Electric Memories

There's a new Electric Company now, but the original is worth remembering and seeing again on DVD. See post below.

Hey, You Guys!

Boomers who were kids in the early 70s probably remember The Electric Company best, and may even have learned to read watching it. Despite the fact that I was already out of college by then, I loved this show! And a couple of Best of the Electric Company DVDs I recently rented reminded me why.

What The Electric Company was doing--as original cast member Rita Moreno explains on one of these disks--was essentially vaudeville sketch comedy. This was about the last period in TV that the vaudeville tradition--essential to TV comedy from the start--was still alive. Even Moreno's signature "Hey, you guys!" cry came from Abbott and Costello, one of the great vaudeville-style comedy teams. Vaudeville also meant particular styles of song and dance, and there are several examples of that on these disks, too.

Some of the last great sketch shows were on the air then, so those skills were still alive. That vaudeville style is what made this show funny, along with more 60s-style parodies, like Rita Moreno doing a send-up of Tina Turner. So funny that I remember I did a review of comedy albums in the early 70s for the Boston Phoenix, and the one I rated as the funniest was...The Electric Company.

At the same time, the show--especially the first year-- was very late 60ish, with all the effects, color, designs, music, fast cuts and even the words. The very talented cast was pointedly multi-racial and the feel was very urban, since minority kids were a big target audience. The cast included Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman (who can forget his Easy Reader song, or his appearances as Dracula?) and a very young Irene Cara as well as Moreno. Another regular was lovely, perky Judy Graubart, a Second City comedy alum. Lots of energy, fun and eye candy, too.

There's a new version on PBS now, but this is the one I love to watch. That it's basically about words is just more magic for me. At the same time, like the best comedy made for kids (from Bugs Bunny through Bullwinkle, etc.) the show never talks down, and there are some pretty funny levels that kids may or may not get but delighted the cast and writers, and perhaps the parents watching with kids, or boomers all these years later...

Gumshoe on DVD

Finally on DVD, this gem from 1971. I remember Gumshoe as a 60s style romp with Albert Finney playing another working class hero, alongside his favorite mate as the working class heroine, Billie Whitlaw (most famous as a stage actress in Beckett). (That's not her in the photo, though--that's a nice set piece towards the end with the young Wendy Richard, who has also had a good long career.) But there's some other historical interest here now, in this tale of the Liverpool bingo parlor comic who puts an ad in the paper on a whim to hire himself out as a Bogart-style private eye. It turns out to be the first (or maybe second) feature directed by Stephen Frears, whose had quite a career since (My Beautiful Launderette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, High Fidelity, etc..) I also noticed from the start of watching this again--for the first time since it disappeared from theatres-- that the music was unusually stylish. Turns out the composer was Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Surprised I liked it, actually.) The cinematography--and the print--have held up remarkably well. Sometimes going back to favorite films from the 60s isn't as striking an experience now, but this one holds up--it's a smart delight. It's funny, both in its homage to those Bogart as Philip Marlowe movies, and as a contemporary comedy, but it's got some complexities as well as wit. Check it out.

Update: A sad addendum. The Guardian reports that Wendy Richard, pictured above, just died, after a bout with cancer. She became best known for the British TV series The EastEnders, where she starred for 22 years. Her career was capped by an MBE from the Queen. She was 65.

R.I.P. 2008: The Final Frontier

Besides Arthur C. Clarke, one of Gene Roddenberry's inspirations in creating Star Trek, the Final Frontier lost other significant people in 2008. Majel Barrett Roddenberry (pictured here in three of her Star Trek roles; she appears on camera or as the voice of the Enterprise computer in every Star Trek series and feature, including the one yet to be released) was a major figure in creating Star Trek and especially keeping it alive. She was kind and generous to fans, and they loved her. Robert Justman (lower left) was Gene R's right hand man in creating the original Star Trek and the Next Generation. Joseph Pevney (center left) was an original series director, and composer Alexander Courage (top right) wrote the famous original series theme. Forrest J. Ackerman (top left) was famous in the sf subculture as a collector, a publisher and a fan over many years. Robert Jastrow (bottom center) was an astronomer and futurist with a cosmic perspective in time and space. Click collage to greatly enlarge. P.S. Neglected to include Ricardo Maltaban, who played Khan in the original series and Star Trek II.

