Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird How Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormack, and today we're going to be talking about the nineteen forty size related thriller Doctor Cyclops. You know that line, that classic Hollywood line about how I stayed big it's the pictures that got small. Well, you can't say that about this movie, because this movie is really truly about actors getting small.
That's right.
This is our first nineteen forties film. I mean barely since it's a nineteen forty release. But yeah, this is one I was not familiar with. I've never heard of it, despite the fact that it has a pretty famous director who we'll get into more about in a second. But it's Ernest B. Showedsack, who if that name doesn't ring a bell, I think his most famous film will for you. It was, of course King Kong.
Yeah, this this movie I thought was a real firecracker. Like, it looks great, it has amazing special effects. The story isn't as complex as you might hope. But then again, I mean, this was a I don't know, a horror thriller of the of the nineteen thirties and forties, of the of the Hayes Code era, so you can only expect so much moral and intellectual complexity. But just as a big special effects thriller, the kind of Transformers or Independence Day of nineteen forty, it's it's fantastic.
Yeah, And I think that's also only the way you have to approach it is a it is a nineteen forty special effects fiasco, and the special effects very much come first. And you know, by today's standards they might not look as you know, as amazing. But if you but that's again only if you're looking at it as a modern viewer and not thinking about the history of filmmaking.
Because I think if you, if you sit there and watch the film in its entirety and keep reminding yourself like this is nineteen forty, you know, this is what had been done before with similar effects, and it will impress you.
Oh.
I think the special effects in this movie do look fantastic. I mean, I think they look so much better than the quote realistic CGI that floods the films of today.
Well that's true, yeah, I mean, you know, it's very polished, you know, using the tools of the day.
It creates I think some high quality visuals.
So this is We've talked about a number of mad scientist movies, and I'm sure we will talk about many more mad scientist movies in the future. Mad Scientists are kind of the hub of the wheel of weird house cinema, and this particular mad scientist is a mad scientist who likes to shrink people with radiation.
Yes, the villainous doctor Thorkol. And yeah, he's pretty great because he's you know, I guess his real defining characteristic is he's a complete lamaniac. You know, he already feels himself to be a giant among tiny people, and his super science just enables him to make that, you know, an objective reality.
Now, I think doctor Thorkel would probably shrink you to death for the way he pronounced his name. Because of the one of the funny things in this movie, So his name is spelled t h o r k e L. So I read that in like any other normal American English speaker, I would think Thorkele.
Yeah, if I had to go to an appointment with doctor Thorkele, I would call and be like, yeah, I'm a patient of doctor Thorkele's.
But the characters in this movie make a really special effort to always emphasize the second letter. So it's like Sar Dough, no mister, accent on the doe. Here we get thor Kel, No mister, it's doctor accent on the kel.
Doctor thor Kel. Yeah, and in this picture you can you can basically, well, here's the elevator Pitch, a mad scientist working in the south of Maria and jungle miniaturizes his colleagues when he feels his megalomania is threatened. So it's basically it's apocalypse now, but with doctor thorp Kel instead of Colonel Kurtz. Science instead of war, and miniaturization instead of the horror.
Let's say that's about accurate. Yeah, and well, and instead of Martin Sheen, it's a ragtag team of the world's greatest scientists and a mule guy.
Yeah.
And instead of spending like a large portion of the film about the journey, that journey is really quick in this they just skiffy right through it.
Should we hit that trailer audio, Yeah, let's hear it.
Then a crocodile becomes as huge as a prehistoric monster.
A rifle as unwieldy as a siege gun, a.
Terrifying black cat whose jaws lee den a dog looms larger than an elephant.
Then in the hands of a ruthless monster.
All right, So let's talk about the people involved here. Really, the one we're going to spend the most time on is, of course, the director Ernest B. Schodsak.
I know almost nothing about the life of Shodzak except that he is involved with one of the great early special effects and I don't know what you might call it science fiction horror films of the big studio era, which is King Kong.
Yeah, I mean really, King Kong, despite being very much a genre film, it transcends genre like it is that film is an icon of cinematic history itself. You know, it's kind of it's kind of difficult to overstate its importance in the history of film. But he and certainly I think you, mister you science Theater three thousand fans would agree it is a great eight movie. But shod Sack also directed another great eight movie, and that would
be Mighty Joe Young. So if you're not familiar with King Kong for reasons unimaginable, then perhaps you've heard of Mighty Joe Young.
Did that get some kind of remake in the nineteen nineties.
Yes, it did. Goodness, I forget who was in it, but they had. Mighty Joe Young is a is an enlarged ape as well, but not nearly as enlarged as King Kong.
It's a medium enlarged ape.
Yeah, and I think I've seen some comparisons. Just in the same way that Godzilla keeps getting bigger and bigger in films, King Kong also inevitably just gets bigger and bigger, but Mighty Joe Young was always a smaller giant ape.
So some of this guy's big movies seem all focused on changes in size perspective, either really big creatures or
really little creatures smaller than they're supposed to be. And this is funny because I think there were This is sort of the A list version of that kind of director, but there were also B list versions of that kind of director, because you get people like Bert Eye Gordon, who made B movies, almost all of which are about creatures of unusual size, either like a person or a creature that gets shrunken down or creatures that get blown up.
Real big Yeah, and you know, I think ultimately Bird Eye Gordon was able to make some really interesting films, but they're generally not put on the same pedestal as King Kong.
None of them look as beautiful as Doctor Cyclops does. Another thing that Doctor Cyclops really has going for it with the modern release, especially or at least the blu ray of it that we watched, it has three color Technicolor, and the technicolor is gorgeous. The colors are just dripping off the screen.
Yeah, in a similar way to Doctor X, though that was not technicolor. That was what two tone technicolor.
Two color technicolor. Yeah, this is three colors. So this is like the color you know, color films that would come later.
Yeah, So there's a certain unreality to it, but it's beautiful and it's certainly I mean, I find it more engaging than a lot of black and light films of the period. Just you know, Yeah, I guess it depends, like you wouldn't want to see Mad Love and color. Mad Love belongs in black and white, like that is the world of that film, but this one really benefits from the.
Color well and taking place in the jungle. I feel like there are a lot of shots in it that I wonder if they were only included to take advantage of that beautiful three color technicolor. Like there are parts where it will just cut away to some kind of tropical bird that is squawking in a tree, and you know, we see all of its beautiful feathers.
Yeah, yeah, sort of. You know before three D there was there was technicolor.
Yeah.
Again, it's quite quite a beautiful looking film. So let's let's talk about the director behind it again.
Ernest B.
Showed Zach who lived eighteen ninety three through nineteen seventy nine. We're not going to really be able to touch on his entire biography here, but if if you want a good one, you know, you can go to the usual places. I found Britannica had a nice one online. But here's some of the interesting points, sort of the bullet points of his life that I think are with driving home here. So, first of all, he ran away from home as a
teenager and worked as a surveyor in San Francisco. He got a job as a cameraman from with help from his brother in nineteen fourteen, and then during the First World War he served as a cameraman in the Signal Corps in France. He stayed in Europe. After that he got involved in adventure filmmaking. So this is interesting because it makes sense given the nature of films like King Kong. But it also, you know, it seems to run against the grain if you think about his success in fiction,
because earlier on it's less purely fictional. There's a certain documentary aspect to it, like fictionalized documentary work. So he served with the Red Cross in nineteen nineteen, helped refugees from the Russo Polish War, and he also filmed this conflict as well as the Greco Turkish War of nineteen twenty one through twenty two, And in this he essentially wound up working as a conflict journalist and was then sponsored by the New York Times as a cameraman on an around the world expedition.
Wow.
So he worked on this. He worked with a pilot by the name of Marion C. Cooper, and they began producing what they called natural dramas, which were a kind of combination of travelog and drama. This is super fascinating given what we've covered stuff to blow your mind before. In nineteen twenty five, he joined William Beebe's expedition to the Galapagos Islands as a cameraman.
