Weirdhouse Cinema: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss 1953’s “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” a pivotal entry in the history of giant monster movies directed by Eugène Lourié and with effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. It stars Paul Hibschmid, Paula Raymond and Cecil Kellaway.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
today on Weird House Cinema we're going to be talking
about the nineteen fifty three creature film The Beast from
twenty thousand Fathoms, a very interesting precursor to movies that
would come later, like Godzilla, and you might say one
that follows in the footsteps of King Kong. I had

(00:36):
never seen this before today. I watched it for the
first time this morning, and yeah, this one was a
lot of fun. I was noticing how even though there
are silly things about it, it really does fit more
in that first half of the fifties monster movie bucket
than the second half of the fifties monster movie bucket.

(00:58):
It got me thinking about this division and where like
these early fifties movies are the monsters are a thing
of seriousness. They're more kind of adult oriented creature films,
usually made or at least distributed by these major studios,
and they deal with serious themes, very often about the
Cold War in one way or another, thing from another

(01:20):
world and them and this movie too, and then sometime
you get sometime in the mid fifties, you get this
handover where things start getting silly, where your monster movies
are like lower budgets, more independent features that are kind
of focused on the teenage audiences. This is your time
of the AIP takeover and Roger Korman and all that

(01:41):
attack of the crab monsters that sort of thing. And
there are exceptions, of course. I remember when we did
our episode on Robot Monster, we were noticing that, like, man,
that's this really feels like a movie from like five
years later. That one is from nineteen fifty three as well,
same year as Beast from twenty thousand fathoms, but it
fits in more with that drive in era. But generally

(02:02):
the trend really does hold, and I would say Beast
tightly conforms to the trend. This is a relatively serious
early fifties creature feature, and I would especially single out
the grim imagery of the conclusion right at the end
of the movie. It's one of the weirdest, spookiest looking things,
I think, especially because of the imagery we get to

(02:23):
of the roller coaster on fire with the main characters
wearing these deathly looking radiation suits. Yeah, interesting movie.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah is It definitely has that serious tone, but to
be clear, early fifties serious tones, not a sixty serious tone,
not a seventies or eighties. So don't feel like this
is a monster movie that is going to necessarily demand
a lot off you. You can definitely give it a
casual viewing. You can definitely just check in for the

(02:53):
monster scenes. But I do think it's worth watching in full.
I really enjoyed it. I get to watch this one
at Atlanta's own Plaza Theater as part of the Silver
Screams spook Show series and the Beast in question, I think,
to nobody surprise if you're familiar with it at all,
this is a Ray Harry Howsend creation. Looks absolutely terrific

(03:14):
on the big screen, big screen, black and white. You
can really imagine what it was like back in the days,
back in the early fifties to see this thing up
on the screen. Yeah. I think most people agree that
the monster absolutely holds up here, and the monster is
primarily the reason people come back to it with a

(03:34):
few other bits of interest as well. Some have said
that they find the rest of the movie a bit
slow at times, and I agree somewhat when it comes
to the research the research portion of the film, but
absolutely worth sticking out, especially for the ending. The ending
is just bonkers and I love it.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
I don't know. I was kind of going in for
the flirty dinosaur identification scene.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
No, no, that was good, and of course the lighthouse
scene is terrific. I mean, all the scenes with the
monster are terrific, and the humans are very likable as well.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
I'll take your modification on this. I don't want to
oversell the seriousness of it. It is also, I think,
in some ways unintentionally funny. I think, especially to audiences today,
some of the dialogue scenes and its treatment of scientific
skepticism is pretty funny, but not nearly the level of
seriousness and darkness you would get when treating the same themes,

(04:31):
or at least similar themes in Godzilla a year later.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah. To be clear, this was the first time I'd
seen the film as well, and I knew that I
needed to be excited about a giant lizard rampaging down
Broadway in New York City, but I didn't know that
we're going to kick things off in the Arctic. That
was a real treat.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, I was actually thinking about this, like these fifties
creature movies that take place in the Arctic, or at
least have parts that do. First, I don't know, fifteen
minutes or so of this movie is in the Arctic,
and it was making me think about Howard Hawks, the
Thing from Another World that also has a setting in
the Arctic. Of course, that movie was the inspiration for

(05:13):
the Thing which moves from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
And I was kind of thinking about, like, why do
we get all of these sci fi creature movies set
in the far North and you know, these icy environments
in the early fifties. I think that's probably no coincidence
because when I started thinking about it, that probably has
to do with what was actually happening geopolitically at the time,

(05:36):
because in the early fifties, nuclear war was very much
on everybody's mind. You know, the Cold War is kicking up,
and we have these new weapons, this horrible technology. But
because of the state of the delivery systems for nuclear
weapons at the time, the Arctic was a major strategic

(05:56):
theater for the Cold War in the early fifties. ICBMs
wouldn't be operationalized until later like around nineteen fifty seven
or fifty eight. So in the first half of the fifties,
people generally understood that if nuclear war ever broke out,
it would begin with long range bomber planes, and the
shortest route between available airfields and targets in the Soviet

(06:21):
Union in the United States would involve flights over the Arctic.
So as a result, the Arctic was a major zone
of strategic anxiety. So during this time there was a
lot of building, building and staffing of these far northern
bases and airfields, and trying to establish radar lines and
early warning systems that could detect a first strike coming

(06:42):
across the North Pole or through Arctic attack routes. So
I think it very much makes sense that the Arctic
would be on people's minds when they thought about nuclear war.
And in one way or another, most of these big
monster movies from the fifties have something to do with
nuclear war, either direct or indirectly.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously a key thing going on in
the zeitgeist and our fears take the form of these monsters. Well,
let's see my elevator pitch for this one would probably
just be giant lyzard goes crazy on Broadway because that
is what will happen, and that's the most iconic sequence
in the picture. But as far as just promotional materials go,

(07:23):
I love this The original poster for the film, which
says the Sea's master beast of the ages raging up
from the bottom of time pretty grand.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
You know. I don't really recall a scene where they
describe much of anything about the palaeoecology of the Redosaurus
or the Raydosaurus. I forget how they pronounce it is that,
but they come up with a fictional dinosaur species in
this movie, which is what the monster is. It is
an unfrozen, unfrozen caveman lawyer, except it's a you know,

(07:56):
rampaging dinosaur monster coming out of the ice and it's
r h Edosaurus. However you say that, and yeah, do
they say. Was it supposed to be an aquatic dinosaur
or a terrestrial dinosaur? It does both, And it really
is shaped more like a terrestrial animal would be. It
looks like a big iguana sort of, but with like

(08:18):
a really gnarly nasty head. But we see it, really,
we see it moving around beneath the water, much like Godzilla.
So I don't know. Is this thing supposed to be
a master of the seas or the sea's master? I guess.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
I mean it can eat a bathosphere, which speaks to
some mastery of the sea, and it is the beast
from twenty thousand fathoms. But yeah, it seems as comfortable
on land as it is in the water. That poster,
by the way, also in all caps, lets you know
that it is not suitable for children, which it's always

(08:53):
fun to reflect on that because by today's standards, this
is very suitable for children. It might bore some children
for some set for some segments, but I mean, there's
nothing out of line here at all, even within the
nineteen fifties.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
I would say. We were discussing this poster before we
started recording, and one of the things that confused me
was what's this white stuff hanging out of the beast's mouth.
It doesn't. The only thing that would make sense is
it's supposed to be drool, but it doesn't look like that.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
It looks like it ate a white wig, yeah, or
it almost looks like it is supposed to be like
beard material, like they as if they added some motifs
of like Eastern dragons to it or something.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Because it is a very dragon like organism. But yeah,
I could see yeah, like a like a Chinese dragon.
It's got the trailing kind of wind swept thing, beard
like stuff coming from the mouth. Also, we have one
person down in the crowd that's running in terror away
from the dinosaur. One person gets a speech bubble and

(09:55):
they're saying it's alive. Yes, Well, what did they expect?

