“The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) and “The Towering Inferno” (1974) were two seminal big-budget disaster action flicks produced by Irwin Allen.  They were both based on popular novels, they both had all-star ensemble casts, and they both found their way to network television fairly quickly.  They were both pretty decent flicks, too, I think … although I admittedly only saw them broadcast when I was very young.  (My best guess is that I caught them sometime around 1979 or 1980; I’d have been in the second or third grade.)

They both made a big impression on me.  Although “The Poseidon Adventure” is probably the better known of the two, it was “The Towering Inferno” that truly got under my skin.  It had its share of frightening sequences — at least by 1970’s standards.

The one I remember the most is one of its two famous “elevator scenes.”  After the plot-driving fire breaks out to create the titular burning high-rise, some panicking partygoers try to take an elevator directly to the street, past the burning floors — even after they’re warned not to try such an escape route.  The result (which you can see in the third video below) was pretty scary stuff, at least to a kid my age, just before 1980’s action films would thoroughly desensitize me to this sort of thing.  (It was not a decade known for nonviolent movies.)  The outcome of the scene sent a pretty big message to me about the importance of following the authorities’ instructions during a disaster.

Both “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno” were also among the paperbacks that littered the backseat of my father’s car.  (Cars and closets and coffee tables in the house where I grew up were veritable small libraries; my father wasn’t reading Joyce or Dostoevsky, but lord knows that man read a lot.)  In the case of the latter film, “The Glass Inferno” was the name of the original book by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson.  Believe it or not, I can remember asking my Dad what the word “inferno” meant.  And I remember being fascinated, for some reason, by the idea that filmmakers could change the name of a story when adapting it.  (The people who made movies could do anything they wanted!)

They actually remade “The Poseidon Adventure” a few years back … I saw it, and I might have even reviewed it for this blog.  I can’t say that it was memorable, though.  Indeed, the only thing I can recall about it was the presence of the priceless Kurt Russell.

Or maybe it was terrific, and I just don’t remember that.  I am getting old — after all, I was a second grader in 1979.