Ah.
Now William Beebe was, if you'll recalled the was he a marine biologist. He was a researcher who got down into a basically a gigantic metal ball that just was dangled down deep into the ocean to see what kind of life could be observed through a tiny window in this ball at depths that had never before been documented firsthand. Yeah, the bathosphere horrifying because this ball had no means of self propulsion. It was not a submersible, It was not a submarine. It was just a hollow metal sphere and
dangling by a chain. So if the chain breaks, you just sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Yes, but he was as we discussed in past episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind. He was also notable because he tended to surround himself not only with technicians on these expeditions, but also artists like people who could write about it, people who could illustrate what was going on. And it turns out showed Saq was one of the creatives that he brought a board to document the work. At least on one of the expeditions.
Now, I think the bathisphere of observations were not in the Galapago, so that was somewhere in the Atlantic of itself, what Bermuda or somewhere in the Bahamas.
Yeah, I believe. So this would have been a Yeah, this would have been a different journey. But still it's wonderful how these two came together. I wasn't expecting him to come up in this. So anyway, from here showed Sack and Cooper. They go on to produce a natural drama titled Chang, a drama of the wilderness from twenty set in nineteen twenty seven. This earned a nomination for
Best Picture at the very first Academy Awards. He then directed The Four Feathers in nineteen twenty nine, based on the nineteen oh two novel, shot in California and the Sudan. And then he shot Rango in Sumatra, which is a film about and this just sounds like super ambitious for any filmmaker because it's about a boy and a rangutang and a tiger, filmed in thirty one. Again, then he shot The Most Dangerous Game in thirty two.
Oh, okay, wait, didn't we just talk about no We talked about Ernest Dickerson's Survivor is it Surviving the Game?
Surviving the Game?
Yep, the Iced Tea movie, which is sort of based on the similar concept the novella or novel The Most Dangerous Game, which is about a human who hunts men.
Yes, and so it's been popular for a while. It's one of those stories that's going to keep getting adapted
in one form or the other. Now, from here, Showtek and Cooper moved on to what would be the most famous motion picture that they worked on, and that was King Kong of nineteen thirty three, and then they followed this up with The Sun of Kong, which also came out in nineteen thirty three, And then they did they also did a movie titled Blind Adventure, which also came out in nineteen thirty three.
So it was quite for these.
Two regular Roger Corman over here. This is like Roger Corman's in nineteen fifty seven or whatever your year it was that he made like fourteen movies.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, an impressive year. They were really just firing on all cylinders. Now, in nineteen thirty five, they made a film titled The Last Days of POMPEII, and this was ultimately, at least a commercially a failed attempt at an historical epic. So after this, you know, they were kind of I guess in some version of
director's jail. He ended up doing smaller pictures. But then he got another shot at a big genre film, a special effects feature, and that is nineteen forty's Doctor Cyclops. And Cooper was an uncredited producer on this film. Now, of course we'll get back to Selector Cyclops in depth here.
But World War II broke out and Shoudzak was, like a lot of people sucked into the war machine anew and while testing photographic equipment at high altitude for the US Army Air Corps, he suffered a severe eye injury. I was trying to get like a firm account of it. If there's a good biography about Shodzak, I wasn't able to find one, like a you know, like a book length biography. I believe what happened is he accidentally dropped his face mask. And I'm a little foggy on the
exact nature of what the injury was. If we're talking about, like, you know, some sort of a light blast based injury or of its pressure based, but the end result was severely damaged his eyesight, and he only directed a couple of additional films. Really only one notable film after that, and this was Mighty Joe Young in nineteen forty nine, which featured OSCAR winning special effects by O'Brien and Ray Harry Housen. Oh god, yeah, yeah, so another big name.
And then he finally directed a portion of This Is Cinerama in nineteen fifty two, uncredited to promote the Cinerama widescreen projection process. But that was pretty much yet like after this eye injury, you know, he just wasn't able and or you know, or didn't want to direct. I think it was, you know, more about ability. And then he died in nineteen seventy nine. Cooper died in nineteen
seventy three. He did a bit more work after Mighty Joe Young came out, including serving as executive producer on nineteen fifty six as The Searchers, directed by John Ford and starring, of course John Wayne.
This is a fantastic coincidence how this story about his damaged eyesight connects to the plot of Doctor Cyclops. It almost makes me wonder do you know what exactly the time of his injury was. Could it have been before Doctor Cyclops or was it after?
I believe that's the weird thing about this. I've not been able to find like a firm date for this injury, you know, like a statement, you know, in this year or in this month, this is when showed Sack suffered the eye injury. It's it's my understanding that that the the eye injury occurred after Doctor Cyclops.
Wow. Because so we'll get into this a little bit more when we discussed the plot, But one of the main uh situation points of Doctor Cyclops is that the the titular doctor uh doctor Thorkel is a is a brilliant scientist, but he's limited by damage to his eyes. He has got poor eyesight already and relies on these really thick glasses.
Yeah.
So this is this is just mysterious to me, Like it's either an amazing coincidence or I have it wrong and there is more connective tissue here, like you know, maybe he had you know, previously damaged his eyes in some fashion, or his eyesight was already fading. I'm not sure you know what the answer is here, but as it turns out, like his actual biography and the and some of the plot elements in Doctor Cyclops do line up.
Now, he did not write Doctor Cyclops though.
Correct right.
Doctor Cyclops was and by a writer by the name of Tom Kilpatrick who lived eighteen ninety eight through nineteen sixty two, and you can look him up on IMDb. But basically he wrote various crime in Western screenplays and tell a plays, but nothing that really jumped out to me personally.
I mean, the script here is not really anything to write home about, except in the skillful way that it string that it efficiently strings together excellent special effects set pieces. But you're not going to like run into interesting character development or like super witty dialogue in this movie. This is a very much a sets and special effects driven film. But I will give the script credit for connecting each one of those things to the next in a very fast paced and enjoyable way.
Yeah, all right, well, let's talk about Doctor Thorkel. In this film, he is played by an actor by the name of Albert Decker who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty eight. He was a Broadway star turn film actor, and later in his life he served on the California State Legislature and largely transitioned back to stage in his later career. He often played aggressive characters, and this is probably due to his great size. So he was he was six two, which granted isn't like super tall, but
it's that's I mean, it's reasonably tall. I'm six two or so, and I bought my head way too often.
It's big in this movie.
Yeah, And I think part of that too is that not only is he six two, but he's he's got kind of a thick physique, like not you know, not obese or anything, but like he's he looks at he has this kind of he looks kind of beefy, especially for a mad scientist in a movie.
Usually they're a bit.
Scrawnier, and like doctor Thorkel looks like he could really throw down.
You would not want to tangle with Thorkel, right.
So, yeah, this guy, Albert Decker played him. Notable roles for him include roles in Kiss Me Deadly, and East of Eden, which was fifty five I believe, as well as his his last film role, which was in nineteen sixty nine's The Wild Bunch. Ah.
Yeah, the hyper violent Sam peckinpah movie in which I think he plays. He plays some kind of like railroad policeman or like a railway detective. He's hunting the outlaws in the movie. If I recall.
Ah, it's one that I have. Somehow I managed to get through my twenties and thirties without seeing The Wild Bunch.
It is a dusty, dirty, nasty, violent movie. It makes you need a bath. In fact, I would say the full vibe of that movie is summed up in one exchange. The outlaws arrive at the compound of this powerful guy and the guy says to them, like, you're filthy, you need baths. And one of the outlaws says, we don't want baths, we want women.
It sounds delightful.
One sentence that communicates a lot.