Speaker 1 (10:00):
It's very much alive. All right, If you were curious
about this film and you would like to watch The
Beast from twenty thousand fathoms before we really get into
the spoilers here and all, well, it is widely available.
It's a whole lot of fun on the big screen,
but you can very much enjoy it on the small
screen no matter however small screen you desire. You can

(10:21):
get it in all digital formats, and there's some nice
DVD and Blu ray editions as well. All right, let's
get into the people behind this film, starting with the director.
This is actually a director we've mentioned on the show before.
This is our second film by this guy. This is

(10:44):
Yuzenne Laurie lived nineteen oh three through nineteen ninety one.
He also directed the nineteen sixty one British kaiju movie Gorgo, Gorgo.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
You know, this is a better movie than Gorgo. This
is definitely better than Gorgo. Gorgo had there was a
lot to love about Gorgo. That was the one about
the big lizard rat that attacks off the coast of
Ireland and then gets captured and brought back to London.
So really it is the plot of King Kong, except
it treats Ireland to Skull Island.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yes, yeah, the King Kong connection is key here. You
alluded to it already. But my understanding is that this
film basically came about because there had been they re
released King Kong in the studio, in the in the theaters,
which of course would come out and come out you know,
decades earlier. They re released it in the theaters. It

(11:36):
was a big hit, and you know, studio heads were like, well,
why are we not still making giant monster movies that
make us giant money. Let's do some more of those.
And that's where the Beast from twenty thousand fathoms comes in.
And then it by most accounts, partially inspires Godzilla to come.
So it does play a key role in the history

(11:57):
of giant monster movies just Internet nationally m Yeah. Uh.
You know.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
One thing I think King Kong gets right. Gorgo does
not get right, and this movie gets somewhere in the middle,
is making the human characters of interest. Yeah, you know,
there's like some human interest in King Kong. There is
not really much at all in Gorgo, and this is
somewhere in the middle. Like the characters in this or

(12:24):
you're not going to be, you know, falling in love
with them. They're not like amazingly compelling, but they're fun
enough to fall especially like the paleontologist guy.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he is a lot of fun and
it is of course sad when when he gets it.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
We'll get to.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Here, okay, but back to lay Here again, our second
film of his having covered Gorgo before. Russian born French
art director and then a film director his production design
where it goes back to the early thirties, but his
first directorial credit was this film, and this scene still

(13:00):
have cemented him as a giant monster director to some extent,
as he followed this up with fifty eight's The Colossus
of New York, in which a giant robot body has
a dead boy's brain in it controlling It.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
That's on my weird house list.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Yeah, I do want to see that one, and I
see it on the video rental shelves of Video Drone sometimes.
Fifty nine's The Giant Behemoth, which is another Giant Dino movie.
And then he also did an episode of the fifty
nine TV series World of Giants. This is an incredible
Shrinking Man inspired series. And then of course he did Gorgo. Yeah,
all right, getting into the screenplay here, one of the

(13:37):
most the more interesting connections here on the script is
that it is based to some extent on a short story,
very short story by Ray Bradberry, who lived nineteen twenty
through twenty twelve.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Did you notice how in the credits it doesn't name
the story. It just says based on the Saturday Evening
Post story by Ray Bradberry.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
It really kind of felt like, oh, crap, I forgot
to I've got to write down the name. I'll just
say just just say where it was feltlish.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yeah, it was in the one in the post.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
Yeah, the one in the post. That one what was
it called? It was? It was I'm forgetting the fog Horn.
The fog Horn was the name of the.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Songg fog horn leg Horn.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, the Foghorn from nineteen fifty one, which which you
can find online. It's it's it's a pretty short story,
and it's it's it's it's well written, it's nice. I'm
going to read a quick excerpt from it here. Mcdunn
fumbled the switch, but even as he switched it on,
the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of
its gigantic paws, fish skin glittering in webs between the

(14:37):
finger like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye
on the right side of its anguished head glittered before
me like a cauldron into which I might drop screaming.
The tower shook, The fog horn cried, The monster cried.
It sees the tower and gnashed at the glass, which
shattered in upon us.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Oh okay, So is this the scene that becomes the
attack on the light house in the movies?

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah? Okay, Well, one.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Of the better parts of the movie. Very very interesting scene.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah, the emotional heart of the film really as far
as the monster goes, because essentially what appears to be
happening is the monster is confusing the sound of the foghorn,
in confusing the lighthouse with one of its own kind,
and it sort of comes in and tries to hug it,
to embrace it, to find comfort in its embrace, but
instead just collapses a lighthouse and has then desponded, And

(15:29):
you know, we can understand it's rage at that point.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, and sadly kills a couple of lighthouse keepers who
were in the middle of a brilliant discourse on body songs.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah, it's true there was human tragedy here as well.
But yeah, this was the Ray Bradbury story. Yeah, we
talked about Bradbury before. He's come up before, but we
talked about The Soul and the Lame Bass short film
Quest from nineteen eighty four, which was based on one
of his tales. And he's the author of such works
the Martian Chronicles from fifty They Illustrated Man from fifty one,

(16:04):
The October Country from fifty five. And he was of
course a successful screenwriter, having written the screenplay for the
nineteen fifty six adaptation of Moby Dick, and his work
was also adapted for TV and film going back to
the nineteen fifties, including Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer
Space in fifty three, and that's one that has been
kind of on the short list or maybe the long

(16:25):
list for weird house cinema. There's probably one Jack Arnold
film in particular. In particular we'll get too before that,
but at any rate, Yeah, you do see a little
bit of the fog Horn in this picture, and it
is kind of the emotional heart of it. I was
reading about it, and I've found out that there's actually

(16:47):
a nineteen ninety seven episode of the Pokemon TV series
which also loosely adapts this Bradburry story. It's called Mystery
at the Lighthouse, and I included a couple of stills
for you here. I did not have a chance to
watch this episode, but based on the screenshots, it appears
that a large dragon like form I'm assuming this is

(17:10):
what Charizard charizard O.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, I know that one.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, it looks like Charizard, except in black and white,
you know, or at least in mist and fog we
don't get are mostly silhouette, and he is indeed attacking
a lighthouse, perhaps mistaking it for I don't know, another Pokemon. Anyway,
Pokemon fans out there, and we know, we certainly know
we have them right in about this episode, we'll learn

(17:35):
more from you, all right. The screenplay credits, however, go
to two individuals. We have Lou Morheim, who lived nineteen
twenty two through twenty thirteen, writer and producer who's other
credits as a writer include five episodes of the original
Outer Limits plus a bunch of Westerns, which makes sense
given the time period. And then also Fred Freiberger nineteen
fifteen through two thousand and three, film and TV writer

(17:57):
who went on to create the Neanderthal Saturday More live
action TV show Corg seventy thousand BC. This ran from
seventy four through seventy five, nineteen episodes narrated by Burgess.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Meredith. Huh yeah, I didn't know about that.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yeah. Yeah, Like I was reading about it and it
was like, oh wow, this is like a serious caveman
drama and they're like, no Saturday Morning TV.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
Show, Okay, it's not like the Inheritors.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah yeah, that's what I was thinking, Like, is this
a real serious treatment of maybe, you know, somehow connected
to a lot of the other like seriously minded prehistoric
people novels and so forth. But I don't think that
was the case. More of a light land of the
lost flavor here I think, all right, let's get into

(18:43):
the actors here. So our protagonist is Professor Tom Nesbit,
played by an actor credited as Paul Christian, his real
name Paul Hubschmid. He was a Swiss actor with film
credits going back to nineteen thirty eight. He lived nineteen
seventeen through two thousand and one. He worked in German cinema,

(19:05):
including during the period of Nazi rule, which he later
expressed regret over and had difficulty finding Swiss roles because
of in the years following the war. I'm to understand
that these German films of the Nazi era he appeared
in were light romantic fare with only faint ideological references,

(19:26):
but it was still kind of a lasting blight on
his career. So to be clear, not a Nazi, but
a young Swiss actor working in Germany at the time
who was just kind of going with the flow and
did not ask questions about who he was working for.
But anyway, he kept working and continued to find success
in Europe and then branching over into Hollywood. He signed

(19:48):
a deal with Universal in forty eight, starring in the
forty nine film Baghdad, alongside the likes of Marin O'Hara
and Vincent Price, all playing Middle Easterners, and did a
string of other big studio films, including nineteen fifty two's
No Time for Flowers, directed by Don Siegel. Other credits
include The Indian Tomb from fifty nine, The Day the

(20:08):
Sky Exploded from fifty eight, Oh Sounds, Explosive, Funeral in
Berlin from sixty six, and Skullduggery in seventy, a screwball
adventure movie starring Burt Reynolds that does not sound good,
looks like it has not aged well and probably came
out of the oven offensive. And then he was also

(20:30):
in the nineteen eighty eight German language horror movie Broken Silence.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
When I was watching this, I wondered if I was
subconsciously holding his accent against him. I hope that's not it,
But he just like he wasn't totally selling the movie
for me.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Oh really, I found his accent charming. I think I
like that. Like he's, for the most part, very much
by appearances, your square jaw protagonist from an early fifties film,
Like he's very definitely definitely fits the mold in pretty
much every imaginable way. On that front, but his accent
I felt like, gave him like maybe a little bit

(21:07):
of charm where I was like, oh, this is this
is not just an American monster movie. This is this
is a you know, a Transatlantic monster movie. This is
a you know, it has a little bit of European
flare to it.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Even. Yeah. So he's supposed to be a nuclear physicist
who exactly what his relationship is to his work is
not totally clear, And some of the monologues in the movie,
his character seems to be kind of ambivalent or even
kind of negative about what nuclear technology means. Other Times

(21:40):
he's like talking about how he's paving the way for tomorrow,
and you know, he's like that he's talking about the
curative properties of the radioactive isotope. So I don't know,
I feel like there's some ambivalence in the way that
the character is realized. But also, as I said, I
was saying, I hope it wasn't the accent was making
me feel this, but something about him was awkward for me.

