would one day be president, they’d lock you up in the looney bin, since you’d obviously slipped a cog.

Women stayed at home and raised the kids, or taught elementary school, or were nurses and stewardesses.? (That’s the old-fashioned word for ‘flight attendant’ from when there was no such thing as a male steward, let alone a male steward who wasn’t gay:? men working in traditionally female occupations were regarded with a bit of a sidelong glance:? they’re probably the types that looked at nudie men’s magazines…)

In many places the marriage buzz was all about blacks marrying whites, not about men marrying men or women marrying women.? In several states it was still illegal and would be until five years hence.

Finally – no NAFTA, no Office of Homeland Security, only ONE real communciations satellite, no cell phones, no calculators, no PCs, no wireless phones, no flatscreen TVs, no game systems, no PDAs, no E-books, no E-Mail (but then postage for a letter was only 4 cents) Bazooka bubble gun cost a penny for TWO pieces and a McDonald’s burger was 15 cents; going to the movies might cost you a buck fifty – if you included the popcorn.

So how does this affect watching The Day of the Triffids?

Ok.? There was no CGI, so the monster plants either had to be rendered as stop-motion animation (kind of like making an animated GIF these days) or had to be props manipulated like puppets from off-camera.

Going on location, or using a real city as the backdrop for a scene meant you had to deal with what you found when you got there.? You couldn’t erase inappropriate background scenery or use a travelling matte or green screen it.? So when you see a scene of a dead city with survivors blindly wandering around and you say to yourself – I thought there were a heck of a lot more people living in London – just remember that they had to hire a bunch of extras and film at like 4 am.

You can apply variations on the above theme to just about every outdoor scene in the film.? They were doing the best they could with the technology (and budget) that they had at the time.

Getting on to the technology:? remember – no internet, no Hubble Space Telescope, no Keck.? This means that it was possible to be surprised by a meteor storm.? These things just happened – you didn’t get advance notice from your favorite cable television news program as filler.? And back then, things that were happening in the sky were considered to be pretty important.? The UFO flap was at a height and MEN! were floating around up there.? Back then it was no stretch of the imagination to believe that just about everyone would drop whatever they were doing to go outside and watch lights in the sky.

People really would be forced to rely upon themselves and would be isolated from most of the rest of the world.? On the other hand, recovery would be a bit easier since things like hand-cranked generators were not at all uncommon.

Yes, school girls really did wear cute little uniforms, complete with hats and matching blazers.? Pedophilia existed, but it was not a front-page item like it is today.? There would be (and was) nothing wrong with allowing a pubescent female out in public unaccompanied by her parents – and most anyone could be trusted to do the adult thing.? An adult male showing up with a 12 year old, unrelated female would not have his motives questioned – no thoughts of Lolita would ever enter anyone’s mind.

The women?? They were EXPECTED to scream helplessly in terror and wait for their males to protect and rescue them.? No Ripleys here.?? A strong woman during this era was one who could keep her kids from interrupting Dad at the dinner table.?

So when you sit down to watch and you ask yourself – why don’t they just pick up the cell phone and call for help? – remember that there were no such things.? When you ask yourself – why is she holding her face and screaming like that instead of running away? – its because that’s what most people believed women would do when faced with a giant carnivorous plant.

And when you ask yourself – why did they come up with such a stupid solution to their problem – remember that even today there are some movies that have some pretty stupid endings.