All right, well in this film. Yeah, Like we've said, he's delightful. He's got this wonderful, imposing physical presence. He's got these you know, these scheming eyes that are accentuated by his his his glasses, bald head in evil mustache. And I have to say he was reminding me of somebody as I was watching this, and I figured out who it is. It's British actor Julian Barrett, who mighty
Boosche fans out there. You might recognize him as the actor who played Howard Moon, but he also showed up on Dark Place with Darth Morangi.
As a priest, okay, and he also.
Was in something recently he was. He was the titular character in Mindhorn, which I've heard good things about.
I never caught him in Dark Place, but I should go back and watch that whole series again in one sitting.
It's ironically it is the ape heavy episode I believe.
Oh interesting.
So anyway, Howard Moon or Julian Barrett same height as as Albert Decker, and I feel like Doctor Thorkel could have easily been a Julian Barrett character. I included a photos here if you can compare the two like they they have very similar physicality, facial features. Both are prone to wearing a mustache, so I include that for what it's worth.
Yes, I can see and like Doctor Thorkel, he's gonna hurt you real bad.
All right.
So there are other humans in this film, and we'll touch on them with in less detail because there's not much else for non Doctor Thorkel characters to do in this film.
I mean, I would say they execute their functions correctly, which is to move the plot from one fantastic set and prop sort of extravaganza to another.
Yes, and do so, you know, with a serious look on their face. So the first one to mention here is Thomas Coley, who plays Bill Stockton. He lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen eighty nine. This was his very first film role, followed by mostly a lot of TV work. His part partner was actor and writer William Roorick. And Roorick was a theater actor on Broadway who is also in Not of This Earth.
Oh wow, So that was the nineteen fifty seven Roger Korman movie that we have covered on a previous episode of Weird House Cinema. It was, I believe, the b side to Attack of the Crab Monsters. So if in fifty seven you went out to a drive in theater to watch a sci fi double feature, you may well have seen Attack of the Crab Monsters and then Not of This Earth with this guy what was his name again, William Roick?
Yeah, William Roorick.
He was the doctor in the movie. I think, not to be mean, I think we did not draw a lot of attention to his performance in the movie, because there's not much to say about it except his character. If you recall, he played doctor Rochelle, who was the blood clinic doctor who gets hypnotized by the alien so that he's unable to talk about the alien's blood condition.
So other characters, you know, they'd be sitting at a table in a restaurant and the other characters would be like, don't you think it's strange that that man had alien blood? And Doctor Rochelle would be like, you guys, want to get some appetizers.
Yeah.
Yes, I wasn't the most memorable of roles. But Rorick was in a number of interesting films, though several of which I've seen. He was in God Told Me To This was the with the Larry Cohen film about alien Messiah's. He was in Day of the Dolphin. He was in The Wasp Woman. And he was a friend. This is interesting biographically. He was a friend of author I m Forrester and Coley and Rorick, apparently they call it. They would like, you know, entertain him when he was in town,
that sort of thing. They'd go out and see shows and stuff. But yeah, that's the connect they're all connected here to Cooley. Coley is the one in this film, not Rorick, but the two of them apparently collaborated on various projects over the course of their careers and lives together.
Coley plays the the like sort of lead of interest in the movie. He's the only character who's hunky enough to potentially end up falling in love with the one female character, so you kind of know what's going to happen.
Yeah, it's a very g golly role. And again, this was his first screen role to boot, so the results are very wooden. There's just not much to this part here, but that still seems like you had an interesting life and career. All right, let's talk about what the sole female character in this film. The character is doctor Mary Robinson. The actor is Janie Logan. She was born in nineteen fifteen died in nineteen sixty five. She only appeared in
six films, and this was her third. But here here's again a nice connection to the previous episode of Weird House Cinema. Her last two film roles were both Mexican films directed by Renee Cardona.
The director of Santo in the Treasure of Dracula.
Exactly yes, a major name in Mexican cinema, so both were of these films were from nineteen forty four. One the translated name is The Black Ace and the other is Summer Hotel, and I was looking this up. The Black Ace also featured a Dutch occultist and magician named David Tobias Bamberg who built himself as Fu Manchu and Bamberg also co wrote it. But yeah, which I don't know.
It sounds like he was sort of an occult star or would be star of the day, and so he just I guess he wound up in Mexico City and was like, hey, let's do a movie.
Anyway.
Logan is also rather wooden in this role, but it's not like the film gives her much to do other than scurry around and try not to be grabbed by giant hands or eaten by giant cats. Then we have the character of doctor Bullfinch played by Charles Halton who lived eighteen seventy six through nineteen fifty nine, actor of stage in film. I would say he has a little
more to do in this. He's actually pretty funny because he's this stuck up professor through and through even after he's been reduced to a tiny human wearing a handkerchief toe.
Yeah. He refuses a lot of things in the movie, Like he's constantly being told to do things and saying like.
I refuse yes on scientific grounds, Doctor Thalkel. I absolutely, yeah, that kind of thing.
Yeah, let's see.
Then we have the character of Steve Baker, played by Victor Achillian who lived eighteen ninety one through nineteen seventy nine. He was in films like Only Angels Have Wings and the ox Bow Incident. He wound up blacklisted from Hollywood, presumably for political beliefs, but he ended up doing a lot of TV and stage work instead after that. And I mean he's all right in this He's also it's a very typical type of performance and role for this time period.
He's the mule guy. He's all about the mules.
Yeah, all right. Next, we have an actor by the name of Frank Jacanelli who plays the character Pedro.
So.
This guy lived eighteen ninety eight through nineteen sixty five.
He was an.
Italian born World War One vat who became a natralized US citizen, and he was a vaudeville performer later a USO tour manager. He played a lot of Italian characters, as one might admit, but he also expect rather but he also seemed to have a lot of roles in films playing stereotypical Mexican characters, And in this film he plays Pedro, which is very much a goofy stereotype character.
Yeah, they don't say what nationality Pedro is supposed to be, but he is playing a Latin American character, Pedro, who, at least definitely in the first half of the movie movie is the butt of some jokes yeah about like trying to find his lost horse, which has actually been shrunken with a shrink ray.
Yeah, so you know, this was a you know, a casting situation that definitely made me sigh a bit. But if you want to know more about Jack and Ellie, I did find a page on Bewesterns dot com like bee Hyphenwesterns dot com that that has like seems to
be the only place I could find online. Like you can only much of a biography of him on IMDb, but this site gets a little more into like his what kind of audeville acts he was involved in, and he did seem to kind of make a career in places out of playing a Mexican stereotype, and certainly that's
what more or less he's doing in this film. Now, another interesting character that is involved in this film ultimately uncredited, but there's a guy by the name of Charles Gemora who lived nineteen oh three through nineteen sixty one, and he's an uncredited makeup artist on this film. Were you familiar with this guy before, Joe.
Well, I guess by his work, but not by name.
Okay, So he was born in the Philippines. He was a Hollywood makeup artist who became known as the King of the Gorilla Men. And it's interesting how this came to be, Like, apparently he's a guy who would he would hang around outside the studio and he would he would offer to paint for you or draw for you, like he had sort of an innate and I'm guessing kind of like self taught artistic ability. And of course people eventually notice this and they're like, Oh, bring this
guy in, we got some stuff to paint. Let's get him going. And I guess he was up for anything. And at one point in one of these films they busted out a gorilla suit and he's like Hey, that should be me. I'm the right just the right height. I've got the physicality to carry this heavy suit. Let me get in there. And so that's what he did. And aside to doing a lot of he did a
lot of monster makeup in other films. But he has and he has sixty makeup credits on IMDb, but he also has sixty acting credits, most of which are playing gorillas wearing gorilla costumes. And so if I do recommend looking him up because it's kind of amazing, Like, if there was a gorilla costume in a film, this was
often the guy that was wearing it. In addition to some you know, aliens here and there, he definitely did some alien costumes and other kind of like humanoid monster costumes, but his specialty was the gorilla costume.
