ALL SCI-FI

[Pow]

The Thing as illustrated above would have been wonderfully realized by either stop-motion animating legends Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen.

[Bud Brewster]

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While having breakfast at Phat Daddy's Cafe this morning I told my friend Jay about one aspect of this movie that has bothered me for years.





How the heck did the men cut the block of ice loose along the bottom after chopping loose all four sides?


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Jay just smiled and said, "They didn't have to."

"What? Why not?" I replied.

"You said the saucer crashed the day before, and the heat from the engines melted the snow around it, which then refroze before the men got there. Right?"

"Right."

"So, there wasn't time for the water to refreeze all the way down to ground. That means there was a layer of water below the ice. The men just chopped down until they broke through to the water below it."

"Oh . . . right."

(I just sat there staring at Jay like this.)


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By gum, I think old Jay figured it out!

The block of ice was about five feet thick before it melted down the way it looks in the picture below —


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— and lakes freeze from the surface downward. They rarely freeze solid all the way to the lake bed, and even though the crash site was (for a while) a pool of water about seven feet deep (based on the block of ice), the water under the ice near the ground would need longer to freeze than the layers above it.

We know the temperature was not subzero, because the sun was fairly high, so the temperature would have been about 32° (the typical summer temperature for the North Pole).

In fact, the North Pole sometimes turns into a lake when the temperature is unusually high.





So, the question isn't really, "Could the ice have had water under it?".

The real question is, "How did the water manage to freeze to a depth of several feet during the Polar summer in just 24 hours?"

We should bare in mind that the movie cheated a little when they started out the film with it being nighttime in the first scene with the guys playing poker at the Alaskan airbase, then having it be daylight when the plane arrives at the research station, which is supposed to near the North Pole (which is 1,988 miles from Anchorage) in a DC-3 (which has a cruising speed of 207 mph),

That would be a nine hour flight.





Unfortunately, the range of a DC-3 is 1,491 miles, and during the poker game at the beginning the Air Force guys tell Scotty that the scientists have a base "about 2,000 miles north of here", which is the distance from Anchorage to the North Pole.

Add to this the fact that DC-3 with landing skids can't retract the gear, which would create additional air resistance and reduce the range.

I don't know how they made it, but I suppose the research station had lots of avgas (aviation fuel similar to gasoline) so the plane could be refueled for the return trip.

DC-3's are beautiful aircraft, and when I was a kid my family would fly on Delta Airlines (where my father worked), when we'd go on vacations, and we'd sometimes ride on DC-3's.


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Anyway, I think Professor Jay Roach, my friend and occasional breakfast companion, has a valid explanation for how the ice block containing the Thing was cut loose from the frozen layer above the unfrozen water near the ground.

It's interesting to note, by the way, that Jay has never actually seen The Thing from Another World, despite being about ten years older than me. And he's also not really a professor, but I promised him I'd tell you guys he was after he solved a 67-year-old mystery that had eluded me all these years.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

GREAT POST BUD !
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has 50 trivia items for this movie. Here’s a few of the ones I found the most interesting, in the blue text.
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~ James Arness reportedly regarded his role as so embarrassing, that he didn't attend the premiere.

Note from me: He was either embarrassed by the role or he couldn't get the makeup off!


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~ Billy Curtis played the smaller version of "The Thing" during the creature's final scene.

Note from me: "There are no such things as small roles! Only small actors!" (Except that in this case, both are true.)

~ When Scotty (Douglas Spencer) mentioned having attended the 1928 execution of Ruth Snyder and Judd Grey, another character asked him if he was able to get a picture of it. Scotty answers, "No, they didn't allow cameras, but one guy." He was interrupted by The Thing's approach before he can finish the sentence. Scotty was referring to Chicago Tribune photographer Tom Howard, who smuggled a miniature camera into the execution chamber strapped to his ankle and was able to take a famous photograph of Snyder's final moments in the electric chair.

Note from me: And by gum, here's the gruesome photo itself.


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~ The famous scene when the crew formed a ring around the flying saucer frozen in the ice, was actually filmed at the RKO Ranch in the San Fernando Valley in one hundred degree weather.

Note from me: For years I had trouble believing that the scenes weren't filmed outdoors in a snowbound location, and that the background showing the sky and horizon was a huge painting. The first few pages of this thread are filled with a debate between me and orzel-w about the shape of the background painting.

Orzel-w won . . .

~ James Arness complained that his "Thing" costume made him look like a giant carrot.