(22:03):
It didn't totally click.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Okay, all right, well that's like him or not. That's
her character and the love interest. The supporting character here
is the character Lee Hunter. And she is played by
Paula Raymond, who live nineteen twenty four through two thousand
and three, American actress with credits going back to thirty eight.
She acted in a variety of genres, including noir such

(22:26):
as fifty threes City That Never Sleeps, westerns such as
fifties Devil's Doorway, as well as romance. Her other horror
and sci fi credits include sixty two's Hand of Death,
starring John Agar as a monster that looks an awful lot.
People have commented on this like Marvel's Thing, who debuted
in the pages of Marvel Comics the year before, and

(22:48):
then she's also in sixty nine's Blood of Dracula's Castle
with John Caradine.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
I like her. She's fun when she shows up, though
you do kind of get the feeling with her character
that like, so she shows up when Nesbit is like,
I've seen a monster, nobody will believe me, and she's like,
well you're handsome, I believe you.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah, Yeah, there is that. It's it's a mix of
things here with this the way this character is presented,
because she's presented as a confident female scientist, which is great,
but on the other hand, she's still fetching coffee and
kissing old men on the cheek before there are only
the lips before they get into the bathosphere. So you
know it's a mixed bag here.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
She makes some little sandwiches with the crusts cut off
while they're trying to do their research.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
You need that crust for the research, though, I think
doing them a disservice.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Are they five years old? While don't they leave the
crusts on?

Speaker 1 (23:46):
I will say she is very stylishly dressed. There's one
scene where she's wearing this black like this big black
coat with a big, wide white collar, and you know
this is a big this is a monster movie, so
you know, certainly I was poking the person to me
and say, you're looking at this monster. But in a
couple of these scenes, I'm like, are you looking at
this coat? This is incredible. It looks amazing on the

(24:07):
big screen.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
I enjoyed her wardrobe. But in the first scene where
we meet her, she's got the Is that the scene
in the paleontologist's office where she's ring like a trench
coat over there? I don't know. I don't know yet.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
She's also wearing more of like a beige trench coat
and another scene, but in general, just you know, very
well costumed.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Also, I think she gets to be the only character
in the movie who expresses care or concern for another character.
So you know, it's that like she she's she's the
person who gets to grieve when Elson gets eaten by
the monster. The rest of the movie is very it's
very process and action oriented. She's one of the only
characters who gets to have emotional reflection on the proceedings.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, that's a good point. Well, let's talk about Professor
Elson or the Professor, the aged Professor, much beloved professor
that is also part of the monster investigation. Played by
Cecil Calaway lived eighteen ninety through nineteen seventy three South
African British character actor who started out in Australian theater
in film in the thirties before making them move to Hollywood.

(25:09):
Two time Oscar nominee for forty nine's The Luck of
the Irish and sixty eights Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Replayed the Monsignor character in that. His other films include
The Invisible Man Returns and The Mummy's Hand from nineteen
forty and Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte in nineteen sixty four.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Well, I like this guy. He was, you know what.
They set it up like the cop movie, like he
was two days away from retirement. Except this guy's thing
is he was like two days away from his first
ever vacation.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah, he's a very likable, grandfatherly character, and it was funny.
I saw this with my family and afterwards I was
asking my kid what they thought about it, and they mentioned,
and to be clear, like they've seen Aliens at this point,
and various other films. They watched Stranger Things. It's not
like they've only seen films in which the endings are

(25:59):
super happ but they were like, oh, yeah, I thought
that they were going to cut open the beast at
the end of the film and find the Bathisphere and
he was going to be all right. And that obviously
does not happen, but I can understand, like what the
characters presented in such a sweet way, and then he's
just totally destroyed, you kind of, I guess they're holding
out hope.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Well, you know, if the Bathisphere had had its own
internal oxygen supply, m this may be conceivable. I don't
think it did I think they had an air hose
from the surface.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
Yeah yeah. Or of course, then you get into a
weird area. If he's in there, that's a whole second
movie where he's communicating to the outside. It's like innerspace,
except he's in a dinosaur.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Like he still got that phone and he's making calls
from inside this Yes, the monster.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
I'm almost out of coffee. Yeah. All right. So those
are I guess are three main characters, but we have
we have some other supporting characters. Want to mention real quick.
There's Colonel Jack Evans and he was played by Kenneth Toby,
who of nineteen seventeen through two thousand and two. If
that square jaw and no nonsense demeanor seems familiar, it's
because he was the lead in nineteen fifty one's The

(27:07):
Thing from Another World, which of course covered on Weird
House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Oh yeah, this guy was ready to punch a communist
at a moment's notice.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah. Yeah, he's got a signature, signature face. You recognize
him once you start looking for him. He was also
in fifty fives. It Came from Beneath the Sea. Just
a ton of TV and film credits going back to
I think nineteen forty five. And in his later career
he did a lot of cameos. So there were a
lot of like, you know, new and up and coming
directors who grew up on some of these old fifties pictures,

(27:37):
including Joe Dante. So he pops up in The Howling
Grimlins two Inner Space, and he even cameos unrelated to
Joe Dante in hell Raiser Bloodline. Mmm, okay, yeah, which
I think he's a priest on a hologram. Still a
tempted to come back to that one.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Wait a minute, is that the one that's got the
segment different segments in time? There's like one on a
space station.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
One in the past, Yes, yes, the past, the future,
Adam Scott.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
It's got little baby Adam Scott. He's in like seventeenth
century clothing.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
I think, so, yeah, he's in the past. All right,
let's say moving along, We've got Captain Phil Jackson played
by Donald Woods, who have nineteen oh six through nineteen
ninety eight Canadian born actor whose credits include nineteen sixties
Thirteen Ghosts and nineteen sixty nine's True Grit.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
And then we.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Also have a character by the name of Corporal Stone.
Corporal Stone is going to come into play pretty late
in the picture, but he is played by Lee van Cleef,
who lived nineteen twenty five through nineteen eighty nine, only
a year into his film and TV career, coming off
of small roles in such films as fifty two's High
Noon his earliest credit. He was in his late twenties

(28:51):
at the time. So a very small but pivotal role
here in which old angel Eyes really gets to shine.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah, he plays a crack shot, right. They bring him
into to slay the Beast because he's the best with
a rifle.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, he is essentially barred the bowman from The Hobbit
and all that. We'll dwell on this a bit more
when we start talking about the scene. But yeah, he
is the sharpshooter brought in to use a special weapon
against the Giant Monster's one week point.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Which came first this movie or The Hobbit. I don't
know when the Hobbit was first published.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Well, the Hobbit was first published in thirty seven.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Okay, so it wouldn't be that Beast inspired.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
The no, But it's also not necessarily the fact that
the Hobbit inspired the beast, because, as I'll get into
later in the episode, the trope of a hero using
a special weapon to slay the monster by hitting a
very specific spot on its body is basically one of
the oldest stories in human mythology. So we have multiple

(29:50):
examples we can point to and works of ancient literature
in which this exact same thing happened. So I think
it's it may be it maybe have been a case
where they were inspired by the Hobbit, but just as
likely that it's just this is a very human story
about people standing up to monsters.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Well, I mean, I guess the other big point of
comparison is that it's a character who shows up late
in the story. It's not like the hero for the
whole time is the one who makes the strike at
the weak point.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
That's true, yeah, because I think in many of the
other examples, it's like you're gonna have a key hero
who it's like, oh yeah, we don't have to bring
an outsider in because our structural protagonist is already the
best shot within bow and Arrow in the entire world.
In this case, they're like, who can do this shot?
We got to bring into Lee van Cleef more on

(30:40):
that scene when we get to it, like he's part
of He's just one element in the fantastic finish to
this picture.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
You know, he does the same thing at the end
of it Conquered the World, except instead of a rifle,
it's like a you know, a little butane torch. Oh
remember that. Yeah, we brings up to the art to
choke with it.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, we talked about him previously in that episode and
a much different character like he's because he's he's on
the side of the villains in that one for a
long time and then has a change of heart and
decides that space communism is bad. In this one, he's
just yeah, they just like, we need to bring in
a guy who really knows how to shoot, and they're
like here he is, and he's like, all right, I'm

(31:16):
up for the job. He pulls it off.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
I don't remember them mentioning his name in the movie,
but I guess maybe they do.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Uh, you know, I don't remember as well. I was
more at that point in the film. I knew Lee
van Kleeff was going to be in it, and then
I forgot that who's going to be in it? And
the movie was about over and then suddenly they brought
him out and I was like, yes, he's finally here.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
It took me a minute to recognize who he was,
and I was like, oh wait, that's him.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Well they're getting the lead box out of the container.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah yeah, it's like what you got here? A monster? Yeah,
I'm gonna shoot that, which his whole vibe. He's cool,
all right. Technical effects created by, of course Ray Harry Housen,
who of nineteen twenty through twenty thirteen American British Oscar
winning animator and special effect creator, major pioneer in the industry.