Oh and I see what do you know? He's in at least one adaptation of The Murders in the Room Morgue.
Yeah. In addition to being an actor and an artist, he was also an inventor and he held actually held a couple of patents, including a I would look these up on Google scholar, a sanitary pad holder, and a tissue dispenser.
Wow.
Yeah, so interesting fella. Now again he was just a you know, makeup guy in this The two main special effects names were of Farcio Edward and Gordon Jennings. These were the two that were nominated for an Oscar for the special effects in this film for the thirteenth Academy Awards. Now they ultimately lost to the Thief of Baghdad. But these are some impressive special effects. Like we said, they're
impressive for their time. It's not the first time that we see miniaturized humans or giant animals in a film. Certainly Todd Browning's nineteen thirty six film The Devil Doll predates it, but this film makes some impressive use of supersized sets, giant hands, creative combinations of footage.
Yeah, the special effects in this film are really top notch. I was trying to think of earlier examples of really good looking special effects for miniaturized humans, and I recall the main example I could think of. There are the excellent shrunken human effects in Bride of Frankenstein. Oh Yes, by James Whale, which was released in nineteen thirty five. Now, you might remember in that movie when we first meet,
you could argue the villain of the film. Doctor Septimus Pretorius also just one of my favorite mad scientists in movies, Doctor Thorkel and doctor Septimus Pretorious. They're really up there in the canons of mad science in the first few decades of studio motion pictures.
I love doctor Pretorius because in the Frankenstein film Brida Frankenstein, he's such a mad science enabler.
You know.
Yes, Frankenstein is like, I can't do it anymore. I'm emotionally rotted from that last film, and he's like, no, no, we've got to get you back in there. We've got to get you back in there. You can do it.
Let's do some evil.
There's also a great part in right of Frankenstein where we see doctor doctor Pretorious just going down into a crypt just to have like a midnight snack. Like he goes down into a crypt at night for a picnic. He lays out a spread with like food and wine and stuff on a big tombstone. It's wonderful.
Oh man, I forgot about that part.
Yeah, but I think it's like, right when we first meet doctor Pretorius in the movie, I think, what is it, who is it who's playing doctor Frankenstein in the movie. Is it Colin Clive, Yes.
That's Cly.
Yeah. So he's meeting with Colin Clive and he's like showing off his latest work, which are these jars of homemade homunculi. So he's got like tiny humans in jars, and I think he has like a tiny king in one glass vial, and a tiny queen and another. I don't really recall the special effect relating to the plot much. Maybe I'm forgetting how it connects, but it no.
It doesn't really. It's just like, look at what I can do. Yeah, I'm pretty great. You're you're great. Let's work together and you will do great mad science things.
Well.
Yeah, it seems like one of those things that I suspect often happened in early special effects driven movies like this, which is that somebody had figured out how to do a certain kind of effect in a way that looked good, so you just find a way to work it into the movie. It's like, well, we can do it, why not do it? So let's get a homunculus in this movie. Yeah,
And I didn't look deep into it. But as a side note, I think those homunculous effects in Bride of Frankenstein were done by John Fulton and David Horseley, and that was it was done by like combining different different shots, so you'd have a you know, a shot of people inside full sized glass jars with a certain kind of background, and then that was matted over the full shot, you know, at normal distance, with the actors looking huge in comparison.
All right, well, let's get into the plot of Doctor Cyclops.
Okay, here's the full plot breakdown. You know, we always have to comment on the opening credits, and this movie also has excellent opening credits. Like a lot of the weird older movies we have watched, I feel like opening credits used to be really cool for weird sci fi movies, and then they got kind of whatever, you know, it just be some like words on the starfield background for a few decades, and then they just started doing away with opening credits altogether.
Yeah, but for a while, certainly in this age, it feels like the opening credits were treated like the poster, you know, as if you might be walking by the projection screen and deciding whether you're going to stop and finish watching. I mean, that's the ultimate weird I guess
you get in the audience revd up. But it's like they've already paid their money, they're already in the seat, They're they're clearly they're not going to walk out yet, but I guess it's about just preparing them for what's to come.
Well, there's actually a kind of visual continuity from the open credits to the opening scene in this movie, because you've got While the credits are rolling, there is this flickering light effect that creates a kind of auroral unease that is then replicated again once you get to the
opening scene. It's like the same shimmering flickering light effect carries over into the scene of a bald man in welding goggles who is leaning over a table examining a fluorescent green tube in a room lit by this shimmering green light. And of course this is doctor Thorkel, and the movie gets right to it because his colleague Mendoza enters the room, and of course, I my brain every time somebody said Mendoza, my brain kept going to the Simpsons.
But his colleague Mendoza enters the room and he says to doctor Thorkel, how much longer will you struggle before you realize you can't do it, and thor Kel says, no longer, my dear Mendoza, because I have done it. Look for yourself. So, you know, they examine what it is that thor Keeke has been looking at, and Mendoza is aghast. He has shaken. Thorkel says, there should be sufficient radium to tear it to shreds, and yet it's still alive. And we don't know what they're talking about.
But Mendoza is horrified. He's terrified of the power of whatever they've discovered. And he says, he starts saying like, you must destroy your slides, you must burn your notes. And then we get some classic backstory through utterly implausible dialogue, you know, and somebody says something to another character that that person would have no occasion to say to them,
just obviously for the benefit of the audience. So Mendoza says, when I discovered this gigantic radium deposit, I first thought of you, doctor Thorkel, my teacher of doctor Thorkel, the great biologist. I sent for you to counsel me. I began to imagine here in the jungle, the Thorkel Institute, a palace of healing to which all might come, and it was very much like Grandpa Seth has been dead for three weeks now. It's been hard on all of us, including me his daughter.
That is correct Joe, my podcast partner who has podcasted with me for many years.
At this point, but Thorkel is immediately dismissive of Mendoza's concerns. He's like, you know, bah, we now have the very cosmic force of creation itself. We can shape life like clay. And then Mendoza again with the classic sci fi movie line. He says, you are tampering with powers reserved to God, which is almost verbatim the last line of Bride the Monster by Ed Wood. You remember that.
Part, Yeah, yeah, I think so.
The movie with Bella Legosi and Tor Johnson. And at the end of the movie, Bella's mansion explodes. I don't remember why. There's a giant octopus attack and the mansion explodes, and then a guy just kind of soberly looks at the camera and says he tampered in God's domain.
So Mendoza is like, we shouldn't tamper in God's domain. But doctor Thorkel was like, yeah, that's what we're doing and we're gonna do it.
He literally says. He says, like you're tampering with powers were served to God. And Thorkel says, that is good, that is just what I am doing. And so Mendoza tries to forbid it, but Thorkel he's tasted the God power now and there's no going back. So it is time to murder. And the Mendoza murder is a very
cool scene. I thought. Thorkel shoves Mendoza's head through this radioactive green tube he's been looking at, and then there's a photographic effect where Mendoza's face is just gradually layered over by skull paint.
I like that.
It's a weird scene. Apparently this one was removed from some TV airings of the film, so I don't know if they found it, like maybe it was for time or it was just considered too graphic. There is a like a severity to it, like it firmly establishes doctor Thorkel as a guy who will murder for you know, for for his science. And we'll really not think it's not like there was a struggle or some sort of accidents. It wasn't one of those situations where oh, I've stumbled
into murder and now this is who I am. He's like, got to kill you now, and he does it right.