R.I.P. 2008 (1)

Some of the 50s/60s Boomer heroes and elders we lost in 2008: the incomparable Paul Newman, country singer Eddy Arnold, actress Beverly Garland (the babe in seemingly every monster movie), artist Robert Rauchenberg, chess whiz Bobby Fischer, the unique Bo Diddley, and one of the voices of the boomer generation, George Carlin. click collage to enlarge.

R.I.P. 2008 (2)

More folks we lost in 2008 who boomers will remember: singer-songwriter John Stewart (Kingston Trio, etc.), Isaac Hayes, 60s designer Yves Sant Laurent, Arthur C. Clarke (who gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey), Suzanne Pleschette (a 60s starlet before her TV fame), folk singer Odetta, Charlton Heston, who did some pretty good work as well as his iconic kitch film roles. Click collage to enlarge.

R.I.P 2008 (3)

50s/60s people we lost include: dancer Cyd Charise (seen with Gene Kelley and alone); Harold Pinter, one of the 20th century's great playwrights who dominated the 60s; Mitch Mitchell, drummer for Jimi Hendrix; Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with the Beatles; Dick Martin (r) on Laugh-In; writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, singer Eartha Kitt. Click collage to greatly enlarge.

Classic Stuff: Merry Christmas!

Maybe you got some of this stuff--or maybe you will this Christmas! One Christmas I asked for Robbie the Robot (he's on the right) but I got the blue robot on the far left front instead. Oh, well. It's not about the stuff anyway, right? Merry Christmas! Click photo to enlarge.

Classic Stuff: Hopalong Cassidy

Before there was Davy Crockett, there was Hopalong Cassidy, the TV cowboy that first made a lot of stuff for young boomers in the early 50s. William Boyd was the good guy in black with the funny sidekick and the distinctive chuckle. We loved him. I got that gun and holster set one Christmas, along with a Hoppy shirt. I believe I had that toy chest, too, or something like it. My grandfather called him "Hopalong Que ce dice," which is an Italian pun even I understood.

Classic Stuff: Davy Crockett

The Davy Crockett episodes on Disneyland caused the first youthquake of the baby boom era in 1954 and 1955. "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" was a big part of it (there were several versions, 3 of which hit the top ten.) The top photo is of one of the many Crockett products--one I got: a package of Davy Crockett socks, with a big bonus. The cardboard backing of the package contained the lyrics to the entire Ballad--all 20 verses. The big item which we all craved was of course the coonskin cap. We all had versions of it eventually, and their quality was the first class (or at least income) demarcation by product I remember: the cheap ones had a sort of vinyl top, the really good ones were fur all over. They became so ubiquitous that Steve Allen and friends all wore them (bottom photo) on one of his shows in 1955--while (of course) singing "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" (although I suspect Allen changed the lyrics.)

The other Crockett item I remember and which I prized highly was actually a give-away. I walked into the Hudson-Nash-Rambler dealer, down on the West Newton Road on the way to town, and got an 8x11 glossy black and white photo of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, with the "handwritten" words: "If you want to win, try the Crockett grin." Other products carried his saying from the show--"Be sure you're right, then go ahead."

Classic Stuff: American Flyer

This is the train I got one Christmas --an American Flyer steam engine (top row) with coal car, box car and caboose. Don't get me started on the trials of getting a train board and trestles the following year. Eventually the transformer and all of the track were thrown out, but I managed to rescue the engine and cars, which I still have. I was never much for Lionel...

poster for the 1953 Technicolor movie of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, which early boomers may remember. This year is the 110th anniversary of the novel, and this Halloween is the 70th anniversary of the 1938 radio "panic broadcast" by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

The War of the Worlds

This is the is the 70th anniversary of the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” on October 31, 1938. This year is also the 110th anniversary of the novel by H.G. Wells that was adapted for that broadcast.

Many early boomers like me (and Steven Spielberg) first encountered this story of a Martian invasion of Earth either in the Classics Illustrated comic book version, or the 1953 Technicolor feature by George Pal. The story has been adapted for one screen or another several times, and got the big Spielberg treatment in a 2005 movie starring Tom Cruise. There's been another radio (or CD) version produced by Alien Voices, and featuring several stars of Star Trek.

But it seems these days that a lot of people are encountering the story by way of that Orson Welles version, as written by Howard Koch. It's become a fashion for community theatres to re-enact radio plays on stage, often also broadcast on local radio stations, and "The War of the Worlds" is often their first choice--usually about now: Halloween.

Orson Welles, performing in the 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds.