(32:03):
We talked about him before in the show because we
covered Clash of the Titans from nineteen eighty one, which
was essentially his swan song, but so many other films
in between that one and this one, and really, like again,
the effects in The Beast from twenty thousand fathoms absolutely
hold up. And you hear about fairly recent films, including

(32:26):
Peter Jackson's Hobbit adaptations. I'm to understand that in figuring
out how they were going to present Smog the Dragon
and animate Smog the Dragon like this was one of
the films they look back to look back to see
how Ray Harry Elsen brought a creature like this to life,
because it's one of these things. When you see it
on the screen, you admire it. But sometimes, like not

(32:48):
being in effects and not ever actually having tried to
create something like this, you maybe miss out on just
how sublime it really is. How this creature moves like
a creature. You know, it's a you can easily take
it all for granted because the magic is absolutely working totally.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah, I think it looks excellent. You know, I've said
many times on the show how much of a sucker
I am for Ray Harry Housen and stop motion creature effects.
I love them. I really like them, even sometimes when
they're not great. There's just something about the texture of
the effects themselves I just find pleasing. And then when
they look really good, as this one does, it it's

(33:28):
even more of a treat. So yeah, I think they're
just great. You know. There were a lot of little
things where I felt like I noticed moments that resembled
different types of effects, maybe stop motion, maybe puppetry, maybe
computer effects from later movies, and I kept wondering or
those later movies calling back to this one, Like there's

(33:49):
one part where the creature eats a policeman in New
York here, and it was like, I was like, man,
that really looks like the first time the t Rex
eat somebody in Jurassic Park. I wonder if that was
in space Olberg's mind, where they like, I kind of
want to have this look like when the monster eads
somebody in Beasts from twenty thousand Fathoms.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
I mean, I bet it was. I mean it is also,
of course the thing you would want a giant monster
to do. But yeah, yeah, I think it's probably hard
to overstate the importance of a film like this and
it effects history.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah, there was some visual signature in common there though,
with like the biting the top half of the body
and the legs sticking out and wiggling in a certain way.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yeah. Yeah, because this is a creature that is this
in effect a lizard, and there are aspects of a
lizard to its locomotion. But it also I think it's
clear that that Harry Housen was looking at other animals
as well and determining like how he was going to
animate it and how it was going to move. And
when we've talked a little bit about that, I think
in previous episodes about how like he would go to
the zoo and watch animals move around and to figure

(34:51):
out exactly how he was going to animate things. So
he really put in the work here. But to your point, though,
whether it's Harry Housen's work or anyone else's, like when
stop motion effects or puppetry effects practical effects when they
are less than perfect, yes they can be hilarious, but
they can also still absolutely resonate on this level that

(35:12):
it is a form of puppetry. It is this form
of human storytelling that has very much been in play
as a medium throughout our history as a species.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
As I often say on here, stop motion effects don't
have to look realistic to look great. You know, there
are two different dimensions of like how well realized the
effects are. One element is kind of realism blending in
with the human action or the backdrop or whatever. But
then there's a whole other dimension that's just kind of

(35:43):
artistic pleasingness that doesn't really correlate necessarily with it looking
like real life.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, all right. Finally, the music here is
by David Buttoff, who we've mentioned before. Butt Off lived
nineteen oh two through nineteen eighty three imposer who also
did Hitchcock's Rope forty eight thirty nine's The Gorilla That's
Not Hitchcock, And we previously mentioned him for his score
to nineteen fifty three's House of Wax.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
All right, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Let's do it.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
So the title appears in this movie over a whirlpool
water spiraling down a drain, and this in the credits
here is when we get that note that this was
inspired by the Saturday Evening Post story by Ray Bradbury.
So at the beginning of the movie, a voiceover monologue
sets up the action while we watch footage of workers
moving cargo around on an airfield in the far North

(36:45):
with these twin engine propeller planes lined up into the distance.
And I was actually kind of curious about a air
you know, aerospace technology question. Did you notice all these
big hoses they were running from machines on the ground
up into the airplane engines. I was wondering, are these heaters?
Are they blowing hot air into the engines before the

(37:06):
planes take off, maybe to prevent them from icing or something.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
That would make sense, But yeah, I don't know for sure.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know either. I wondered what that was.
Folks out there, if you know what's going on there
right in contact at stuff to blow yourmind dot com. Anyway,
the narrator sets up what's going on here. The narrator says,
this is Operation Experiment. Experiment is the name of the operation.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
I think they should have workshopped at a bit more, but
fair enough.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Okay, this is Operation Experiment, a secret base far north
of the Arctic Circle. Experiment was the code name for
a top priority scientific expedition. These men arrived here on
X day minus sixty. It has taken them the full
two months to get ready. Today is X day. It

(37:55):
is now h hour minus fifty nine minutes. There is
less than an hour.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
Lefe left a lot of babel to get through. But okay,
something technical is happening.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
I like how it does the math for us. So
at h our minus fifty nine minutes, that means there's
less than an hour. Oh okay, thanks. So now we
see the airplanes that we saw earlier. They're like getting
ready to go. So the engines are running, they're preparing
for takeoff. And I thought it was kind of cool
here to notice that instead of wheels at the bottom
of the landing gear, they have skis, I guess because

(38:27):
they're out on these ice fields. And the narrator goes
on to say, the plane must arrive at its rendezvous
two hundred miles away in exactly fifty eight minutes. There
can be no room for error, there can be no
second chance. So then the plane takes off. We see
this big radar aerial spinning on top of a metal tower,
and it goes on narrating about like, here's the rendezvous,

(38:49):
and it's doing more of the countdown, here's for the
scientists or double checking their equipment, and we see shots
of inside a facility where a bunch of men dressed
for cold weather are looking through instation. They're doing calculations
on paper with like you know, a pencil and compass
and a straight edge and all that. And then we
see eventually the radar operators kicking into action. They detect

(39:12):
the airplane and they get on the radio and they
report its heading. And then outside on the ice we
see men in fur lined jackets and boots standing around
with binoculars watching the sky. The narrator says, every man
here knows his job he does it quickly, efficiently, silently.
The men are ready, the equipment is ready. We're like, okay,

(39:32):
what is it.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
I don't know what it is, but I guess I'm
feel confident about the people doing it.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah. So the countdown continues, The narrator goes on building
up the tension. People are standing around waiting. Then we
get the final countdown from ten down to one, three
to one, and it's a nuclear explosion. So there is
a blinding flash of light, a mushroom cloud blooming up
into the sky, and then lots of footage of I mayhem.

(40:00):
So we see glaciers calving off and dropping sheets of
ice into the sea. There are icebergs that split in
half and then crumble into the water, all kinds of
like ice crumbling and falling. So we have just witnessed
a nuclear test conducted somewhere over a northern polar ice sheet.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Well, it seems fine, probably won't be related to anything
else in the plot. That the world absolutely will be
the same. Let's see what happens.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, So the radar operators flag something weird right after
the blast. They say they detect a foreign object, and
one of them says it's silhouetted like five hundred tons
at least, but by the time they call the superiors over,
the object is gone without a trace. So after the
test we join a couple of guys in charge here
reflecting on the successful detonation. This is Colonel Jack Evans

(40:51):
played by Kenneth Toby and Professor Tom Nesbitt played by
Paul Christian or Paul Hugh Schmidt, but billed as Paul Christian.
And so the colonel comments with some amusement that they
spend eight weeks preparing for this kind of test and
then it's all over in a second. But then Nesbit
comes back with some opposing consideration. He says, quote, when

(41:14):
energy of that magnitude is released, it's never over. What
the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests
will be only time can tell. And then the Colonel's like,
what you mean, Scientists don't know, You don't know the
answer to everything, And Nesbit goes on. He's like, well,
you know, the world's been here for millions of years,
man's been walking upright for a comparatively short amount of

(41:36):
that time. Mentally, we're still crawling, he says. And then
after this there is I thought a one two punch
of dialogue that for me, like the first line lands
great and the second not so good. So there's another
professor nearby named George Ritchie who comments that quote every
time one of these things goes off. I feel like

(41:57):
we're helping to write the first chapter of a newt Genesis.
And then the second line from Nesbit is he says,
let's hope we're not writing the last chapter of the
old one. That was like the last chapter of the
Old Genesis. That's like I had to look it up.
It's like, that's the death of Joseph. Like I think
what he must mean is the Book of Revelation, not