So next we cut to some guys in a fancy study and it's a room that sort of reminds me of M's office in the Sean Connery James Bond movies. But weirdly, despite what you might assume about the sort of pipe tobacco drabness of such an environment, the first thing I couldn't ignore was how much the colors drip just in this scene in a study. Because the opening
scene is very much shimmering green and black. It's actually sort of closer to the look of the two color Technicolor range in Doctor X, which we watched for a previous episode. Remember how that whole movie was very had a kind of diseased green and orange palette without the full range of a full color Technicolor. This has all the colors. Now now that we're in the office, and the greens, the reds, blue, and orange, the color is
almost violent and it is really beautiful, Pops. But anyway, so we're in the study now and these two stuffy old guys are discussing attempts by Thorkel to recruit them by mail for research at his remote institute in the Amazon. I think it's supposed to be in Peru. And this is doctor Bullfinch we're meeting. He's one of these two guys here and they're discussing the pros and cons of
joining doctor Thorkel's jungle institute. Pros are that he is the greatest living biologist, so be good to work with him. Cons are at he's a strange man, secretive about his experiments. You already get the impression that these guys suspect he may kill them. And I love the strong vibe from the very beginning that this is going to be like the fire Festival of scientific research. It's just like lure everybody to a remote location and then just watch it all go to hell.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious where this is, at least in general, where this is going, like mad scientist is up to bad stuff in the middle of nowhere, where where they're there is no law but his own. Let's go, let's go hang out with him and see what happens.
Yeah, and then there's a sort of recruiting montage.
These scenes are they're brief there's not much to them. Yeah, it's kind of like, hey, if you paid your hotel bill, no, well, better join up with us then, right.
So we get doctor Bullfinch, and then we get doctor Mary Robinson, who's writing a letter saying she's joining the team. I think letter, yeah, I think the letter says something like should should be no problem or something. And then we see the recruitment of a good for nothing, deadbeat geologist named doctor Bill Stockton. This is the guy played by Thomas Coley, and he has pulled in on the promise of having his mini IOUs remitted. So when we meet him, he's lounging in a patio recliner. And I
don't know if you noticed this. Did you notice that there are just in at least one of these shots, there are bugs crawling all over his lap.
No? I did not notice that.
I mean, it's easy to miss. It goes by pretty quick, and I don't think it's supposed to be like that. I think it's just something that happened to get caught by the camera. But in one of the shots there are at least three flies simultaneously, a couple around his belt buckle. Ones kind of to the side of his crotch, and it makes me wonder, like, what did he spill sugar water and his lap or something in an earlier take.
I don't know. I mean, is he shirtless in the scene?
No? No, no, no, he's got a shirt on.
Yeah, okay, I was thinking maybe they oiled him up a bit, you know. Okay, but who knows.
But yeah, So they're recruiting him because I think there was supposed to be another mineralogist or geologist and that person fell through. So now they're trying to get the deadbeat guy. But he's a handsome dead beat. And then finally they're out in the field in Peru and Bullfinch, Robinson and Stockton recruit a minor slash mule wrangler named Steve who has a lot of mule thoughts and he wants to get rich. And there's a mule hagling scene
between Bullfinch and Steve, which is pretty funny. Steve's like, you can't have the mules. I need him for something, and then all these eggheads are like, but doctor Thorkel is the greatest living authority on organic molecular structure, and the muleman is not very impressed, but eventually they get him to go along by promising him riches and saying that he can come with them to I guess make sure the mules are okay.
Yeah, it's it doesn't make tremendous amount of sense, but okay, he's coming.
Along, right, So they journey through the jungle. They arrive at doctor Thorkell's compound. Thorkell's assistant Pedro, comes to inform him that they've arrived, and when Thorkell is interrupted, I just want to say he's wearing an awesome helmet slash suit. Rabbi attached to a picture I found of the helmet for you to look at. Here is it's just like it's just like a can, just like a straight up thick can with two eye holes surrounded by glass and
then the kind of rounded top. It's not very elaborate, but it looks great.
Yeah, it looks kind of I mean, finds me a lot of some of the stock rocketmen and robot costumes of the of the day. You know, it looks a little bit like a medieval night as well.
Oh, it's kind of the night guarding the bridge and Monty Python and the Holy Grail and so they get there and they all meet doctor Thorkel, and doctor Thorkel is a creep from the first minute. They do not like ease into it. He's got the unholy combo of a huge head with tiny glasses, and he's he's huge in general. But it's just this like large bulky bald man grabbing people by the arm and moving them around
and saying like, I'm so glad you've come. He might as well be saying, you know what lovely cells you're made out of. And so we find out the doctor Thorkel sent for the assistance of the other scientists because of damage to his eyes. The damage to his eyes no longer allows him to use the microscope. But I was wondering, wait a minute, then, if that's the only problem,
why did he send for three different scientists. Then it almost seems like the imply is that doctor Thorkell thinks that if he had fully functioning eyes, he would be worth four scientists put together.
Yeah, that makes sense, or you know, or maybe it's it's he doesn't expect all of them to live that long. You know, he needs multiple sets of spare eyes.
Well, this is weird because so here's a question I have he is a creep from the beginning, but the movie does not suggest that he planned to kill them all along. Like the fact that he kills them does genuinely seem to be an unexpected development for him. He kills them because they discover his secrets.
Basically, Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess he what he I think has revealed that he he sort of needed a mineralist, a mineral specialist to weigh in on some of his work. He needed somebody with a biology background. But I don't know about the professor, did he. I mean just sort of brought him into the boast to him about like maybe part of it is like ultimately he needs an audience, like he's he's doing amazing thing.
So yes, I need I need a basically a team of judges to come here and tell me how great I am.
I think we're sort of rewriting the script as we go, But that's I think you're onto something there that that is part of it. Like he as a megalomaniac, he needs people to witness his greatness.
Yeah, So that's one of the downsides to working out in the jungle, is that in the jungie, is you occasionally have to bring people in to recognize your greatness.
Right, And so they're there and they recognize his greatness, but he wants them to get right to work. So he has them look at some stuff in a microscope and Stockton, the deadbeat hunk, he sees some iron crystals under the microscope. This is like minutes after they've arrived, and he says, yes, it's iron crystals in the microscope. And doctor Thorkel is like, ah, eureka, okay, that's it. Well, I'm done with you guys now. But Bullfinch, which is funny,
I mean very funny, Bullfinch is mad. He immediately gets super indignant, starts yelling and he's like, you can't do this to us. At one point, Bullfinch is like are you Are you intimating that you brought us here just for five minutes of work, and Thorkel is like, I am not intimating. I am merely stating a fact. Which that's man. That's one of my favorite types of statements in English, the like I'm merely stating a fact, like that wasn't a threat, it was a promise. I'm not
suggesting anything. I'm merely stating a fact. I wonder when was the first instance of that.
I don't know.
Yeah, this seems like at least an early variation on the theme.
But anyway, Bullfinch and Robinson they are mad and they want to know what it is that Thork is working on before they leave. Steve the mule guy, he thinks he knows. He thinks the answer is that there is a mind full of precious ore somewhere around here. Stockton doesn't seem to care much. It seems like he's fine to just like get his bill settled and then leave. You know, all he wants to do is lay around in a chair basically.
Yeah, But the other two it is kind of like they thought they thought this was going to be Thorkel at all.
Yes, you know, they thought.
They were going to go author credit, yes exactly.
But no, there's only one author on Thorkel research, and that's doctor Thorkel.
Now you might know more about this than me. I was kind of curious about this movie's abundance of unflattering pants. There are multiple characters wearing pants that have like big, saggy butt and thigh areas that sometimes make it look like they're wearing like a weird sort of diaper or just sort of just have a saggy butt in the pants? Are these some specific kind of rugged outdoor pants of the era, like the go into the jungle pants. I didn't know what the deal with this was.
I don't know. I just I just thought maybe that was the style of the day. You know, he just wore big balloony pants. But I could be wrong. Maybe maybe the pants experts out there can weigh in.
Well.
Anyway, Steve the mule guy goes out snooping at night the day before Thorkel has told them they're supposed to leave. Thorkell says, you need to leave tomorrow, and so it's that night and Steve goes out snooping around. I think he wants to track down the mine. So while Thorkel is inside wearing his crazy helmet and doing science work, Steve is snooping around this big hole in the ground that has a giant like rigging over it and with some kind of rope dangling something down in the hole.
