Tag Archives: 1957

Uncategorized

Tonight on Eric’s Insomniac Theater: “The Incredible Shrinking Man” (1957)!

Leave a comment

Hey kids — don’t go running through any radioactive mists!  That’s the message of 1957’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”  Okay … it’s actually a little more complicated than that.   Grant Williams’ titular doomed protagonist was exposed first to insecticides, and then to the mist a couple of weeks later — so it was sort of a one-two toxic punch.  (I am linking here, by the way, to the Video Detective channel on Youtube for the trailer below.)

This movie rocked my world when I was a first- or second-grader.  It was the sort of thing that aired periodically on weekend television in the early 1980’s.  I’ll never forget the awe I felt … along with confusion at the abstract closing narration.  What did all that mean?  What happens to him next?

I was surprised to learn tonight that this was adapted from a Richard Matheson novel.  (He also wrote this screenplay adaptation.)

It’s … actually pretty good!  It holds up surprisingly well over time.  And the simple special effects are nonetheless effective.  (I’ll bet the props and sets people had a lot of fun designing giant objects to make Williams appear progressively smaller by comparison.)

Fun stuff.

IncredibleShrinkingMan-poster

Uncategorized

Throwback Thursday: “The Lone Ranger” (1949 -1957)!

2 Comments

No, I obviously don’t remember “The Lone Ranger” during its initial run between 1949 and 1957.  (At least I hope that’s obvious — I’m a couple of full decades younger than that.)  But I absolutely do remember this show’s reruns from when I was a baby … maybe around 1976, if I had to guess?  I would have been about four years old.   (I was five when my family moved out of that house in Queens, New York, to rural Long Island.)

I know that people who claim early childhood memories are often viewed with skepticism — I get it.  (And I think many of us are more prone to confabulation than we’d like to admit.)  But I’ve actually got a few memories from when I was a toddler — and this is one of them.

I can remember my Dad putting “The Lone Ranger” on in the tiny … den or living room or whatever, to the left of our house’s front door and hallway.  You see the part in the intro below where the horse rears up at the .31 mark — and again at the 1:53 mark?  That was a verrrrrry big deal to me as a tot.

Go ahead, tell me I’m nuts.  I can take it.  You and I live in an age in which conspiracy theories have gone completely mainstream.  If I share something online that seems implausible to others, I figure I’m in a lot of company.

Anyway, I pretty much forgot about The Lone Ranger after that.  There was a 1981 television movie, “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” that was remarkably well done — especially for a TV movie at the time.  I remember being pretty impressed with that — its plot-driving scene where the good guys get fatally ambushed was unexpectedly dour.

But I never bothered with the infamous 2013 film.  I occasionally enjoy movies that everybody else hates — something that earns me a lot of ribbing on Facebook — so maybe I should give it a shot.  Hell, the trailer makes it look decent.  And HBO’s “Westworld” has really whetted my appetite for westerns … which is weird, because “Westworld” is decidedly NOT a western — that’s sort of the point of its central plot device.  But still.