#if the title format wasn't a giveaway...

[pandoramsbox]

Sci-Fi Saturday: Dr. Cyclops

Week 20:

Film(s): Dr. Cyclops (Dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940, USA)

Viewing Format: Blu Ray

Date Watched: 2021-10-29

Rationale for Inclusion:

In looking over a list of science fiction films of the 1940s, most of the feature films were more horror than sci-fi: sequels to Universal Horror movies, dipped more into fantasy than science fiction, and/or re-hashes of the core story of Frankenstein. Narratives where science fiction didn't come conjoined with horror were mostly found in serials, like the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials discussed last week. Across all formats, the mad scientist remained the mainstay of the genre.

Representative of this decade sci-fi cinema is this week's film, Dr. Cyclops (Dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940, USA). Mad scientist? Check. Horror paired with science fiction? Check.

On a technical level, however, Dr. Cyclops is a standout. It was the first science fiction film ever shot in 3-strip "glorious" Technicolor and one of the first sci-fi films to be nominated for a Best Special Effects Academy Award. These characteristics made it stand out and secure a spot on this survey. 

Reactions:

On a technical level, Dr. Cyclops did not disappoint. The Technicolor was vivid without being over the top, and my partner and I were both surprised by the quality of the visual effects. It was the first time on the survey where we found ourselves going "Oh, the effects are good" with no caveats, including but not limited to "for the era." Black and white cinematography can cover up a lot of sins when it comes to visual effects work, so the fact that we had this reaction to a color film was all the more notable to us.

An aspect of the film that took us by surprise, but in retrospect really should have been more obvious was how much of the film was based on the cyclops episode from Homer's Odyssey. The name "Dr. Cyclops" should have been a dead giveaway, but cyclopses are mythological creatures that existed prior to Homer's epic poem chronicling Odysseus's fraught trip home from the Trojan war, and their name has been applied to various works, characters, and vehicles without invoking the story of Polyphemus. Nevertheless, it wasn't until the bespectacled Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) uses his experimental shrink ray on a group of unsuspecting scientists, and traps them in his lab, did the allusion sink in. Like Odysseus and his crew, despite their disadvantage in size, the scientists must use their cunning to blind their poorly visioned captor and escape. 

I was also amused to note that since Dr. Thorkel's shrink ray is powered by radium it means that, like The Invisible Ray (Dir. Lambert Hillyer, 1936, USA), Dr. Cyclops is a pre-Atomic Age atomic sci-fi film. Labeling a film as being "atomic sci-fi" will rapidly lose its novelty once we get to movies made during the Cold War, which is why I find examples of atomic energy figuring in science fiction narratives made prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 fascinating.

It also had not occurred to me until later that Dr. Cyclops would be the first film of this survey to deal with characters being miniaturized or shrinking. Using the survey as an excuse to watch The Incredible Shrinking Man (Dir. Jack Arnold, 1957, USA) and Fantastic Voyage (Dir. Richard Fleischer, 1966, USA) had occurred to me, but had I been thinking about shrinking people as a recurring sci-fi narrative, as I did killer brains, robots, and devolution, I would have included The Devil-Doll (Dir. Tod Browning, 1936, USA) in the survey too.

Oh well. I keep being reminded that when this project started it was meant as a representative survey and not a mission to watch every available science fiction film ever made. Still, I wish that I had given titles from the silent era through the 1940s the same attention I would later give films of the 1950s and 1960s.

[bloodmaarked]

the dos and donuts of love // adiba jaigirdar

first published: 2023 read: 31 december 2023 – 08 january 2024 pages: 327 format: e-book

genres: fiction, young adult, romance, love triangle favourite character(s): ammu and abbu. maybe also fatima least favourite character(s): pretty much everyone else

rating:  🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑  thoughts: don't get me wrong, i didn't hate this book given the rating, i'm just not its biggest fan. i'll keep it short and sweet here (pardon the pun – because there are so many in the book, if the title itself wasn't a dead giveaway). it was a cute enough, lighthearted read. the premise was not bad, even if the execution of the baking competition writing was a little wishy-washy. it's not too long of a read and i sped through it pretty fast considering i read the bulk of it in one sitting, so it's not a bad pick if you want a fun break out of the rest of your tbr.

i liked the idea of the main character, shireen, being a fat bengali girl who generally gets to exist in her own skin and love her body. i found it a little questionable that most of her interactions with food, when not baking it herself, were in the form of eating away her negative feelings... i'm not entirely sure that was the best depiction of her character?

i felt the writing of the most important topics (e.g. racism and fatphobia) was pretty surface level. you're not gonna get any kind of in-depth analysis with a book like this but it was still pretty meh and i felt the author could've dug a little deeper there.

i generally disliked most of the characters, including shireen, who i felt came across as quite whiny, self-centred and unnecessarily rude. the two love interests in the love triangle did nothing for me whatsoever and shireen ending up with either option would've left me with varying degrees of dissatisfaction, so it was a bit of a lose-lose situation. the drama between the three of them felt a little juvenile, but to be honest i could say this of the writing as a whole. maybe it's just me not being part of the target audience, but a lot of the story felt this way, and i think the main cast came off much younger than 17/18 year olds. shireen's best friend fatima was okay but i wish she had existed as more than just a person for shireen to vent and moan to. but it was good that she was able to call her out once or twice.

i'm not in much of a rush to read any more from adiba jaigirdar, but i do have her upcoming collaboration with faridah àbíké-íyímídé (who i love) on my reading list - four eids and a funeral. holding out that it's well worth the anticipation.

[anistarrose]

leaving, as an injustice

Mavis does not remember her father by blood, and only knows what her Mom tells her, what pictures she’s shown. His eyes seemed kind, his smile seemed proud, but… when Mavis was still so tiny, he left to fight, and now, he’s never coming back. Each year on his birthday, the two of them visit his grave.

Mavis is told she’s very bright, and she understands at a young age what it means to be dead, and gone. But it’s harder, for her, to understand why anyone so kind-eyed would ever think it’s fair to just leave.

Mom says he was one of Pan’s bravest souls, and that he left to protect them, but that doesn’t make any sense — how could he be protecting them if he hadn’t been with them? How could he have protected them by just leaving?

Mom promises that Mavis will understand when she’s older. Mavis never doubts this, and still spends many sleepless nights wondering.

But, while she does not remember her father, she of course remembers her Dad. How could she not?

She was still so young, maybe three, when Merle Highchurch was still just a stranger to the Coralheart clan — and not much older when he married Mom, and became her stepdad proper. Those are more stories that she only knows from photographs, but from not long afterward, she remembers being told how she’ll be a big sister soon, and dancing around the cottage with excitement. She remembers traveling with Dad, too, to a store out of town and up the coast — and picking out a little stuffed seal, to leave in the nursery for her incoming sibling.

It’s a tale that Dad loves to tell, because Mookie loves that seal.

(keep reading on ao3)

[vergess]

I forgot most people wouldn't understand it on sight, tbqh. Professional blindness.

The thing that matters is not that it was on a shoe, but that it was on a machine embroidered (or machine woven I wasn't looking that close) label.

What happened is, someone at the labels-for-boots factory ran a cool looking piece of text in a language they didn't understand through either an OCR program, or any number of similar software to convert text in a photo to a digital format that can be fed to the embroidery machine.

It came out with good visual balance so off it went, to be sewn onto boots.

The text was from the English language poster of the film Gomorrah.

It was run through an OCR intended for use with both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but was not set to recognize English properly, hence some dead giveaways like 'production' becoming 'prdhhhco' and, y'know. The title. Goncharov.

It might have been ripped from a JPEG online but given age of Gomorrah, I would bet it was scanned off an old movie cover or movie poster.

It's on a shoe because shoes often need a big fancy label or decal to make them pass for branded products at a glance. It's the same principle as those "CUGGL" shirts in the "GUCCI" font.

Anyway this happens all the time when clothing is made for both English and Russian speakers by people who do not read either language. It's a lot of fun to browse AliExpress and try to guess what the original text was.

The funniest thing about the original Goncharov post is that I have seen people do exhaustive amounts of research in order to discern that it's a misspelling/mistranslation of Martin Scorcese's "Gomorrah" and then go "well this explains everything" while never once questioning why it's on shoes