And then he's almost caught by Thorkell. Thorkel comes out and Baker hides and it is revealed that Thorkell is operating some kind of awesome giant copper drill in the Thorkel super deep borehole. He's like drilling down into the earth and getting something out of the earth. I don't know. I think maybe it's the radium samples.
Yeah, there's this.
They don't talk about it that much, but there's this sense that he's somehow absorbing radiation out of the ground itself, you know, by lowering this probe down into it. That's kind of the sense I was getting from it.
Yeah, And then we see at some point Thorkel is alone in his lab later and it reveals that he has created a tiny pony. This is very much like the Septimus Pretorious images. So there is somehow they've superimposed footage of a full sized pony kind of neighing and clumping around, but they have matted that onto the shot of Thorkel sitting at a table, and so it looks like the pony is on the table and it looks great.
Yeah.
But then later we check in. I guess this is the next morning. Bullfinch is examining some pig remains that he came across, and it claim he claims that he's discovered a new species of pig that is only four inches long at maturity, and Bullfinch tries to name the species after himself, like you do, and then Thorkel rolls up on them, and he's immediately like, haha, you weak minded fool, you think you've discovered a new pig. And
he said, I wrote down this quote. Strange how as absorbed man has always been in the size of things.
Yes, because of course he knows what this is. This is not a new species of pig. This is just a normal pig that he shrank down.
He's been shrinking pigs for months, and they're all here amazed, thinking they've discovered new species of pigs. And he's like, ah, you idiots, you don't understand pig shrinking. I'll tell you about pig shrinking. But Bullfinch retorts, he says that size is the chief difference between mammals. I wrote down this quote as well. He says, in all essentials, a mouse
and a whale are identical. Yeah, so Bullfinch, I guess he's supposed to be like the second best biologist in the world, but I'm not sure about that one.
There was a big gap between first and second greatest biologists of the time, I guess, yeah, no, I don't think there were. I think gray Bao just in real life. Before these guys would have argued, no, a mouse isn't in a whale or not essentially the same creature there is, there are some major differences.
But after this, I like this Thorkel, like we said, even though he is very much a creep from the beginning, he does seem to give them another chance. He tries to send them away again. He's like, be on your way, but Bullfinch is just so mad he refuses to leave until he finds out what's going on, and then Thorkell begins to threaten them. He's like, if you do not leave within the hour, you will remain at your own peril. So there's some snooping around. After this, Thorkel goes back.
I guess, assuming that they're supposed they're going to leave, but they end up investigating. They're too curious for their own good. They hear some horse sounds and they end up spying on Thorkel appearing to like search around for a horse in tall grass. So they all start to think, okay, Thorkell has gone mad, but Pedro explains that actually he has delivered a bunch of animals to Thorkell, and he
doesn't know where they are now. He's delivered rats and chickens and dogs and cats, and he doesn't know where they are now except for uh, there's this cat, Satanas, and oh my god, Satanas is a good cat.
Yeah.
Upon just mere introduction of Satanas by doctor Thorkel, I I instantly laugh, in part because just seeing a cat just sitting there looking slightly bored in a film is always a light but also because it does it doesn't take take much to realize where this is going. You know that cat is going to try and eat a tiny person at some point in this film.
Oh yeah, which is a brilliant idea for for a horror movie. By the way, I mean, a cat of sufficient size to attack you is a terrifying proposition.
Oh yeah.
Like anybody who owns a cat can can attest to this, because you know, sometimes they will They will hunt the feet of full sized adults like me. Uh, and their their speed. The reflexes are terrifying. Despite how much time they spend, you know, laying around doing nothing and sleeping. When they want to move, they can do so with just incredible speed. So it's easy to imagine yourself as a small creature and having to face, you know, the
ferocity of a domestic cat. You know, you wouldn't you wouldn't stand a chance your your only chance really would be that it would grow bored and torturing you to death.
Yeah, I mean, I would say seek out water because you know, a lot of a lot of domestic cats don't don't really like getting too wet. I guess there's some exceptions, but you know, they can be scared about getting too close to water. But then again, if you're very small, I guess water would probably like a shrunken human might very well be in extreme danger from water.
We can talk about this more as we go on, but I recall again the JBS Hall day and Essay, you know, on on being the Right size, where he talks about how getting wet is an entirely different proposition for a small animal than it is for a larger animal because like, if if a rat gets wet, like a huge percent of its body weight is now clinging to the outside of it.
Yeah.
But anyway, so there's this question, like where did all the animals go? You know, all the animals that Pedro delivered and where are they now? Pedro says, I don't know. But Satanas every day she gets more fat.
She is really living her best life here. She's getting to kill, to hunt, and kill so many animals that she wouldn't get to otherwise.
Shrunken pigs, shrunken horses. It's all gravy for Satanas.
Yeah.
But anyway, so they're packing up to actually leave this time, I think, But then they discovered that they keep finding reasons to stay. They discovered that the ore that they've been finding around this place contains radium, which at this time they're like, whoa, that's worth a lot of money and it's very important for scientific research. I guess this would have been on the cusp of the era of the discovery of nuclear power.
Yeah, so certainly you know that the scientists are like, this is great for science. And then mule guy is like, like, there's there's that's some expensive radium.
I want a piece of it.
Yes, get me the money, And so they start snooping around in Thorkell's stuff and then there's a big confrontation. They find records of him saying that he has shrunk things and they're like, well, he's obviously lost his mind, and they and then he comes in and discovers them going through his stuff that they have a confrontation and he's like, here, well let me explain everything to you.
Come into this room and look at my condenser. And so they all go in there, Robinson, Bullfinch, Steve Stockton and Pedro.
Yeah.
At last, he's like, Pedro, get in here this room.
Yeah, tru Yeah, everybody cray him into this, into this room. Don't be suspicious. Just look at the condenser. And then he slams the door on them and shrinks them, and now we've reached the situation of the film. Everybody except
Thorkel has been shrunk to about thirteen inches tall. And so after this, you know, they're in a room having been shrunk, and Thorkel is like doing some playful diagnostics, saying like wow, you know, oh your vocal cords still work, and oh you're of this size, and he's crowing over his victory over them while the rest of the main characters scamper around on the floor trying to hide and escape.
And here's where the special effects just get wonderful, because a lot of what you have here are fully built sets to make actors that normal size appear to be like, you know, somewhere between like six and thirteen inches tall according to perspectives. So they were like giant chairs and they'll go up to one of the legs of the chair and crouch behind it, and giant books and things like that.
Yeah, I love it when films would do this, and I guess they still do variations on this. But I talked to a guy once in real life who had previously worked in special effects, and he had worked on the film Stephen King's Cat's Eye, which you might remember doesn't have any miniaturization occurring, but it does have a troll creature, which was of course played by like an
adult in a full size costume. In order to make him seem like a tiny creature, they had to build like an enormous child's bed for this actor to prance around on. So I got to see some behind the scenes photos of that he had in an album and it was super cool.
I love it. I love it. I really really missed the era of special effects through built sets and built environments. I do feel like something really is lost, no matter how good an animated environment can look. I mean, the green screen world I do feel like has lost something beautiful.
Yeah, there's a craftsmanship to it. I mean not to say there's not a craftsmanship in creating virtual environments, but there's a physical craft to it that perhaps is kind of lost.
You know.
One thing I noticed at the very beginning is that as soon as we come on the new characters, I guess they are too small for their original clothes now. So instead the characters have all replaced their original clothes with like togas. They're like little torn pieces of cloth that they're wearing like like togas and stuff. And this really I think heightens the connection to the Odyssey.
That's right.
And of course the film will continue to it will let you know that it is referencing the Odyssey. It's going to be very direct about it. But yeah, this may be the first sign that they're going in that direction. So I love this because they their clothes were not shrunk.
Doctor Thorkel is picking up their clothes and putting them in a bag later, but I guess he left either pristine handkerchiefs in there and some sewing equipment at scale for them, or he had pre arranged clothing made from handkerchiefs for them one or the other because they seem to fit rather well.
Yeah, and so Thorkel says that, you know, he's like, well, I've been working for days without rest, and now I'm going to fall asleep. So he falls asleep, and while he's asleep, they escaped the room by building a tower out of books and using a match stick to draw back the bolt on the door. And then there's a there's a great moment I loved where they're trying to sneak around outside once they've gotten out, and there are some chickens just like ye, giant chickens and giant chickens. Eh,
that would be really scary. I mean that's like a dinosaur.
Yeah, I would be terrified, Yes, like a like a big feathered t rex. And you know, I guess with any of these animals, you have to ask yourself, what is the threshold of miniaturization at which I am identified as potential prey by this animal?
Right? And the chickens never try to eat them, but the implication is there, I mean I really do.
Yeah.
So if you were thirteen inches tall and you were walking past a chicken, I mean that'd probably be like a human walking past a dynonicus or something like therapod dinosaur, the predatory one.
Yeah, if it decided you were worth a pack, I mean that could that would be death.
But they do a thing that really did make me laugh. They do the just tack natural walk while they walk past the chickens like pretend like we're supposed to be here, and then they get attacked by Satanas the cat, and they have to hide among a bunch of cactus, which
I thought was a cool idea. Yeah, and Pedro's dog Tipo eventually comes to the rescue, chases off Satanas, and here we get we here we get the movie, I guess offering thoughts about how you would be treated differently if you were miniaturized by a cat versus by a dog.
Yeah, this was fun because I've heard this this many times before, people commenting that, Okay, if you were to suddenly be you know, an inch tall or whatever, your your dog would still be your friend, but your cat would just eat you immediately. And and I don't disagree
with that principle, though I do. If I'm going to seriously consider the question, I'm going to wonder if a dog would be able to recognize you by side or by smell in a miniaturized form, Like if you start asking hard scientific questions about all.
Of this, I don't know. I am a dog lover, but I kind of think the dog would eat you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess it. Were more inclined to believe and want to believe, the dog would be like, oh, master, why are you so small? Let me help you, whereas there's no doubt with the cat, Like the cat would be like, sorry, the table has turned, and you know what I have to do.
The cat would one hundred percent each you. I feel like I'm at about eighty percent, and the dog would eat you.
Yeah.
In a way, it's like that slight level of uncertainty that makes it more terrifying, Like if you were suddenly miniatized in your home, you'd be like, oh crap, I got to avoid the cat at all costs because that is death. But then you're like, I don't know about the dog. The dog could be my savior, but the dog might just eat me anyway, or at least put me in his mouth for a while.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So after this we get a little interlude where we see the humans sort of adapting to their new scale, and it sort of turns into one of those recapitulation of the discovery of technology narratives like you get in stories like the Swiss Family Robinson. I think that's really part of the pleasure people get in a lot of castaway stories. Is they really like that, like watching people rebuild technological capability out of the materials available to them.
Yeah, like a Robinson Crusoe or to a certain extent, Flight of the Phoenix was like that. I think they remade it at some point, but the original was like a god was it a not to be twenty four? It was a B oh, it was a B twenty nine. Of course B twenty nine crashes in the desert and then they have to take it apart and try and build a new airplane out of this four prop engine airplane and then fly out of the desert in it.
Yeah. So obviously, the fact that this type of narrative recurs so much, I mean, I do think it's clear that, like some people really enjoy watching this sort of thing happen. It's some kind of fantasy fulfillment, and this movie has stuff kind of like this, except instead of a desert island where you're trying to recreate known technology and solutions
and stuff out of I don't know, coconuts or whatever. Instead, it's on a tiny scale, so you see them figuring out how to use a needle as a giant drill or a scissor handle, was a sword and stuff like that.
Oh, man, you know, I have to jump back in and say, I'm mistaken. It was not a B twenty nine and Flight of the Phoenix. It was a C eighty two. But I think I'm confusing it with some Disney film that came out where they the characters did a similar thing and turned a B twenty nine into a sailing vessel of some sort. But at any rate, it's a it's a trope. It's a fun thing that you see in a lot of films.
Is that water World.
They might have had one of these in water World, but it was a different film that I don't think I ever saw, but I vaguely remember the VHS box for it.
Wait, it's the version of Noah's arc made made with John Voight. I'm pretty sure that had some aircraft in it.
Actually, I've looked it up, Joe, and it is the Last Flight of Noah's Arc from nineteen eighty. It starred Elliott Gould and A B twenty nine.
The Last Flight of Noah's Ark. You're not kidding.
I'm not kidding. That was the name of it was a Disney film. I don't think this one has been added to Disney Plus yet.
I was joking the job Void. Noahs Arc does have pirates in it, but I don't recall aircraft.
Yeah, all right, anyway back to miniaturize people. They're making tools, they're rediscovering what they can use for a weapon, et cetera. They're making new clothes, all while doctor thorkel Is is snoozing off his latest science bender.
Yeah, and when he does wake up from the Science Bender, he has got a bit of a science hangover. He's he's kinda he's kind of frisky, but he's also kind of mad, and he's like, what is he going to do with these these with these shrunken people, And doctor Bullfinch starts he's still just like mouthing off to Thornell. He's like, he's like, we are prisoners in cyclops cave again, recalling the story from the Odyssey where where ulysses or
he calls him Ulysses. In the movie Ulysses may be better known today as Odysseus and his crew are are captured within the cave of Polyphemus the Cyclops I don't remember on some island and and they have to find a way to escape, and they end up blinding the Cyclops by stabbing him in the eye. But Odysseus has said that his name is no One. So when somebody comes to ask if the Cyclops needs help, the Cyclops says,
no one is hurting me. Very clever, yes. But doctor Thorkel ends up catching Bullfinch in a net oh after a part where Bullfinch tells off a chicken. He's like, go away, you ridiculous vowl. And Bullfinch, as always, is extremely uncooperative. Thorkel is like he brings him inside to measure him in various ways, and then Thorkel expresses disappointment. This is privately just between him and Bullfinch all the other people are still outside. He says, you know what,
your bodies are growing. Your bodies are reacting as if you have reverted to childhood, and you will eventually grow back to regular size. And Thorkel of course can't allow this because then they would interfere with his work again. So Thorkel turns to murder once again. We've seen him. We've seen him murder to solve a problem at the beginning of the movie. And his eyes, his eyes become cold,
and he's like, I'm going to do it again. And he gets a cotton swab and puts it in some kind of chemical and smothers Doctor Bullfinch with it and kills him. And there's like a giant fake hand for Bullfinch to be held in. It's pretty good.
It's a great scene and again very brutal, you know, just despite the sanitized nature of this film as a whole, it's just a cold murder of the of this professor.
You know.
But also during this scene, I was thinking about what doctor Thorkel said about how you're going to grow as if you were children into adult form again, which in this movie all it means is you're going to get big again. By the end of the film and the end it's saying like if you had hidden, you would have just returned to normal anyway, but instead you came back to me, and now it will kill you. But I had a moment there where I was imagining, like what does this mean? Because a baby is not like
a miniature adult. You know, it changes a lot as it becomes a grown person. So I was trying to just contemplate, like what would that mean if you were a miniaturized person and then you grew Like what monstrous full sized forms would they grow into?
You're gonna have skull plates fusing together? Again, like what's going on?
Like, so I that was kind of a nightmare scenario that this film does not explore, but I had a moment there I was like, oh my god.