Note from me: This one has got to be made up by some misguided fan, inspired by Scotty's "super carrot" remark. Arness' dark jumpsuit and bald makeup did NOT make him look like a carrot!

~ Originally, it was intended to make the creature a shapeshifter, as in the novel, but the limited budget forced the filmmakers to drop the idea. Early conceptual sketches depict a very plant-like looking creature, with one of its limbs seemingly undergoing a transformation into a human hand.

Note from me: I tried to find those concept sketches but I stuck out. Maybe somebody else will have better luck.

~ Veteran stuntman Tom Steele replaced James Arness in the fire scene. Steele wore an asbestos suit with a special fiberglass helmet with an oxygen supply underneath. He used a one hundred percent oxygen supply, which was highly combustible. It was pure luck he didn't burn his lungs while breathing in the mixture.

Note from me: I cringed when I read this! Whose bright idea was it to give Mr. Steel a tank filled with oxygen to carry around while he was on fire!

~ Close-ups of "The Thing" were removed. It was felt that the make-up could not hold up to close scrutiny. However, the lack of close-ups gave the creature a more mysterious quality.

Note from me: It's absolutely true that teasing us with quick glimpses and low-lit shots of the alien was a great idea and leaves the audience just itchin' to see the Thing better. However, the photo I posted above indicates that the makeup was really very good. My God, those hands . . .

~ When Producer and co-Director Howard Hawks attempted to get insurance for the creature, five insurance companies turned him down because "The Thing" was to be frozen in a block of ice, hacked by axes, attacked by dogs, lit on fire, and electrocuted.

Note from me: I'll bet the problem was that the policy paid double if the insured person happened to die by being frozen in a block of ice, hacked by axes, attacked by dogs, lit on fire, and electrocuted — so, the insurance company thought Hawks was deliberately trying to collect on the double-indemnity clause!

~ The skeleton crew at the South Pole Telescope station have a tradition every winter-over of watching this movie, and the other two adaptations on the very first night after the departure of the final plane of the season.

Note from me: Hey, that's exactly what I'm going to do this afternoon, as soon as the mailman delivers the two newer versions from Netflix.

~ Charles Lederer's original script featured an inhuman-looking creature looking almost exactly like the novel's creature in its original form (blue-skinned, with three red eyes, a sucker mouth and stringy hair), but the budget resulted in a simpler-looking alien. Allegedly, test footage was shot featuring a creature with the earlier alien design, played by a one-legged man.

Note from me: I know we'd all like to see that footage, but I'm sure it's long gone.

~ The opening credits are unusual for its time, in that they don't list a single member of the cast.

Note from me: I wonder why Hawks did that.

~ It took Make-up Artist Lee Greenway five months and eighteen sculptures of the creature before he came up with a design that satisfied Howard Hawks.

Note from me: I'll bet there are pictures of all eighteen versions somewhere. I'd love to see them!

~ Although it has frequently been derided by science fiction purists for being an overly loose adaptation of the original John W. Campbell, Jr. novella, it actually hews quite closely to the first six chapters of the original story.

Nearly all of the borrowings from the novella that recur in the movie, including the discovery of the flying saucer through the electromagnetic anomaly it makes, and its accidental destruction through the use of thermite charges, the thawing of the creature, the suggestion that it reads minds, and its death in the electrical trap, come from these first few chapters.

Note from me: You can hear the novella being read at the link below. The Youtube video says it's the audio book version, but it's over four hours long and seems to have both the Radio version at the beginning and the audio book version afterwards. I'lk check it out more thoroughly later and amend this post if needed.

____ John W. Campbell Who Goes There Audiobook


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~ It is generally believed that Howard Hawks took over direction during production, and it has always been acknowledged by Director Christian Nyby that Hawks was the guiding hand. However, in an interview James Arness said that while Hawks spent a lot of time on the set, it was Nyby who actually directed the picture, not Hawks.

— However —

~ As opposed to that interview with James Arness, the film's star, Kenneth Tobey, has maintained in many interviews that it was indeed Hawks who directed the film. Tobey said that he had worked with Nyby after this film on many occasions, and he was a fine director, but Hawks did call the shots on most of the film.

— And finally there's this —

~ The difference of opinion between Kenneth Tobey and James Arness as to who actually directed the film is not a surprise. Directors very often had their assistants direct the "action" sequences so that they could focus their time on the speaking roles, where most of the "important" portions of the film were centered. Assistant directors generally were assigned to get multiple takes of action sequences which the directors would then be able to see with a more objective eye.

Note from me: Damn, you'd think there would be no doubt in anybody's mind who directed most of the movie if they were major stars in the cast!

~ In an interview on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, when asked about the most scared they'd ever been at the movies, Ebert indicated that this film scared him to death, especially the scene where they incinerated the "Thing".

Note from me: The one that scared me the most as a kid was the surprise appearance of the Thing at the door to the greenhouse. And yet when I saw it at an Atlanta art house cinema in the 1980s, the scene that made the whole audience gasp was when the scientists opened the storage cabinet in the greenhouse and the dead dog fell out.

Dimitri Tiomkin is responsible for that. He's music blasts out at that point and scares the crap out of everybody!

~ When they are all flying out to the crash site for the first time, they see where the craft has landed and discuss it. It touched down, skidded, and then came to stop and melted through the ice. They show a long shot of the skid and where it finally stopped. If you slow motion the film or stop it, it reveals the following: At the beginning of the skid, the touchdown point, there is what looks like a guy in a hat knelt down by a machine of some sort. That could be the ice cutting machine that made the entire etching for the scene.

Note from me: Okay, feel free to doubt this claim, because it's ridiculous. We all know about the two-seconds of film at the very end of landing site's aerial view which shows a vehicle of some kind at the right end of the "skid path" the saucer made.[/size]





But how anybody can seriously claim they see a guy next to the vehicle is silly!

Much a less a guy kneeling next to it!!

And to embellish this bull-manure by claiming the guy is wearing a HAT is just too ludicrous for words!!!





If anybody can find a hat in the picture above, by God I'll eat it!

My theory is that the vehicle is an Ice Cream truck selling Eskimo Pies to the Inuiit Indians that Hawks hired to shovel the snow out for the landing site. (Hell, that makes as much sense as the knelling man in a HAT! )
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]

[Gord Green]

The Arness/Tobey debate re: Hawks part in the direction of the film could be due to the fact that Arness was only in a few key scenes in the film. It's very possible that Nyby was fundamental in those, while Tobey was in the bulk of the filming and may have had more contact with Hawks. Jim wouldn't have been on the call sheets for those aspects of the filming.
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Bud Brewster]

[Krel]

The exterior set of the research station was built at a reduced scale, so that when it snowed at the location, the snow would look deeper, and higher up the building walls.

David.

[Bud Brewster]

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Where was the exterior set built? I seem to remember that one of the chosen locations didn't get as much snow as expected and caused problems for the production.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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I love this movie!

And yesterday, when I didn’t receive my Netflix disc of The Thing (1982) and the 2017 prequel, I was forced to spend my evening watching The Thing from Another World and finding ways to stretch out the experience to occupy the evening I’d planned to devote to the original classic AND the two more recent films it inspired!

Fortunately I love the original SO much I was able to ration my viewing of it and pause it periodically while I made note of interesting ideas I had. Here’s what I discovered while watching The Thing from Another World last night (for about the 20th time in the last 67 years) with frequent pauses to compose the following comments.
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~ Carrington explains that the automatic camera took pictures of the saucer’s descent using a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second, and that it was traveling so fast it left a steak on the film, despite the fast shutter speed.





And yet he states that the duration of the UFOs descent was three minutes!

How could the saucer take a three full minutes to cross the field of vision of the camera if it was traveling so fast?
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~ George Fenniman said they calculated the distance to the crash site by comparing the difference between the time the sound waves from the explosion arrived and the time the seismic waves arrived from the impact.

Wait a minute . . . that doesn’t make sense!

The saucer didn’t slam into the earth and explode — it crash-landed and skidded across the snow until it came to rest and then melted down into it. How could that crash landing produce an “explosion” heard almost fifty miles away and a seismic reading that was detected at that distance?
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~ On the way to the crash site, Capt. Hendry said that they were navigating the plane with a visual reference, a “peak that’s due east of the base”. But the North Pole has no land mass below the ice, so there would be no land to form a “peak” high enough to be visible 48 miles away when the plane took off from the base!

I Googled the question, “Does the North Pole have mountains?” and got this.

Unlike the South Pole, which lies over the continent of Antarctica, there is no land beneath the North Pole but more of a floating Arctic ice sheet that expands during colder months and shrinks to half its size in the summer.
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~ Why did the men break the window in the room where the block of ice was going to be kept? In all the scenes shot in that room before the Thing gets out of the ice, we see snow blowing in through the window. Obviously the room was as cold as the sub-freezing environment outside. We're even shown icicle forming on the floor from the water dripping down from the melting ice beneath the blanket.

If the room was THAT cold, a puny electric blanket would NOT have melted the ice in the first place. They just don’t get that hot!

Besides, all they really had to do was keep the door partially open. Better yet, just leave the block of ice outside!
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When Barns throws the electric blanket over the block of ice to cover it so he wouldn’t see the Thing inside, the block is encased in a web of ropes across the top.





The alien would have to quietly crawled out from under the web of ropes before standing up next to the half-melted block of ice. One would think the man on guard duty would hear all the rustling around behind him while the Thing was pushing the wet blanket aside and struggling to get out from under the ropes.




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When the men see the half-melted block of ice, the depression in it caused by the alien’s absent body has a light dusting of snow along the bottom. But the melted upper half of the ice should have left the depression wet on the bottom, with water pooled up in the lower section where the Thing’s feet had been.
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This next comments are not about mistakes in the movie, just interesting observation.

~ Several characters actually call the alien the “Thing” during the movie. The injured scientist who stumbles into the community room and then collapses manages to say, “In the greenhouse, the thing . . . “

As he lays on the floor trying to tell the others what happened, he speaks in broken sentences,

“In the greenhouse, I was working, I could see. Then a blast of cold air . . . I heard Olsen scream. When I turned, the thing struck at me.”

He pauses, and Capt. Hendry says, “Go on.”

“I don’t remember . . . my head . . . I must have fallen. When I came to I saw Olsen and Arbach . . . they were both hanging from the beams upside down, they were dead. Their throats were cut.”

Later on, Niki tells Capt. Hendry that Carrington hasn’t slept “since he found that thing.”

And when Capt. Hendry and his men discover the growing alien plants, he orders his men to burn them, then he says, “What about that thing in the greenhouse?”, wondering how they should combat it.

When the Geiger counter indicates that alien has gotten loose and is headed towards them, Capt. Hendry goes to the door of the mess hall and says to the people in other room, “Watch it everybody! That thing is out the greenhouse. Be sure and stay together.”
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~ Ironically, no one ever uses the word “alien” a single time in the whole movie! One of the scientist calls it a “creature” when he’s discussing how dangerous it is and how it’s reproducing itself in the greenhouse.

However, shortly after that, Tex reads a radio message from the general that says, “Carrington informs me Martian alive. You are directred to make effort to keep it alive and to protect it against injury. Under no circumstances take action against it until my arrival when weather permits.”
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~ In the 1982 remake, flamethrowers are used extensively to combat the alien. In the scene just before the Thing is set on fire, Nikki suggests they use heat against it, and Scotty makes the suggestion that “maybe we could borrow a flame thrower from somewhere”.

It should be noted that the men do NOT throw gasoline on the Thing, they throw the kerosene which the heaters use. Kerosene ignites slowly and does not burn quickly the way gasoline does. The Thing would not to ended up engulfed in flame from be doused by kerosene the way we see in the movie.







I Googled “Is Kerosene as flammable as gasoline?” and got this.

“Kerosene is less volatile than gasoline. Its flash point (the temperature at which it will generate a flammable vapour near its surface) is 38 °C (100 °F) or higher, whereas that of gasoline is as low as −40 °C (−40 °F). This property makes kerosene a relatively safe fuel to store and handle.”

And also this.

“You’ll actually have a hard time lighting kerosene with a match. If you put kerosene into a container or spill it on the ground, you’ll have a hard time lighting it up with a match.”

However, in all fairness the men did use a “very pistol” with a flare to ignite the kerosene-socked Thing. Flares use a combination of chemicals which, when ignited, burn extremely hot and virtually can’t be extinguished until the fuel burns out. So perhaps I’m wrong to suggest that the kerosene wouldn’t have burned the way we see in the movie.
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The following is a comment on the hidden erotic aspects of the story.

~ This movie has several moments that offer sexually suggestive dialog. The first time we see them together, Capt. Hendry scolds Nikki for something she did when he and she had a romantic encounter at the Artic base prior to the movie’s story by saying —

“That was a downright dirty trick you played on me! Why’d you do it? Just tell me why?”





Nikki giggles and says, “Well . . . your legs aren’t very pretty, and I didn’t . . . “

Hendry interrupts with, “You didn’t have to write it on a note and put it on my chest! Other people got up before I did. At least six people read that note before I woke up. Now the whole Air Force is laughing at me!”

(Still giggling) “Not so loud. They’ll hear you.”

“They probably already heard! The only place it hasn’t been is on a billboard!”

Then Hendry asks her if she really drank all the drinks they shared during what seems to have been a private time alone, and she giggles again while reminding Hendry of things he said, like telling her about “a night in San Francisco”, which embarrasses him so much he stops her abruptly.

And then Hendry says, “All right, all right. What else did I do?”

Nikki says —

“Well, you had moments of kinda making like an octopus. I never saw so many hands in all my life.”

It’s easy to interrupt this scene as being a description Capt. Hendry’s unsuccessful attempt to seduce Nikki. We tend to assume that sweet Nikki refused his advances and retreated to preserve her honor.

But I submit that the attempt wasn’t entirely unsuccessful!

Consider this: obviously Capt. Hendry is admitting that Nikki saw his naked legs!
He doesn’t deny that they “aren’t very pretty”, he just objects to the fact that she saw them and stated this fact in a note that other people read!

Under what circumstances would Nikki have seen Pat Hendry’s naked legs? And why was he asleep when she left the note on his chest?

Okay, sure, he just passed out from all the drinks they shared, while she managed to stay conscious and escape the clutches of this Fly Boy Romeo. But what happened prior to Capt. Hendry “making like an octopus” and exposing his naked legs to Nikki?

I submit that Nikki and Capt. Hendry were both intoxicated from the drinks they shared (the ones that Hendry was amazed she’d consumed and NOT passed out from, like he did), and during that time they almost-but-not-quite . . . had S-E-X!

Gasp!

But Capt. Pat Hendry — the ladies man who foolishly bragged about his “night in San Francisco” — succumbed to the effects of the alcohol he’d consumed and passed out after removing his pants for the ready-and-willing Miss Nikki!

Because of her inebriation and her basically “impish” nature, Nikki accepted the humorous situation and chose to bait a hook for the handsome captain, in hopes of a future relationship that didn’t just involve casual sex.

In other words, she played a joke on him and knew it would bring him running back to her so she could snap up this handsome hunk for her husband!

Folks, I admire the skillful way this movie’s script and direction snuck in the suggestion that these two appealing characters almost had premarital sex in the era when married couples like Lucy and Ricky in I Love Lucy had to sleep in two single beds because Hollywood wasn’t allowed to show a man and women in the same bed!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

[Bogmeister]

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The seminal alien invader film, jump-starting that whole fifties plethora of hostile aliens from outer space and rampant paranoia about what is 'out there.'

Of course, within the context of this film, it's not being paranoid to worry about such threats.

This was based on the famous John Campbell story "Who Goes There?", about a shape-shifting alien, but it was changed to a man-shaped plant alien (played by very tall Jim Arness). The alien is discovered in the Arctic by a research team, frozen in a block of ice.

We can predict what follows: the block of ice thaws . . .



One strength to the narrative is the isolated location, naturally lending a chill to the proceedings. But the story also becomes a study of American teamwork and management, headed authoritatively by Ken Tobey's military man.

Not all members of the group always agree with his assessments, notably one scientist who wants to communicate with the creature. But Tobey never wavers — this threat has challenged him and his group, and must be destroyed.

This no-nonsense approach must have been at the direction of producer Howard Hawks, though the credited director is Christian Nyby.

BoG's Score: 7.5 out of 10

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Trivia from the Thing: The last lines of dialog contain the famous warning to Keep Watching the Skies. Bill Warren used this as the title for his book on fifties sf cinema. The movies was remade in 1982 by John Carpenter, who followed the original concept of the story.


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus

[Pow]

Read Bill Warren's book, very well done & interesting. Didn't always agree with his views but they were insightful & intelligently done.

[Bud Brewster]

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I do own Mr. Warren's wonderful reference book, but I've only read a few reviews for the movies I'm most interested in, such as his comments on my personal favorite, The Space Children, which Bill said some very nice things about.

One of these days, when I'm not obsessively putting all my energy into All Sci-Fi in the desperate hope that it will someday become the busy and self-sustaining website I thought it would be when I first created it back in 2007, I'll take my copy of Bill's book down off the shelf and read it cover to cover!

However, until that happens, I'll continue to be a slave to this sadly neglected website which has 137 registered members, but which has a lot fewer who actually log in and post anything.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Eadie]

When coloization is done well it looks like this (sorry about the size. They are much bigger TIFF files — Eadie):





























Thee are from a colorized version that was on YouTube™ a few years ago that Butch managed to take a few screenshots of, but was not able to download. There are almost 100 of these in his file.
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Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable.