While I'm at it, I have to say that seeing the names Jack Arnold & William Alland on a screen may make today's moviegoers groan--but I love it. Always have. It's a guaranteed good time. (Not to mention the great, always-reliable work of Bud Westmore & Joseph Gershenson.)
While I'm at it, I have to say that seeing the names Jack Arnold & William Alland on a screen may make today's moviegoers groan--but I love it. Always have. It's a guaranteed good time. (Not to mention the great, always-reliable work of Bud Westmore & Joseph Gershenson.)
I'm going to guess, Octoberman, that you're north of 50 ears old. In other words, you're. like me, a late Baby Boomer.
We grew up with certain movies on TV, not just on one channel, like Turner Classic Movies, but on at least two or three channels, and on Friday or Saturday night "Shock!" theater (or Chiller or Creature Feature, depending on where you lived in the country), and not just that, but what also played at the local Bijou (small neighborhood cinemas now gone from the landscape), and then there were the horror and Sci-Fi comics and magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and this was all we had.
There were no other distractions, and these movies onTV or in the cinemas were at your finger tips a few months after saw them. There was no home video and the ability to repeat them until they grew tired. Instead, they grew in your mind, and the rally good ones became mythic, and even the ones that weren't so good still remind you of a time when life seemed simpler, responsibilities were less, and so on and so forth.
When we're gone, who's going to remember this era?
We grew up with certain movies on TV, not just on one channel, like Turner Classic Movies, but on at least two or three channels, and on Friday or Saturday night "Shock!" theater (or Chiller or Creature Feature, depending on where you lived in the country), and not just that, but what also played at the local Bijou (small neighborhood cinemas now gone from the landscape), and then there were the horror and Sci-Fi comics and magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and this was all we had. There were no other distractions, and these movies onTV or in the cinemas were at your finger tips a few months after saw them. There was no home video and the ability to repeat them until they grew tired. Instead, they grew in your mind, and the rally good ones became mythic, and even the ones that weren't so good still remind you of a time when life seemed simpler, responsibilities were less, and so on and so forth. When we're gone, who's going to remember this era?
That's pretty much nailing it for a bunch of us here, I think. I'm 54, and my impression is that a good portion of us are in the 50 to 60 range--just the right age for us to have been really affected by these films. And I do what I can for the cause, too. For instance, my son is 23 now, and even though he isn't as devoted to the era quite like I am, I've shared enough fantastic movie time with him that he has some sense of reverence for that "backward glance" as he moves forward with the kind of entertainments his generation is involved in. It's sort of like that saying that you don't really understand where something is headed if you don't understand where it came from. Anyway, the odds are that he will probable pass on at least a little of that heritage.
Thanks to this thread I am gonna pull out "The Land Unknown" and "The Mole People" for a blu-ray double header maybe tonight or Saturday afternoon. Margaritas and popcorn, here I come!
It's totally forgotten now but there was a movie titled "Planet of the Dinosaurs."
I started out thinking this would be awesome, until I saw that it was made in 1977. The 1950s were more fun.
At leastit has stop-motion animation of dinosaur models. In fact, they spent so much money on that several of the actors never got paid. I remember reading about the making of it in Cinefantastique way back when.