Doctor Bullfinch say hello to a second round of baby teeth. And then so we mentioned that scene is kind of brutal, there's another there's a lot of imployed Like this is not a bloody film, but there's a lot of implied violence in it that is very brutal in its suggestions. So you see that the other humans after Bullfinch is murdered, they're hiding in this big thicket of cactus and then Thorkel comes out and I guess he's trying to kill them and he starts chopping up the cactus with a shovel.
It's messed up. But uh, we find when he chops it all up and then finds they've escaped through a hole in the wall out into the jungle, and Thorkell taunts them over the wall, saying that they will never live half an hour out in the jungle, and sure enough there comes along a storm, which again to think about how terrifying of a threat a storm would be if you were tiny, if you were like, you know, six inches tall or a foot tall or whatever.
This is yeah, I mean just on top of the jungle itself. Like when Thorkel said that, I was like, no, he's absolutely right, Like to go into the jungle at this size is just death, Like everything is going to potentially eat you.
Yeah.
But and then on top of that the storm.
Right, And again this comes back to the hall day and essay I mentioned earlier on being the right size. The thing about how when you're when you have a much larger surface area to mass ratio as smaller creatures do. There are advantages to that, Like you can fall off of a roof and probably not be hurt because you know the the amount of air resistance provided by the surface of your body will be enough to keep you going pretty slow actually as you fall compared to the
mass in your body. But the downside are like getting wet is a terrifying proposition when you are tiny, like the surface tension of water clings to you like a kind of slime. And so imagine, Yeah, you're out in the jungle and the rain is coming down and there's rivulets everywhere. Very scary. So they end up coming across a boat in a river later on, and they try to use technology to free it, and they get attacked by a crocodilian. I think it's a crocodile. Might have
been an alligator. I didn't check the nose shaped too well, But the crocodile attack sequence is great. They're trying to fend it off with fire, but they've got these like little tiny sticks that are on fire that are just not enough fire.
Yeah, they're just kind of dropping it on the creature and doesn't seem to particularly care.
Yeah, and then eventually, after they chase it off by throwing a bunch of flaming sticks on it, Thorkel returns. He comes and finds them, and again it's brutal. Pedro heroically leads his dog away from them. Drawing off the smell and and so he saves the rest of the people, but Thorkel sees him and shoots him, and so Pedro
has been murdered. And then after that, the rest of the people are hiding in some grass and Thorkel starts stomping through the grass and then when he can't find them, he burns the grass.
Yeah, so there's this inferno that he starts here, just trying to flush them out. Yeah, but he doesn't quite work, because they find another place that they can hide themselves, right.
They stow away in his specimen box, the box that he was going to put them in when he found them. And so Robinson, Stockton and Steve the mule guy are the three people left alive. And they ride back in this box to Thorkell's hut and once they get there, they get out and Stockton decides, no, I'm gonna stand my ground this time. I'm not going to try to escape. We've got to kill Thorkel and the other to agree.
So first they try to aim a shotgun like a cannon at his pillow in his bed, but then Thorkel doesn't go to bed and stead he falls sleep in his chair and then it really gets into the blinding of Polyphemus in the Odyssey because they steal his glasses. Remember it said at the beginning that he called them there because his eyes were so damaged he really couldn't
see without his glasses. And they they know where he keeps his extra pairs of glasses because they find them when they're going through his stuff earlier, and they hide those.
Yeah, they stick them through like a hole on the floor of the wall. So now he has the you know, the only only the one pair, and they remove those as well. So yeah, suddenly you have this this blinded polythemous trope going on here.
Yeah, and so Thorkel is enraged. He's smashing, you know, he's running around trying to destroy them. He does recover one pair of glasses, but one of the lenses is smashed, and he says, now you can call me Cyclops because I have one good eye.
Thank you for being clear about the title of the film, doctor thorp Kel.
I think they could have done without that.
Yeah.
But so there's a final conference in the end. I won't spoil exactly how it happens, but there they are victorious. They end up they end up defeating doctor Cyclops here and in the end, the three remaining characters they regrow
to full size and they travel back to civilization. And the main things now we find are that Stockton and Robinson are now in love because of course, and we find that Steve the mule guy does not like cats, Like he sees a cat back in the town they go to and he's like, scram.
Well, maybe you remember this. I watched it last week and I think you watched it this morning. Did we ever get any real payoff with Satanas? No, Like, like it's not like they had a big throwdown with the Like they didn't have a big fight with the cat. They didn't have to like slay the cat or I think the dog just chased Satanas off and that was it.
Yeah, I'm glad they didn't have to kill the cat, because I mean, the cat's just being a cat.
It's true, Yeah, I mean, but I also wonder, like was that like maybe something they wanted to do, but they just didn't have the effects, Like maybe that was just too much of an effects asked to have like a big fight with a giant cat. I don't know, Yeah, I don't know, because of you know, there are there were films that you know, they would later go more in that direction of having you know, the cat to aggressively go after tiny humans.
Well like Cat's Eye the one you mentioned.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Well not a tiny human, an evil troll and the cat. There is the hero going that's right, the evil tiny monster.
So yeah, this is this is absolutely a fun film. You know, there's not not a you know, tremendous amount of depth to it. There's not a huge amount of monster science to discuss about it. I mean you can take various you can certainly get really pedantic on the idea of miniaturizing organisms and then how does that miniaturize organism react and and fit in with with an immediate environment that it was not miniaturized. And depending on how small you go, those problems can be you know, can
be quite extreme. But then there are other directions as well. You know, we found this interesting paper we were both looking at titled Human Engineering and Climate Change by lal Sandberg and Roche. This was from twenty twelve published in Ethics, Policy and Environment, and it's pretty wild read. You can find it for free online. I think we founded at
BLC dot Arizona Dot Edu. And one of the things they get into is like, if you were to shrink humans down, they would have less of an environmental footprint, so it would ultimately be better for the environment.
This paper is absolute. This is something doctor Thorkel would write. I started reading it and I was just like, what it is interesting, but it is nuts And I don't know. I mean, it seems like there may be more direct things that could be done about climate change than saying, like, what if we were to shrink humans so that they consume fewer resources.
Yeah, there are other levers we should pull first. Certainly we shouldn't take the thorkelp that path Thorkel way on that particular problem.
I mean, it's at least got to go like solar panels before shrinking people.
Absolutely. All right, Well you may be wondering where can I watch Doctor Cyclops. Well, these things are always subject to change. But we actually had a hard time tracking this one down. We couldn't find it streaming anywhere or for digital purchaser rental. We couldn't even find a We couldn't find a physical rental either, So we actually bought it on special edition Blu ray from kl Studio Classics aka Keno Lorber. It's a brand new four K master.
It also has an audio commentary by film historian Richard Harlan Smith. I didn't I didn't have a chance to listen to it, but it sounds like it would be pretty cool. The box art on this one is great. Unlike some of the other previous releases that have come out that had kind of like cheesy box art, like this one has that weird probe mechanism in the center that is lowered into the earth. You have a picture of doctor Thorkel there with it looks like lasers coming out of his eyes.
It's pretty good.
Yeah, it's really good art.
But then again, this is also a classic film by a notable director, so it's it's entirely possible you might be able to catch this one on one of like Turner Classic movies or something to that effect. I know we've we heard from some people after we did our episode on Mad Love chiming in and saying, oh, they're showing Mad Love tonight, so who knows. Maybe check your local listings, is what I'm saying. Well, let's do it. Then,
let's go ahead and call it done. We're done with Doctor Cyclops here, but this was a fun one to watch, a fun one to discuss, and if you would like to listen to us discuss other films. You can catch other episodes of Weird House Cinema every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. So our core episodes are are about science and culture and those published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do an artifact episode on
Wednesdays listener mail on Mondays. But Friday that's when we get to cut loose and discuss some sort of a weird cinematic gem, generally from Yesterdayear.
That's right, so keep tuning in. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us to let us know feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.