Re: "Can You Hear A Tomato Cry...???"

"Gregory Morrow" <gregorymorrow@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yep...pretty scary. It was a British production. The UK studios made
some really superior science fiction back in the day. The terror was
often understated, thus very creepy, e.g. _The Quartermass Experiment_,
etc. Even a budget production like _The Day of the Triffids_ (which I
watched last night) is good entertainment...

Back in the 50's there was some great sci - fi on radio, e.g.
_Dimension X_, etc.

It seems as if the more that is left to the imagination, the better the
thrill factor for the audience. That's what made radio such a great
medium... the entire visual portion of the story takes place in the
listener's mind. Of course, one needs an active imagination for this to
happen. Today in movies most everything is spelled out explicitly with
special effects. No room for creating the visual scene in one's own mind.

An awful lot of 1950s sci fi relates to radioactivity or atomic
bomb effects. I guess people were preoccupied with the issue after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Probably with good cause, considering all the atomic bomb
tests that were going on in Nevada and the Pacific in the 1950s.

The radiation issue even got into cookbooks of the era. My Joy of Cooking
(1975 edition, and presumably other post WW-II editions) has at least two
references to nuclear fallout in it:

Under hominy:

"It has recently gained favor as an antistrontium absorbent."

And under water:

"If water has been exposed to radioactive fallout, do not use it. Water from
wells and springs, if protected from surface contamination, should be safe
from this hazard. For water storage in shelters, use plastic bottles or
glass ones that are surrounded by and separated from each other by excelsior
or packing."

I suppose younger readers wouldn't have a clue as to why either of these
references were in the cookbook. I presume the fallout references were
removed in the 1990s rewrite.

One of my favorite movies of the era relating to atomic war is "On the
Beach". I especially like the search for other surviving life on Earth that
turned out to be fruitless... the telegraph key.

One of these programs had a hilarious story about
vegetables, IIRC it was set on Venus. The vegetables had evolved as
the intelligent creatures...

Wouldn't the PETA people be blown away if it is eventually determined that
the plant kingdom really is the more evolved species? ;-)

--
( #wff_ng_7# at #verizon# period #net# )




.

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