“The Bellero Shield” (S1E20)

This is an episode whose impact on the wider culture may be surprisingly large: for several decades, it has been suspected that the alien seen here unconsciously “inspired” the description of the aliens provided by Barney Hill during a hypnosis session meant to recover his memories of his and his wife Betty’s UFO abduction in 1961. Betty and Barney Hill’s story is the first example of a modern alien abduction, and the aliens in Barney’s version of the story (Betty’s earlier description of the aliens was fairly different) was the first time the now-standard “greys”, with their bulbous heads and big eyes, were illustrated—and twelve days before his recollection, on February 10^th, 1964, there was this episode, which featured a bulbous-headed alien with strange eyes. It’s more or less impossible to know how true the connection is all these decades later, but it’s also not the only example of a mysterious “real life” phenomenon being secretly inspired by pop culture, as similar connections can be drawn between the original King Kong and the first Loch Ness Monster sightings—and these things illustrate how far certain ideas in culture can diffuse over time.

But, just speaking of it as an episode of The Outer Limits, this is a stylistically ambitious affair, with Joseph Stefano (who is credited with teleplay, while the story is credited to him and Lou Morheim) taking what could be a standard Sci-Fi plot and playing it as Shakespearean tragedy—almost literally, as the inspiration this episode takes from Macbeth is clear as day, sometimes to slightly ridiculous degrees. The dialogue becomes much more poetic, flowery monologues delivered with unwinking panache by an extremely qualified cast—you get the impression that everyone involved in this production knew that this one should be treated just a little bit differently. With all that, though, it still feels like its playing in The Outer Limits‘ own sense of morality, making it far better than just a condensed Macbeth with an alien inserted into it.

Warning From Space (1956)

With Daiei, I always seem to be discovering more pre-Gamera contributions to the tokusatsu genre—they had been testing out monster effects for a quite a while before unleashing their own major series (like Daimajin and Yokai Monsters.) Now I think I’ve found their earliest foray, earlier than even The Whale God—originally released in 1956, Warning From Space (Japanese title Spacemen Appear in Tokyo) premiered barely a year after Godzilla, and aside from capitalizing on the new trend of people in monster costumes, it also feels very much part of the general trends of American Science Fiction films in the mid-fifties, which is to say that it has almost exactly the same plot as several of them. But if some of the parts aren’t entirely original, this ramshackle little film’s general aura is much odder and more interesting—and its unassuming weirdness apparently had a surprising impact, as one biography named it directly as one of the films that inspired Stanley Kubrick to eventually try his hand at Sci-Fi. Who knows how true that really is, but who wouldn’t want to imagine a master filmmaker sitting around studying this tale of rogue planets and dancing starfish?

A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.

While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.