A.C. Wise

While catching up on Tor.com’s wonderful Saturday Morning Cartoon feature, I discovered the existence of this - Disney’s Mars and Beyond. Mars and Beyond originally aired in 1957 as part of the Disneyland series. Obviously, this was before my time, but I still felt a strange kind of nostalgia watching it, a longing for a past that isn’t mine. To me, this is Disney as it should be - the sense of wonder, the beautiful hand-drawn animation, and even a touch of the dark and the bizarre.

Though I am not fanatically to devoted to the ‘Future as it Was’ in speculative fiction, and I do love modern speculative fiction too, there is a place in my heart for the past’s view of the future. (I do want to believe in canals on Mars, dammit.) Mars and Beyond satisfies that itch with its (now)-retro space ships and martians, and an unshakable optimism that Mars is firmly within humanity’s reach. Uh, sorry, past-people. Also, we don’t have flying cars yet, either. The last segment of the episode ends with a detailed plan of how we will (not might) get to Mars. Beautiful.

There were a couple of thing I found especially note-worthy. In talking about earth’s history, evolution is presented as an absolute fact, in 1957, when people still throw a fit about it today. There’s also a great segment that lovingly mocks pulp stories in popular magazines. Besides just being fun, the thing that really impressed me about the segment was that it featured a kick-ass, self-rescuing heroine. Go 1950s Disney!

The empire of mouse may be something different now, though I still don’t think it’s all bad, but once upon a time Disney was just a man with a sense of wonder that he wanted to share with the world (head in a jar and nazi conspiracy theories aside). Mars and Beyond provides a glimpse of the Disney that Ray Bradbury loved and it’s definitely worth watching.

I’m still slowly working my way through the 50 Horror Classics DVD set. Clearly my plan to blog about the films as I watch them has done nothing to keep me on track. To make up for being a slacker, I offer you a double feature review. Warning, the reviews will contain spoilers, but given that these movies are all at least forty years old, I figure they’re fair game. First up…

The Vampire Bat

This 1933 film staring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Melvyn Douglas, despite the title, features absolutely no vampires. Rather, it is about a mad scientist who uses superstition, fear and carefully placed puncture wounds to disguise his nefarious crimes. The movie is predictable, but well acted, though Fay Wray is under used.

As usual, the mad scientist’s plot is delightfully illogical. As far as I was able to tell, he was murdering people and stealing their blood for the sole purpose of feeding a living, breathing sponge - makes perfect sense, right? There is some nice humor, but no real scares. The subplot was more interesting than the main plot, with a mentally challenged man being suspected of the murders simply because he’s different. The movie misses an opportunity to make a statement regarding prejudice and the disturbing power of mob mentality though. The innocent man is chased to his death without a moment’s remorse and is never exonerated or even mentioned again.

Not the best of movies, but not a complete waste of time either. Onwards to…

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I’m a sucker for old horror movies. A couple of years ago, I picked up one of those ‘50 Horror Classics’ sets (classics being loosely defined here) - the kind they sell for $10. How could I resist? I’ve been slowly and sporadically working my way through them, and I thought blogging about them might encourage me to get through all of them, plus remind me which ones I’ve actually watched. Last night when I was trying to pick one, I couldn’t tell which I’d already seen. See, the current generation isn’t the only one that cranks out tons of movies with similar/near-identical plots based on what seems statistically likely to put butts in seats.

I finally settled on The Monster Maker, a 1944 ‘classic’ starring J. Carrol Naish and Ralph Morgan. Mad scientist Igor Markoff deliberately infects concert pianist Anthony Lawrence with a horrible disfiguring disease that will ruin his life and leave him ripe for blackmail, as Markoff is also the only one who can provide a cure. The disease is kind of like low-grade elephantiasis, and causes swelling of the extremities. Hands are extremities, concert pianists tend to use their hands quite frequently…and you begin to see the problem. Why does the mad scientist do all this? Because he wants to marry the concert pianist’s daughter of course, who happens to be the spitting image of said scientist’s dead wife, who died under “tragic circumstances” and who was named (what else?) - Lenore!

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