Early boomers may have heard stories about the 1938 broadcast from parents and grandparents. The broadcast is famous, of course, because a number of people who heard it actually believed the U.S. was being invaded by Martians.

It was 1938, after all, and as the Great Depression hung on, forces of war were gathering in Europe, Americans were nervous about invasion. Those who listened to the entire broadcast should have heard the disclaimer at the beginning, and the way it started: the narrator (Welles) set the story in 1939, a year later, when “business was better. The war scare was over.”

But lots of people didn’t tune until the program was well underway, and they heard ordinary dance music interrupted by what sounded like news bulletins, until the fake news took over. Nothing like this had been done before. The Welles group--the Mercury Theatre of the Air--transposed the story to the United States, and used the names of real towns, cities and states.

Historians dispute how many Americans actually panicked and tried to flee, etc., though comedian and writer Steve Allen wrote vividly about his aunt in Chicago being swept up in it when he was a child and she was taking care of him.

The "panic" made Orson Welles famous, but there were people who were definitely not amused. One of them was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who complained to Welles a few years later that it was his fault that some Americans
refused to believe that Japanese airplanes had suddenly attacked and destroyed much of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. They thought it was another radio hoax.

Someone else who was upset was the author of the original novel, H.G. Welles. Though when he actually met Orson Welles a few years later in Texas they seemed to get along, when he first heard about this broadcast he was livid. He was insulted that his novel had been turned into a "Halloween prank."

This book cover illustration gives a fair idea of how H.G. Wells described the Martian fighting machines in his 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells was first published in 1898. In it, Wells shrewdly combined two topics that separately inspired a number of popular novels of the time. One was invasion. Even then, Europeans could feel the Great War coming (what we call World War I), partly because the European powers were adapting new technologies to build up the machinery of war. So in popular novels, authors imagined mechanized invasions. (English authors imagined Germans invading England; German authors imagined English invaders, etc.)

The other topic was Mars. New telescopes led to increasingly better observations each time the orbits of Mars and Earth came closest to each other. In the 1890s, these observations led to sensational speculations. An Italian astronomer saw what he called “canali” or channels, but the word was translated into English as “canals.” American astronomer Percival Lowell thought these canals would prove the existence of Martian civilization. In 1894, a French astronomer reported “strange lights” on the Martian surface which might be signals. Eminent investigators, including Marconi and Edison, devised ways to signal back.

So in this frenzied atmosphere, more than 50 novels concerning Mars and Martians were published during the 1890s. H.G. Wells simply combined these two popular subjects into one story: an invasion from Mars.

That this novel became a classic and all the others are forgotten is testament to the story he told—and foretold. For one thing, he portrayed the Martians coming down from the sky. There weren’t even airplanes yet. He had them attacking real English towns and cities, when bombarding civilian areas was still relatively unknown in warfare.

But there were also levels of meaning within the story, which Wells deliberately created. One had to do with evolution. For much of the story, all the humans see of the Martians are their incredible fighting machines. Much later, an actual Martian is seen: a weak creature with a huge head.

The hero/narrator of the story recalls the theory of a “distant relative” (named H.G. Wells) that this could be what human beings might eventually look like. As technology got more complex, humans would need bigger brains, but not their bodies. Martians were simply an older civilization. So in a sense, humanity was being conquered by its own future.

Some scholars see the novel as anti-imperialist, and there is a lot in the text to support that interpretation. (The writer of the Spielberg version said he intended an anti-Iraq war movie, which is less clear.) Some scholars also dispute this interpretation. But what is indisputable is how Wells got the basic idea for creating the story.

It’s indisputable because Wells described it, several times. Wells was walking with his brother Frank in the Surrey countryside when the conversation turned to the Aborigine inhabitants of Tasmania, south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island into a prison colony. What if some beings from another planet suddenly dropped from the sky, his brother wondered, and did the same to England?

In the novel, the narrator refers to the Tasmanians, who "in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.”

The narrator didn’t attack Europeans for doing that—in fact, he was looking at the Martian invasion from the Martian point of view. “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

Still, it is clear that the idea came from imagining how “we”—ordinary 19th English in villages outside London—would feel if we were invaded by beings as superior in destructive capability as the English were when they wiped out the Aborigines of Tasmania. (American Indians are also mentioned in the novel.)

In other words, the initial impulse was empathy: imagining from the other’s point of view. At the very least, Wells implied, empathy should limit if not destroy our hypocrisy. If we invade and destroy, we may not be so different from others who invade and destroy. That our machines are more powerful does not mean that the lives of those we conquer are worth less.