(42:18):
the last chapter of.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
That would make But yeah, it's the line is written
or delivered in a way here that doesn't specify that
like it should. So it sounds like these guys have
just had nothing to read but the Bible. Up here,
they're about to list launch and do a very nuanced
discussion of Old Testament literature.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
The Gideons left Bibles and they're beside all of their
ice field sleeping bags, and yeah, they've been really getting
into it anyway. So the scientists after this, they're going
to take some readings. They load up onto a motorized
ice tractor and they head to the forward observation post.
They promised to turn back when their Geiger counters start
going berserk. So out on the ice, the mood is

(42:57):
very eerie. There's soft music and the wind is whipped,
and while the scientists are away from the vehicle taking
readings from their instruments, a blizzard starts coming on, so
the two scientists become separated. And then through a narrow
gap in some tall sort of columns of ice, one
of the scientists, Professor Ritchie, sees something shocking, a giant, black,

(43:21):
scaly figure moving quickly, like what on earth was that?
Richie calls out for Nesbit, but no one can hear
him through the wind, so he climbs up on a steep,
icy hillside and then there at the top he sees
in all its glory, the monster of the movie, which
will later be called the Ritosaurus. So the monster of
the movie is a giant quadrupedal lizard shaped dinosaur with

(43:47):
pebbled skin and sharp teeth. It does a dorsal crest
running down its back with these small triangular sail shaped spines.
It has very mean looking eyes, small, cold, eight full eyes,
and it walks on four feet, but it has an
upturned posture like some lizards do, usually kind of raised

(44:07):
up higher in the front, as if it's somewhat kind
of proud. I don't know, robbed you of any other
comments to add on the monster design?

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Yeah, I would say, in addition to it just being
so very well executed, I would say it's general design
here it speaks to more what we would think of
as archaic paleo art, you know, like older depictions of
what dinosaurs might have looked like. And then there is
a definite there's a definite dash of you know, Saint

(44:36):
George and the dragon here, I said, I in the
sense that there's some you know, classical dragon illustration folded
into the into the design as well.

Speaker 2 (44:44):
Now we didn't talk about this beforehand, so I may
be catching you off guard here, but it just occurred
to me. What do you think the difference in feeling
is with a prehistoric radioactive monster that walks on four
feet versus one that walks on So we will get
Godzilla a year later, who is who looks a lot

(45:04):
like this in many ways, similar kind of dark pebbled,
scaly skin texture, similar kind of dinosaur, you know, tyrannosaur
shaped head in a way. But Godzilla, of course is
firmly bipedal, walks on its two back legs. This monster
walks on four feet. Do you think that has a
significant difference in the feeling created?

Speaker 1 (45:26):
I think so. I mean, I don't know how much
it was really in play at this point, but I
think having you know, comparing the two, a bipedal monster
is going to feel more human and maybe we're going
to be more inclined to give it human motivations and
see some sort of humanity within it, whereas a four
legged creature is more of a beast. That being said,

(45:46):
I think execution also plays a role here, because with
the excellent stop motion like this, you can have a
four legged creature that is brought perfectly to life and
you completely buy it as a four legged creature, whereas
in the Godzilla era when you do encounter quadrupedal monsters,
I mean, it is a man in a suit crawling

(46:07):
around on all fours, and you can suspend disbelief, but
that reality is going to be there on some level
or another for you. And I think That's why, while
you do find quadrupedal kaiju, a lot of kaiju are
going to be bipedal, or there's going to be some
sort of arrangement that is bipedal in basic structure and

(46:29):
in its actual performance elements.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
I totally agree with what you're saying. The while the
characterization of Godzilla did change a lot over time, so
certainly they found characteristics of Godzilla much later on that
we're not there in the first movie. You can see
how the bipedal Godzilla turns into more of this protector
sort of human, you know, personality possessing character later on.

(46:56):
It's hard to imagine that with the Ritosaurus in this movie.
It's hard to imagine this thing ever becoming like having
a human intellect in the way that later Godzilla seems too.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, But already the monster looks great here,
and in general, I just want to say that this
whole opening sequence in this snowy wasteland with a monster
stalking and you know, with me behind a fair amount
of like blizzardy weather, just looks really good. And we
get already getting a nice sense of tension and horror here.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Right, So the scientist Richie sees this beast and then
screams and falls backwards into a crevasse.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yeah, right on his butt too. Got some mild laughter
from the audience, but also like it's it was an
impressive stunt, so it's like that looks like it hurt.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Yeah. So eventually the other scientist, Tom Nesbit, comes to
the rescue and he finds his colleague granting deliriously about
a prehistoric monster. And then after climbing back out of
the crevass, Nesbit sees it too. He turns and he
sees the creature and the beast snarls as it kind
of whips over the lip of a nearby cliff, and

(48:01):
with its body it causes an avalanche that buries the
other scientist, Professor Ritchie in Ice. Then sometime later we
see Professor Nesbitt brought back to the base by a
rescue team, and the doctors conclude that he has to
be rushed back to a hospital in the States immediately,
So he's going to be taken back to New York eventually.

(48:22):
And then while they're waiting on a plane to take
him away, Nesbit mutters in his sleep about a monster.
I do think it's funny that. I don't know what
was New York the nearest hospital to where they I'm
surprised they didn't take him to like a base hospital,
so I don't know.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
It seems like there would have been another option. But no,
we can take the plot right to New York.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Yeah, okay, So we're in New York City now. At
the hospital, Nesbitt seems to be making a good physical recovery. Unfortunately,
he is suffering from what the staff believed to be
traumatic hallucinations, and they bring in a psychiatrist named doctor
Ingersoll to talk some sense into this raving madman. So
Ingersoll goes on a monologue about how like he sits

(49:04):
down next to Nesbit's hospital bed and he's like, let
me tell you about some other monsters people have claimed
to exist. There is the famous monster of Scotland, you know,
the lake Monster of Scotland, the loch Lomund Monster.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
Oh yeah, yeah, I ever heard of that one generic brand?
Is that? Really?

Speaker 2 (49:24):
I don't know. I tried to look it up, and
I was confused about whether the only references I was
seeing were from this movie or whether it's independently a thing.
I didn't have time to investigate. Fully, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
You know, it's been a long time since I've read
into many monsters of the Loch. But I mean, I
do know that there are various lake moderate monster traditions
in the British Isles, so I would not be shocked
if this were referring to some legitimate tradition or an
alternate name.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Could be a thing, but I'd never heard of it.
The other thing he brings up are those green serpents
off the coast of Ireland, and I was like, I
don't know what that is, but that makes me think.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Of gorg Oh yeah, yeah, foreshadowing.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
So Colonel Jack Evans, remember the colonel. He shows up
at the hospital to convince his friend that there was
no monster. He says, he went out and he tried
to reconstruct the whole scene and there was no trace
of an animal like Nesbit described. But Nesbit is he's adamant.
He says, I was not hallucinating. The monster was there.
And you know what, there was a blizzard, so the
snow covered up the tracks and everything. That's why you're

(50:24):
not finding the evidence. Did you notice this set? I
was like, what is with the walls and the door,
like there's crown molding in here. It just didn't look
like a hospital room. It looked like somebody's house.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
Yeah, yeah, I did look ornate.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
Anyway, we eventually start getting attack scenes where the creature
has made it out into the world and is attacking boats.
I think there is a scene very much like what's
coming up, a scene like this in the original Godzilla.
So it's a dark night, there's moonlight sparkling on the seawater.
You've got a grizzled boat captain and his rum soaked

(51:00):
first mate, and they're just staring down the dark waves.
And then suddenly the beast attacks the boat, kind of
fumes up out of the water, filled with hate, has
this horrible cruel look in its eye, and it smashes
the boat to pieces. And then meanwhile we cut back
to the hospital. Nesbit is getting his newspaper in the hospital.

(51:22):
He asks the nurse, you know what's in the paper today,
and the nurse says, death in politics. The comics page
is the only thing that makes sense anymore in this
crazy world.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Give me that, Marmaduke. Yeah, the only thing that's going
to make me feel better.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
The only way to become saying once again is Marmaduke
gasoline ally, but he does not take her instruction. He
starts looking at the news part and what do you know,
there's a headline that says sea serpent reported off grand Banks. Well,
Nesbit is convinced. Now he's like, see, I told you
there is a sea serpent. That's the dinosaur I saw.

(51:57):
So Nesbit goes to the nearby Natural History Museum to
meet a new character. This is Professor Thurgood Elson, a
palaeontologist played by Cecil Kellaway. Nesbit wants Elson to authorize
an investigation to see if the creature awakened by the
atomic test in the North was a one hundred million
year old dinosaur. Elson quite reasonably has some objections to this.

(52:22):
He says, reports of sea monsters are very common, and
we don't believe all of them. Why do we have
reason to think that this one is the one that's true?
He says, dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years.
It is not possible for them to still be alive.
And Nesbit says, but what if one was frozen in

(52:43):
ice the whole time? Don't bears hibernate over winter in
a state of suspended animation. Elson says, yes, they do
for one winter on food they have stored as body
fat from the previous summer. A hibernation of one hundred
million years would take quite an appetite.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
It really sound like the screenwriters are talking themselves out
of the whole premise here.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Yeah. Yeah, like the professor, the skeptical professors make a
lot of sense. But then from across the room, we
suddenly cut to a different character. There's a woman who's
been standing against the wall in this imposing looking kind
of trench coat with this like cape around it, and
she butts in. She says, Professor Elson, isn't it true

(53:23):
that ten thousand year old mammoths have been found perfectly
preserved in ice, with fur still intact and meat still edible?
So we're gonna learn this is Elson's assistant, Lee Hunter's
she's also a paleontologist, and Elson says yes, But nevertheless,
I do not buy nesbit story. Dinosaurs don't freeze for

(53:46):
millions of years and then come back to life.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
It's been a while since I've researched mammoth that remains
found in the purple frost and so forth, But I
forget details about the meat being edible, But did they
eat the meat?

Speaker 2 (54:00):
I mean, technically, is anything edible if somebody will eat it?

Speaker 1 (54:04):
And yeah, I guess a note to self to do
more research on mammoth jerkey.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
I feel like this has come up at some point.
Didn't we talk about a famous dinner at you like
the Explorers Club in New York where they where they
ate frozen mammoth remains or so that's.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Ringing a bell. That's ringing a bell. Okay, yeah, I
think you may be right.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
So Nesbit leaves, and then Lee Hunter here tells Elson
when he first came to this country, I attended his
lectures on the curative properties of the radioactive isotope. He's
a brilliant man. Isn't his story in any way feasible?
So she's trying to find a way to get there,
but Elson says, nope, sorry. I like him, I want
to help him, but I just don't believe it. And

(54:54):
then also throughout the scene, they're talking about how Elson
is about to take his first vacation ever. I think
he's never been on vacation before. He's always been down
in his work, but now he's about to go to
somewhere on holiday.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Yeah, those vacation days rolled over. So he's about to Yeah,
he's about to go to I don't know, oh man,
Panama City for twelve months, I don't know, three years
of vacation.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
So back at the hospital, Nesbit is licking his wounds.
And there's a funny thing that We've got radio announcers
that say a lot of funny stuff in this movie.
Hear what the radio announcer says is this is your
hour of mirth and melody. They say music has charms
to soothe the savage beast. They ought to try it
on these sea monsters we keep hearing about. From Marquette, Canada.

(55:39):
Today comes word of a second ship that was destroyed
by a beast. According to a captain, George LeMay, he
really ought to stop smoking that stuff and try Virginia Golds,
the sponsor of today's probably you know, so, I wonder
what that's rephras is in nineteen fifty three and he's
talking about smoking that stuff. Was that common parlance then about?

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Oh? I don't know. Oh, you know, I will say
that one of the radio announcers in the film, uncredited
is MERV Griffin. But I don't know if this is
merv Griffin in this point at this point or not.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
Could be so. Lee Hunter, the paleontologist, comes to Nesbit's
office to follow up, and she talks about how she
is sympathetic to his story because she says, I have
a deep, abiding faith in the work of scientists, and
I was like, is this the work of scientists? It

(56:30):
sounds like a single scientist claiming he saw a monster?

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Is that what we don't say? Trust all scientists is not.
That's not how science works.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Right, to be clear, No trust in science. Yeah, it's
about the process, not so much about like anything a
scientist says is true.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
A scientist has a very strong opinion that he cannot
prove about something outside of his particular discipline in science. Yeah,
let's believe him.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Absolutely anyway, So Hunter and Nesbit decide to work together.
She has Nesbit tried to identify the animal he saw
from illustrations of dinosaurs, and I should note that all
of these would be artists interpretations based on fossil skeletons,
not like photos shots. Y. Yeah, but they're working over it.

(57:20):
And she she brings coffee and Hunter says, careful, I
make coffee strong enough to compete in the Olympics, and
they have a kind of flirty chat while they're doing
this work. So Hunter describes how she became Elson's assistant. Basically,
she she's like, I was his most annoying student. I
was always challenging him and arguing with him. But he

(57:41):
was a good teacher and he respected her grit. So
he's like, come on, you can be my assistant. And
so clearly they have a very positive working relationship. But
then they start but then Nesbit and a Hunter start
kind of flirting with each other. Nesbit says, between us,
we span the ages. You deal with the past and
I with the future. And then she says how uncomplicated

(58:05):
the past was, and he says, and how bright the
future can be.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
All right, Just so, yeah, the match made in heaven.
Atomic science and paleontology.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Okay, So they keep digging through all these sketches of
dinosaurs and then eventually they land on one. He pulls
one out and he's like, this is it. This is
the creature I saw. And I thought it's funny because
the one he picks out is like a way more
vivid illustration than all the others. It's like a water
color and all the others are sketches with pencil.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like the most impressive of the stills
from the art department here, like this one's in color.
Of course, this is it. The one I saw was
in color.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
So they identified the dinosaur as the Retosaurus or the Raidosaurus.
And to be clear, this is not a real dinosaur.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Correct and shockingly has not become a dinosaur. You'd think somebody,
I don't know, it's different in different scientific disciplines, but
nobody has been able to push through this is the
name of a newly discovered dinosaur either.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
So when they find this picture, Hunter is convinced and
Nesbit's like, I know what it is now, and they
get the idea, we could prove it if we could
get Captain George LeMay from this boat in Canada to like,
if we could cross reference it with him, and he
could say, also, that's the thing he saw. That would
prove it. I don't know if that would prove it,

(59:29):
but that's what they believe. So they call him on
the phone and U and Nesbit has to speak French
to this guy, so there's a lot of wei wei.
But then the captain doesn't want to hear about it.
So he hangs up, and then I was confused about this.
The telephone operator seems to know a lot about the
captain's the operators like he's a stubborn old man, especially

(59:50):
on the subject of sea serpents.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
Yeah, I mean, I guess this is how it used
to work. I mean, my understanding of old timey telephones
and tell phone operators is mostly based on what pops
up in old movies and TV shows. But I guess
it was like a local telephone operator who just knows everybody,
listens into all the calls.

Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
She's been on the line the whole time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Anyway, so after this, Nesbit flies up to Canada to
meet le May in person. You might try calling a
second time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
First, but he ain't answering.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Yeah, okay. He flies up, he can't find the captain,
I think he's left town, but instead finds the other
guy from the boat, the first mate. He is lying
in a hospital bed surrounded by French nuns, and Nesbit
goes up to him and he's like, look, buddy, I
promise you if you come to New York, there are
going to be a lot of people who believe your story.

(01:00:44):
So Nesbit brings the boat guy to New York to
meet Elson, and Elson is he has this talk with
Lee Hunter where he's like, well, I could lose my
job and my reputation for listening to this, but Lee,
I don't want to mess up budding romance, so I'm
gonna hear him out as a favor to you. And

(01:01:05):
then also he reads this historical anecdote about a professor
from the eighteenth century who was disciplined by the Royal
Society because he claimed he saw leprechauns uprooting of venerated
campus oak. So Nesbit arrives with his witness and Nesbit
when he gets there, he's already gloating about how you know,
they tried to put Galileo in jail for saying the

(01:01:28):
Earth was round, but it turns out he was right,
and I'm sorry to be pedantic. That is not what
Galileo got in trouble, for everybody knew the Earth was round.
It was about whether the Earth goes around the Sun anyway.
So this is also one of the cases where there's
more like skeptic versus believer dialogue here, And it's one

(01:01:50):
of those times in movies where the skeptic that we're
supposed to be rooting against makes good points, and the
hero that whose side were supposed to be on keeps
saying things that don't make sense or are logical fallacies.
So they have this exchange where Nesbit's like, if a
particle of the sun broke off and flew into space,

(01:02:10):
I wouldn't consider the man who brought that news to
be insane. As a scientist, I would examine every facet
of it. Uh, And then Elson makes the reasonable points like, yeah,
but that would we would know. We would know about
that because people would see it, like you would have
direct evidence of it. And then Nesbit says if it
broke off, it would make no difference if one saw it,

(01:02:34):
or if no one at all saw it, it would
still be the same as the monster. It still is.
And I was just thinking, wait, I mean, obviously things
are whether somebody sees them or not. But the question
is does Elson have any evidence, like did yeah, other
than the sky just saying.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
So yeah, so far he has nothing concrete to present here, Right,
he saw it. We have another guy who may have
seen it, and that said no footprints, no, no no
body nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Nesbit's just within like not understanding the nature of the critique.
But anyway, okay, things are about to change because this
guy from Canada comes into the room, the guy from
the boat. He is shown the drawings of the dinosaurs
and he picks out the same drawing that Nesbit did.
Elson is immediately a convert. He's like, oh, okay, let's

(01:03:27):
call the president. I think there's a dinosaur. And so
they put Elson on the phone with Colonel Evans and
he says, this is a quote. I'm convinced that this
creature exists, and I'm willing to stake my reputation on
the one eighty is hilarious.

Speaker 1 (01:03:42):
Yeah, yeah, two people pick the same photo. What are
the chances? What are the same chances? The same picture
other not photo.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
Now, after this we get to a great scene, which
is the attack on the lighthouse. Yes we mentioned this earlier,
but whatever you're calling it. The dinosaur, the monster, the lizard,
the retosaurus. It crawls up up on this rocky shore
in Maine and it's up there on the boulders and
we see the lighthouse in silhouette. They've got like a
miniature model of it against the you know, the the

(01:04:09):
black sky in the background with the light on up top,
and then we cut inside and we have the two
lighthouse keepers who are talking about their favorite body songs.
One guy's like, I like songs about gin and women
and another ones like, oh, I like the you know,
the sad sad tales. Uh. And you know they're having
a back and forth, and then suddenly this monster is outside,

(01:04:31):
like raw and it looks in through the window. So
there's like a shot where you see it's face through
the glass and there's rain falling outside, and it's very
spooky because the monster in this shot looks like a
snake with fangs. Did you notice that?

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
Yeah? Yeah. And indeed, these scenes I think are this
scene and the Arctic scene are both key because again,
the most iconic sequences from this film are rampaging and
broad daylight in New York, and those are impressive sequences,
but I think we get a bit more of a
horror atmosphere in these two earlier sequences.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
I love the way it looks later when you can
get a good look at it, but I agree in
the earlier scenes it's much creepier. Yeah, So we get
some different things going on. In the meantime, there is
one scene where somebody goes to I think it's the Kernel,
following up on Elson vouching for the idea of the dinosaur,
and he goes to a military buddy of his and

(01:05:26):
he's like, look, I want you to come and report
back to me if there are any freak happenings. And
the guy's like, okay, I'll let you know about free
happenings and let.

Speaker 1 (01:05:34):
Me know about the freak happenings. Daddy O. I think
it's an invite to a drum circle. Later and it's
like no, no, no, I n monster.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
Attacks and then Nesbit and Hunter also they go to
the ballet they get box seats.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Yeah, we're in kind of a padding zone.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
In the picture at this point, but much like Godzilla,
we see characters eventually figuring out they're kind of mapping
contact points along along the sea coast and they notice
that the monster is like it's here, and it's here,
and it's here, and it's plotting a course for the metropolis.
So they start talking about what can be done about

(01:06:12):
this creature. Elson, the paleontologist, does not want the creature killed.
He wants to study it to understand it, and he
says I know what we'll do. I'm going to survey
the undersea canyons where we think the monster is traveling.
I'm going to do that in person in a diving
bell to see it for myself. And if I see it,
then I can think up a means of capture safely

(01:06:34):
capturing it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
Now this leads to the diving bell slash Bathisphere scene,
which is one of my favorite parts of the movie.
I thought this whole sequence is great.

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
Yeah, yeah, this is really tremendous, builds up some wonderful tension.
You don't want anything bad to happen to the professor,
even though certainly by modern standards, you know it's going
to happen. And this also brings back memories from our
twenty nineteen episodes about the Bathisphere, about the actual underwater
exploration device, vehicle, enclosure, whatever you want to call it.

(01:07:08):
So if you're interested in this sort of thing, go
look those episodes up in the backlog.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
The short pitch on the Bathisphere, which is kind of
horrifying if you think about it, is that it was
a device used to observe deep underwater. It was not
a powered submarine, it had no propulsion of its own.
It was basically just an enclosed ball, metal ball that
was dangled off of a boat, way way down deep

(01:07:34):
into the water. So if that line falls, you're just
going down.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
And he claimed to see in some cases things that
have never been fully verified. So it's a really interesting story.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
Yeah, so Bathisphere very interesting. But I love the part
in the movie here where there's this almost ceremonial ceiling
of the old scientist inside the bell, and Elson is
just giddy. He's not afraid all really, he's so excited
about what he's going to get to see down there.

Speaker 1 (01:08:03):
To give him his coffee, right, he gets a kiss, yeah,
and then seal him in. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
They're trying to Yeah, they're trying to give him drama.
Mean He's like, I don't need that. I don't need
my drama. Mean, I'm just I'm high on life, you know,
I'm ready. But also I love here the underwater landscape
they achieve with these models and sets. You've got these tall,
thin spires of undersea rock that look like giant tree trunks,

(01:08:30):
and then this tiny diving bell hanging in the black.
And as they're descending, the professor says, I feel like
I'm leaving a world of untold Tomorrow's for a world
of countless yesterdays.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
The screenwriters keep touching on this idea, like of the
past meeting tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
Yeah, there's something going on there. I don't know exactly
what it is, maybe maybe suggesting something about barbarity, or
I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into that.
They've got some kind of past future thing.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
It might be there. I think it might might legitimately
be there. So yeah, I think it's a valid reading.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
But then when they get down to the bottom, so
he's looking out the window and he sees an octopus,
and then he sees a shark, and then he says, oh,
there appears to be a slight difference of opinion between
two of the local inhabitants, and the shark and the
octopus start fighting each other. But then oh, a third

(01:09:25):
animal makes an appearance, and it is our ritosaurus. It
is the monster, and Elson is astonished. He's got this
little wired telephone that he uses to call the ship above.
He demands that they put Hunter on the line. He's like,
get these military officers off the line. I need to
talk to my assistant. So she gets on the line

(01:09:45):
and he starts making like anatomical observations. He's like, the
upper clavicle is cantileveric, and then he's like making these
kind of observations. But then suddenly the line goes dead
and we don't see what happened below. He's just looking
and he's talking and the line goes dead. What happened?
Obviously it did not end well, and we are I think,

(01:10:07):
just left to assume that the monster has eaten the
diving bell. Yeah, and so here we get more monologues
like after the fact reflecting from Hunter, where she's very sad.
You know, Elson was like a father to her. She
reiterates again that you know, he was about to take
his first vacation ever, and we see Nesbit comforting her

(01:10:29):
while she mourns. But then there's not much time left
for morning because about now we're gonna have the New
York attack. So during this sequence, the dinosaur rises up
out of a harbor around Manhattan, so comes up on
the docks, first seen by doc workers who run away,

(01:10:49):
and then everybody starts noticing. They run screaming as the
dinosaur comes up onto the shore and then onto the
streets between the buildings and is making his way down
the avenue. There's one thing that's almost funny, where there's
this policeman grimly squaring off against the dinosaur, drawing his
weapon and just standing there scowling. He takes a while

(01:11:11):
to finally shoot, but then he does start shooting at it.
It doesn't work. The dinosaur eats him and we see
his legs wiggling outside of the dinosaur's mouth. We see
the creature crushing cars with its feet with this brigade
of cops with shotguns come out of the precinct and
start blasting it to drive it back. This whole sequence

(01:11:31):
is pretty awesome, Rob, I don't know what else you
want to highlight from here.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Ah, No, it is just an awesome sequence. It's very iconic.
I think if people have seen any clips from the
film or any stills, they've probably seen this sequence. And
it just it does. It looks amazing. It creates a
very believable sense of early fifties New York being attacked
by a giant monster. And again like broad broad daylight, yes,

(01:11:55):
but still great use of shadows, just terrific.

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
Stuff, chases people into the subway. Yeah, and then we
get another radio report, so the radio announcer says New
York is like a city besieged. A state of emergency
has been declared and the entire police force put on

(01:12:21):
twenty four hour duty. Civilian defense is fully mobilized, and
shelters have been opened in an effort to stop the
mounting hysteria. All traffic has been halted and Times Square,
the heart of New York, has stopped beating.

Speaker 1 (01:12:33):
Several elmos have been eaten.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
Yeah, Superman, where is he now? The National Guard has
been called out, fully armed to repel the invader. This
is full scale war against a terrible enemy such as
modern man has never before faced. Ordinary bullets have no effect,
and a method of destroying the awesome creature has not
yet been formulated. But the battlefield has been cleared. Harald Square,

(01:12:59):
thirty four Street, Broadway, every section of the city is guarded.
No one knows where the monster will strike next. It
was last seen on Wall Street, close to where it
came ashore, but Lower Manhattan has become no man's land,
where the beast at present lies hidden. The National Guard
is barricading the entire area in an effort to confine
the death and destruction of what is already the worst

(01:13:22):
disaster in New York's history.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
Wow, so even worse than the King Kong thing decades earlier,
I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
So. Yeah, And we do see some of the aftermath,
like we see hospitals afterwards, where the doctors are going
through checking on people, and it really emphasizes the monster
attack as a disaster with aftermath, not just like a
conflict between the monster and the military.

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
Yeah. Yeah, it's not just people that have you know,
clearly there's a lot of chaos and destruction, but also
this sense that it's like making people sick. Yeah, you know,
it's it has these different spiraling consequences.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
So I did like that it was I think rather nuanced.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
Yeah, people with fevers and stuff afterwards. So after this,
you get more scenes of the armed forces versus the Retosaurus.
They're coming out with bazukas. They've got electrified wire fence
put up, and they can sort of drive the monster
back but apparently not kill it. It seems somehow invincible.
And then they there's a strange observation like soldiers who

(01:14:24):
go hunting after the dinosaur after they blast it with
some weapons, start becoming weak and feverish, and they're collapsing
in the street. Turns out, in addition to everything else,
the animal's blood carries a horrible virus that can infect
and kill humans, and contact with this blood can be fatal.

(01:14:45):
So this leads them to realize, Okay, we thought we
could stop the creature by bombing it, but we can't
bomb it because that will spread particles of this virus
into the air, which will spread and kill more people.
So how can we feed it without spilling its blood?
Very interesting problem that will be replicated in other stories,

(01:15:06):
but mainly the ones I'm thinking of come later. Like
I'm thinking of Alien. In the original Alien, this is
a big part of the plot a different reason there.
In Alien, the crew of the Nostromo figure out that
the xenomorph has acidic blood that could eat through the
hull of the spacecraft and kill everybody if they you know,
blow it up or whatever. So they're like, how are

(01:15:27):
we going to deal with it without spilling this acidic
blood and you know, maybe getting vented into space because
it ate through the hull. And different thing going on here,
but it results in the same thing is like, we've
got to find a way to fight the creature without
getting its gore out.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
So anyway, Nesbit comes in to save the day because
he's like, I've got it, you know, Colonel Jack. There's
one way to beat him my personal specialization, which is
radioactive isotopes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:56):
Yes, yes, And so in this they will forge the
special weapon that can be used against the beast. In
this we really get into this crazy ending for the picture,
and I think it really the ending really puts the
film over the top. And again it's not even that
crazy of a formula. We have a secret weapon to
use against a giant monster, we have knowledge of a
singular weak spot to aim at, and we need a

(01:16:17):
skilled marksman hero to deploy the weapon. Again, pretty much
the exact same formula for killing the Dragon's smog and
the Hobbit, and just a common monster slaying formula throughout
mythic and ancient literature. We see it, for example, in
the North of volsunga Saga, the ancient Mesopotamian and Numa
a Leish, the Romagnina the as well as the Argonautica

(01:16:39):
and concerning respectively the monsters Fafnir, tiamat, Ravana, Talaus, and
again there are many others from many other different cultures
and traditions. It's a basic formula, and in this the
Beast from twenty thousand fathoms is again like nicely positioned
within the canon of deep human history and monster slang.

(01:17:02):
Truly one of our oldest myths, but the movie puts
things over the top in a most delightful manner. So
the Beast here is rampage. They've kind of you again.
These wars between local police and military and the National
Guard against the Beasts have been raging all over the city,
across all the burroughs, and now almost like the I guess,

(01:17:23):
like the end of the Warriors, the action has been
pushed to Coney Island and the Beast is rampaging through
the wooden roller coaster, the Coney Island Cyclone built nineteen
twenty seven, so it's just shy of one hundred years old,
still active. You can still ride this thing. I never have.
I've only done the Wonder Wheel. But yeah, it's rampaging,

(01:17:45):
breaking up the Coney Island Cyclone, and it becomes clear
that the only way that our marksmen, Corporal Stone, this
is Lee van Cleef, who, like you know, they proudly
basically they have the weapon. It's like an isotope weapon
that it's on the front of a rifle something radioactive.

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):
They're carrying it around in this giant lead.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
Case like Holy hand grenaders.

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
So they have to like lift it out of its
containment because obviously I guess it's ionizing everything around it.
They put it on the end of a rifle like
a harpoon, and then Lee van Cleef has to get
up on the on the roller coaster to shoot it
at the animal's weak spot.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Yeah. I have questions about the ballistics of that, but
fair enough, we have our special weapon. And they're like,
who's who's the best marksman. You've got military dudes, and
they're like, oh, it's stone. And then you know, Lee
van Cleef comes out and he's like, well, you need
me to do it. Shoot a giant monster. You got it.
But it becomes clear that they don't have the proper
vantage point. The only way they can get the proper
vantage point to make the shot and hit that one

(01:18:44):
weak spot on the creature is to ride the half
destroyed roller coaster up to the very crest. And that's
what our protagonist and our monster slayer, Le Van Cleef,
are gonna do. They put on these really kind of
creepy radio suits. Like you said, they have the box
with the isotope weapon in it, and they're like, Okay,

(01:19:06):
fire up this half destroyed roller coaster. We're going to
go up there and do it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
Brilliant. Yeah, And then also we get to see like
they go up to the top of the crest and
the coaster and then the cars go on without them,
so like they go sliding down and they watch them
crash and explode, and the Stone gets the shot off,
it goes into the wound in the monster's neck. The
isotope gets in there, sickens the monster, and then we

(01:19:31):
see it kind of pacing around, clearly suffering. There's something
there's a little bit of pathos there. You almost feel
sad for the monster a little bit, and then kind
of it becomes weak and then it falls down and dies.
The whole roller coaster is on fire, by the way,
fire on the coaster. Nesbit and Corporal Stone get back.

(01:19:54):
Nesbit hugs with Lee Hunter and the monsters dead and
that's the end, very abrupt ending, like a lot of
these fifties monster movies.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
Yeah, yeah, a lot of them do follow this formula.
What the monster has been killed, the authorities killed the monster.
At the end, everybody can home, can go home happy
and safe.

Speaker 2 (01:20:11):
Yeah, not even not even he tampered in God's domain.
Not even a single line of comment. It's just monsters dead.
The whole thing's over.

Speaker 1 (01:20:20):
Yeah, but what an ending. Yeah, I was not prepared.
I was barely prepared for le Van Kleef to show
up and just do all the hero work and then
the roller coaster amazing, So just maximum points for that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:34):
Yeah. So I think really well put together ending. The
climax really works, I would say, especially because of some weird, unusual,
very inspired choices of visual texture that go in there,
primarily setting it at the roller coaster and the use
of those super creepy looking radiation suits the costumes. Really

(01:20:58):
they put you in a different mood for the end here,
something like our heroes have become kind of monstrous themselves,
and they don't look they don't look nice in those
radiations ses. It's very creepy look and so something I
don't know. It really works right at the end, especially.

Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
And I also liked that they did have to go
the extra mile and do the extra daring deed to
pull off the shot because a lot of these movies
end with more of an abrupt Oh, authorities are here,
shoot the monster and it's done, whereas like true heroics
and a little extra daring did have to go into
the finish here and it makes it just makes it.
It makes it far more dramatically satisfying.

Speaker 2 (01:21:38):
Totally.

Speaker 1 (01:21:39):
Yeah, so enjoyed it. I like the pick rub Oh yeah, thanks, Yeah.
I had a lot of fun with this one, and again,
great to see it on the big screen. I encourage
everyone out there, if you get a chance to see
any giant monster movie on the big screen, do it,
because the monsters are bigger that way. That's what the
format exists for.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
If only they'd had to IMAX back then.

Speaker 1 (01:22:00):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so that said the Beast from twenty
thousand fathoms, though I was never really clear of the
Beast was truly from twenty thousand fathoms or if it
just visited twenty thousand fathoms at times.

Speaker 2 (01:22:12):
So it's from the it was in the ice right, yeah,
where the ice is on the top of the ocean,
not at the bottom.

Speaker 1 (01:22:18):
But it's built from twenty thousand fathoms. It's like, I
don't know, it's maybe this a show business speak.

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):
I guess maybe it went twenty thousand Fathoms after it
came out of the ice, but before it went to
New York City, because that's where the professor goes down
to see it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
I remember, yeah, But once it gets to New York City,
it can immediately say it's from New York City. I
think those are the rules. It is officially in New Yorker.
All right, we're gonna go and close it out there.
But I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this one.
If you have experience with the Beast from twenty Thousand
Fathoms or other Ray Harry Howsen films that you are
particularly fond of, and you'd like for us to cover

(01:22:52):
in the future, right in, we would love to hear
from you. Just a reminder that Steft to Bow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with corpisodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
here on Weird House Cinema. You can find us on
various social media formats ays stuff to Blow your Mind,
but on Letterboxed we exist there just as Weird House Cinema.

(01:23:14):
Look us up our name there is Weird House, and
you can find a list of all the movies we've
covered over the years and sometimes if peek ahead at
what comes next.

Speaker 2 (01:23:21):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with 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

(01:23:43):
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