5/23/2007
Yesterday’s blog heralded the supposed beginning of the seventeen year cicada invasion- feel free to send me updates on cicada sightings and numbers at svengoolie@wciu.com - which reminded me of some of the strange monster bug movies I’ve shown.
The true classic that we were lucky enough to have for about a year recently was “the Beginning of the End!” It naturally has a special place in all our hearts because it takes place here in Illinois, with the main action downtown and along the Lake Michigan shoreline. This 1957 film by Bert Gordon, a master at making “big thing” movies, features Peter Graves as a scientist/horticulturalist who’s working on growing giant radioactive vegetables. Seems that his colleagues were doing the same, raising radio-active wheat- and , wouldn’t you know it- lax Fifties security let them durn Commies into the silo. No, wait- somehow locusts got in, ate the wheat, and hulked out into HUGE grasshoppers who destroyed whole towns in southern Illinois! Actual towns like Ludlow and Paxton are mentioned, although there are times when we see mountains, which one would be hard pressed to locate in our fair state.
Not content to munch on grain, crabgrass, and the marigold (Illinois’ state flower)-the giant locusts also start to chow down on enlisted men, pedestrians, and anyone else they happen upon. They eventually make their way north and east to the heart of Chicago, and are seen creeping up the Wrigley (or, as I put it in the show, “Wriggly”) Building-or, actually, a postcard of it, since the grasshoppers have an annoying habit of crawling onto what should be sky! You get to see a lot of 50s Chicago, and landmarks and signs that I recall from my boyhood visits to the downtown area- and it’s kind of strange to see the downtown area with huge gaps where buildings would eventually be! The giant locusts are eventually lured to their drowning doom, into Lake Michigan by a loudspeaker (not Mayor Daley) that is broadcasting a certain frequency that the ‘hoppers respond to…wait- Why can’t we do that TODAY with the cicadas?! We’ll lure them into Lake Michigan and be rid of them for beyond seventeen years (but it will kind of mess up the beaches- millions of dead bloated cicadas on the shoreline, just like the alewives…the story has it that, when they started shooting the movie, they had a little over two hundred grasshoppers- but- the ‘hopper wranglers didn’t do their homework, and, with nothing else to eat, the little buggers started to eat each other (that’s why, when you get crickets at a pet store to feed to a pet frog or reptile, they’ll sometimes put a piece of egg carton in to let them hide, so they don’t start devouring each other) and, by the end of the film, they had only about a dozen left!
Uh…you know- I got so into writing about this movie, I didn’t get to any other monster bug flicks! Let’s get to those tomorrow…
The true classic that we were lucky enough to have for about a year recently was “the Beginning of the End!” It naturally has a special place in all our hearts because it takes place here in Illinois, with the main action downtown and along the Lake Michigan shoreline. This 1957 film by Bert Gordon, a master at making “big thing” movies, features Peter Graves as a scientist/horticulturalist who’s working on growing giant radioactive vegetables. Seems that his colleagues were doing the same, raising radio-active wheat- and , wouldn’t you know it- lax Fifties security let them durn Commies into the silo. No, wait- somehow locusts got in, ate the wheat, and hulked out into HUGE grasshoppers who destroyed whole towns in southern Illinois! Actual towns like Ludlow and Paxton are mentioned, although there are times when we see mountains, which one would be hard pressed to locate in our fair state.
Not content to munch on grain, crabgrass, and the marigold (Illinois’ state flower)-the giant locusts also start to chow down on enlisted men, pedestrians, and anyone else they happen upon. They eventually make their way north and east to the heart of Chicago, and are seen creeping up the Wrigley (or, as I put it in the show, “Wriggly”) Building-or, actually, a postcard of it, since the grasshoppers have an annoying habit of crawling onto what should be sky! You get to see a lot of 50s Chicago, and landmarks and signs that I recall from my boyhood visits to the downtown area- and it’s kind of strange to see the downtown area with huge gaps where buildings would eventually be! The giant locusts are eventually lured to their drowning doom, into Lake Michigan by a loudspeaker (not Mayor Daley) that is broadcasting a certain frequency that the ‘hoppers respond to…wait- Why can’t we do that TODAY with the cicadas?! We’ll lure them into Lake Michigan and be rid of them for beyond seventeen years (but it will kind of mess up the beaches- millions of dead bloated cicadas on the shoreline, just like the alewives…the story has it that, when they started shooting the movie, they had a little over two hundred grasshoppers- but- the ‘hopper wranglers didn’t do their homework, and, with nothing else to eat, the little buggers started to eat each other (that’s why, when you get crickets at a pet store to feed to a pet frog or reptile, they’ll sometimes put a piece of egg carton in to let them hide, so they don’t start devouring each other) and, by the end of the film, they had only about a dozen left!
Uh…you know- I got so into writing about this movie, I didn’t get to any other monster bug flicks! Let’s get to those tomorrow…
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