Empathy can provide a note of caution and realism to actions that otherwise are obscured by technological distance and comforting terminology, like “taking out” a “target.”

Empathy can guide us to think of the impact of all our actions on others, and in a more positive way, it can guide us in preventing and alleviating suffering, in providing opportunity.

That's the chief lesson I draw from it. Wells was in many ways the father of modern science fiction, especially the kind that I call the science fiction of consciousness. It's more than adventure stories or war stories with futuristic technology. It tells us something about the soul of the future.

The Classics Illustrated cover, the Alien Voices version (which I haven't heard yet) and a still from the 1953 George Pal version, available on DVD some neat extras--a good featurette, a bad bio of H.G. Wells, pretty interesting commentaries, and a particular bonus--the recording of the Orson Wells 1938 radio broadcast.

As for the other versions, it looks like the Classics Illustrated comic was issued in 1954 (though I'm not absolutely certain), so it may have come out after the George Pal movie was released. In any case, I'm pretty sure I read the comic after I'd seen the movie. The Martian fighting machines are different. They fly in the movie, but in the comic they're closer to how Wells' described them--moving on three leg-like appendages. These were the inspiration for George Lucas' Imperial Walkers (Lucas was just a couple of years older and also must have seen the 1953 movie at an impressionable age), and Spielberg uses this three leg model for his 2005 movie.

As for the 1938 broadcast, writer Howard Koch (who also wrote the screenplay of Casablanca) wrote a book about it called The Panic Broadcast. It's not entirely reliable--he claims that he used nothing of the Wells story but the premise, but he actually borrowed a lot more, including characters, plot and entire chunks of dialogue. He does say that doing it was Orson Welles' idea (and no, Wells and Welles weren't related) and that Orson suggested doing it as a series of news bulletins, which is what really gave it its power.

The 1953 movie--which I have on DVD and still love to watch--was based as much on the Mercury Theatre version as on Wells' novel. It also transferred the story to the U.S. and updated it to contemporary times. In Wells' time, people were fearful of the approaching Great War; in Welles' it was the approach of World War II. This film is very much a Cold War fear film: fear of the unknown Soviets, of nuclear bombs and advanced science, etc. which fueled a lot of 50s sf and Bug-Eyed Monster movies.

In the novel, the Martian invasion is mostly seen through the eyes of an ordinary (if educated) person. The radio play told the story through interviews of major figures: military leaders, political leaders, scientists. That pattern is followed in the Pal film, but there are two characters the audience identifies with: a young scientist and the young woman he falls in love with during the invasion.

The 2005 Speilberg movie returns the point of view to an ordinary person--there are no real authority figures in the film. But at the same time, the scientific curiosity of the novel's protagonist is gone. What we have is Tom Cruise as an errant father learning to assume responsibility as he and his children flee from the invaders.

When I saw the Speilberg film, something in particular interested me: as a child, I still identified with the scientist in the Pal film. I watched how he treated the young woman, and I rooted for him to come up with the scientific solution. In fact, one of the scariest scenes in the movie still is the moment when panicked humans--not the Martians--destroy the scientists' equipment and injure several of them, ending their attempt to find a solution. But even though there are children in the Spielberg film, I wonder who children seeing it would identify with. The kids? Tom Cruise? Neither seems very appealing to me.

Of course, Speilberg did dazzling effects, but the effects in the Pal movie were pretty amazing for their time, and if you don't look too closely at the DVD, most of them still work. This is especially impressive because alot of what they did were true special effects--that is, effects done live, not the "visual effects" created later, these days by computer. There was model work (the miniatures of Los Angeles buildings were very detailed) etc. but the models of the Martian ships had a lot of electronics and working parts.

Beyond the scope of the effects, there just seemed to be a lot more at stake in the Pal version--especially in the 50s, when such a movie could just as well end with the end of the world as with a happy resolution.

One other thing about the Pal movie. It begins with the narrator describing the Martians on their dying planet, looking to nearby worlds for a new home. All the planets in the solar system are considered before they settle on Earth--except Venus. This might be because in Wells novel, when the invasion of Earth fails, the Martians colonize Venus, and are no longer a threat to Earth.

I've written a lot more about the various versions of The War of the Worlds, including an unacknowledged remake called Independence Day, here at Soul of Star Trek.

Across the Universe

The best movie about the 60s made since the 60s so far is Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, which tells its story with songs composed by the Beatles.