![]() ![]() There is one place in every home to regulate every thought according to the dictates of the super state.” Trout calls in his football team to get rid of the thing, but it just zaps them into zombies, as does it with the police, and paralyses Trout’s legs, so he takes up residence in West’s spare bed. It is not only a twonky, it is mind control of the super state: ”In the world of the future where this Twonky comes from, every house, every family has a Twonky of its own to carry out the dictates of the super state. He suspects that the twonky is a robot from the future, that has been sent through time, and landed in the TV factory, and thus taken on the appearance of a TV. Lynn) to help him, and Trout, despite his strange behaviour, tells West that the TV is no TV, but a twonky: ”Something you have, but you don’t know what it is. He calls in his eccentric neighbour Coach Trout ( William H. Even worse, it begins to brainwash him, so that he can’t think his own thoughts, and instead recites the history if sexual promiscuity to his students. John Stuart Mill’s Freedom and The Life of Abraham Lincoln are quickly zapped out of his hands, and instead the twonky gives him the racy book Romance through the Ages. But the real problems arise when he tries to prepare a lecture on individualism and the great arts, or the importance of artistic freedom. He can’t even get drunk, as the twonky immediately zaps him sober. Neither is he allowed to listen to Mozart – zap zap! The twonky wants to listen to marching music. He’s not allowed to drink more than one cup of coffee a day – zap! goes the twonky’s laser beam, destroying the cup. Hans Conried reading Passion Through the Ages.įirst it’s nuisances. And the socket isn’t even plugged! It wobbles around on its strange legs and begins to assert mastery over the household, and especially over West himself. Instead, the thing starts helping him in the household, duplicating money for the down payment, lighting his cigarettes, opening his Coke bottles and cleaning his dishes. But professor West soon discovers that this is not an ordinary TV. To keep her husband company, she has bought a TV set for him. Writer-director-producer Arch Oboler decided to put the cat on the table and made a satirical comedy featuring a TV set from the future that becomes a tyrant in the house of an unlucky college professor.Ĭollege professor Kerry West (Hans Conried)’s wife Carolyn ( Janet Warren) is going away to visit her sister. When included, the television was often shown as a menace or a nuisance. Hollywood was so afraid that television would make people watch films at home instead of going to the cinema, that filmmakers collectively stuck their heads in the sand and pretended that TVs did not exist in the lives of their movie characters. This is why it is easy to misjudge the prevalence of the goggle box when watching films from the early fifties. Hollywood was in open rebellion against TV, with some studios even banning televisions altogether from their movie sets. Unless the fuel suppliedc and burns automatically include the assumption of stowaways, in which case the story makes even less sense.If there was one thing that filmmakers were more afraid of in the fifties than UFOs, nuclear war and those damn Commies combined, it was the television set. because he would have been burning on the assumption of no extra weight (the "Cold Equations" of the title). If stowaways are such a problem and the consequences so harsh, why don't they warn people on the liner of the consequences? Why was the door to the shuttle not locked or guarded? Why did the pilot not check for stowaways BEFORE setting out? If weight is at such a premium why is there enough empty space in the shuttle for a person to hide?ĮDIT: and secondly to weight being at a premium, they can build a shuttle with an airlock and enough empty space and lockers big enough to hide someone (or occasionally several someones, apparently) but they can't give it enough fuel for 2 people?ĮDIT 2: And thirdly, if fuel was at such a premium the mission was probably screwed before the pilot discovered the stowaway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |