MovieChat Forums > Village of the Giants (1965) Discussion > My Unofficial Village of the Giants Page

My Unofficial Village of the Giants Page


http://www.angelfire.com/weird2/villageoftheg

Hope you enjoy: more useless knowledge about this B movie than you could ever hope to know.

Don't point that gun at him-he's an unpaid intern.

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Very cool! I just bought this on DVD! Campy movie, but worth the $9!

Have a favorite part?

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Well, thr growth sequence was one of the shots that got me interested in this film.

A-ha-ha-ha, you're really weird!-Willy Wonka

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[deleted]

Yeah, my favorite story is that my page was created in a fit of drunkeness (This information had been festering in my head over the past 8 years, and I guess I had to get it all out). The film is like a rubber band, it pulls me in for periods of time, and then lets me go before pulling me back in.

The MYstery Science Theater 3000 guys made this film tolerable to me, their riffing is the safety net to soften the blow of this film.

I've made requests to Bert I Gordon, Joy Harmon and Johnny Crawford for possible interviews, but they have not responded. Someone suggested I try to contact Beau. I almost had an interview with one of the actresses a month ago.

A-ha-ha-ha, you're really weird!-Willy Wonka

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Ciao,

i put your website link on my page, in a column dedicated to movie sites, officials as well as unofficial, nice page by the way full of interesting informations so thanx a lot. I like that era of movies mostly related to sci-fi stories. This one in particular take freely inspiration from the novel "food of the Gods" by H.G.Wells building a teen movie without too much pretending. Funny anyway to watch. I got my dvd copy directly from area 1 (US) cos here in Europe there is no local version.

by the way here's the site http://web.i2000net.it/llucente/cinema/index.html
u need to click on link on the left frame, it's far from be completed but i add new links day by day.

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uruseiranma,

That is a truly awesome website.


http://www.bumscorner.com

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Thanx :) still updating as time alllows me

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Excellent site... wow. You should be given an Giant honorary degree in Teenager-ology.

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Cool website. You put a lot of work and research into that. I can see you really love the women in it since their bios are very long and detailed. LOL.

I enjoyed purusing your site and reading all the tidbits. YOu said so many of the things that I noticed about the movie.

One thing I also wondered is why does growing into a giant make people have to move in slow motion. And it made them especially Beau look like they were even struggling to walk as if they were on dope, hence that crazy music sounding like drug music.

One funny bit that Ive not seen posted yet is when their clothes come off as they grew and the girls struggling to cover themselves. The character played by Mickey Rooney's son looks at them and laughs saying something about them caring about their modesty and yet when the camera pans out we see him sitting there with a guitar over his crotch. I wish they inserted a line by one of the girls there where she would say "well why do you have guitar over your crotch, did everything not grow proportionally"

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"One thing I also wondered is why does growing into a giant make people have to move in slow motion. And it made them especially Beau look like they were even struggling to walk as if they were on dope, hence that crazy music sounding like drug music."

It was even mentioned in the script that the giants would move slowly. I think that's a given for anything at a large size. If you look at large excavation machinery, it doesn't operate fast, it slowly achieve it's objectives given it's size and movements.

I think before VOTG, in Bert I Goron's 'Earth vs the Spider,' the Spider also plodded along, but in films like 'The Amazing Colossal Man,' Glen Manning moved slightly faster than the giant teens. And with 'The Beginning of the End,' the giant locusts/grasshoppers moved pretty quick. They seemed able to outrun a tank or a flame-throwing Army craft.


"One funny bit that Ive not seen posted yet is when their clothes come off as they grew and the girls struggling to cover themselves. The character played by Mickey Rooney's son looks at them and laughs saying something about them caring about their modesty and yet when the camera pans out we see him sitting there with a guitar over his crotch. I wish they inserted a line by one of the girls there where she would say "well why do you have guitar over your crotch, did everything not grow proportionally" "

In the show Mystery Science Theater 3000, they made a joke about that, after he says the modesty line, with the retorting: 'well, take alook and consider your OWN modesty.'

Though that guy is actually Harry, played by Kevin O'Neal (Tim Rooney played the character of Pete). Harry was the guy who almost every other time he was on screen, was laughing or found something funny. He also muttered the lines 'What's the matter hot shot, don't you like your new size?' and 'How long do you think it'd take me to bend that rifle round your neck, Sheriff?'


"HAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM!!!!"

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Harry's also the idiot who blurts out "That was Samsom and Delilah!" when Fred tells Merrie he'll bring her Mike's head on a silver platter. WRONG, Mister Wizard!

hkfilmnews.blogspot.com
porfle.blogspot.com
andersonvision.com

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It was even mentioned in the script that the giants would move slowly. I think that's a given for anything at a large size. If you look at large excavation machinery, it doesn't operate fast, it slowly achieve it's objectives given it's size and movements.


More of a matter of density than anything.
Any human that grows huge would have to be like a sponge (low density, lots of porous holes interconnecting by a squishy foam) or a tree (lots of thin flexible fibers connected by a strong sap glue) to not collapse by its own weight.

The Goo would not magically add any notable mass to the cat, the ducks, the dog, the spider, or the humans. So even a Goo-enlarged duck the size a car would weigh the exact same weight as a regular sized duck. A Goo-enlarged human would be spongy and probably die from insufficient blood supply before their size reached a 2% size increase. Since they are spongy, a knife wound would be fatal rather quickly (not from blood loss or the seam-ripping injury), but from too much oxygen introduced into the blood stream. Another obvious problem with being a big sponge-body is that you will exhale more water vapor (larger lung surface area) faster than you can intake it unless you insert a running garden hose up your anus. There would also be the obvious problem of that while the body grows to giant sizes, the total amount of usable calcium for the bones would not be increased. Unless The Goo can make pseudo-bones grow rapidly like Kudzu wood-type branchings, the flesh will grow, the bones will remain the same. Can you say, "really unpleasant pulsing lumps of agonized writhing flesh?" Now visualize it in your mind. Ech!

The Bohr effect is a microbiological phenomenon first described in 1904 by the Danish physiologist Christian Bohr (father of physicist Niels Bohr), stating that hemoglobin's oxygen binding affinity is inversely related both to acidity and to the concentration of carbon dioxide. That is to say, a decrease in blood pH or an increase in blood CO2 concentration will result in hemoglobin proteins releasing their loads of oxygen and a decrease in carbon dioxide or increase in pH will result in hemoglobin picking up more oxygen. Since carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid, an increase in CO2 results in a decrease in blood pH.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
Human blood exchanges carbon dioxide only if oxygen is present in the red blood cells. If the blood serum has too much oxygen, carbon dioxide will not be exchanged.

Myth 1. Deep breathing gives me more oxygen
http://buteykosleep.com/breathing-basics/myths-about-breathing/myth-1- deep-breathing-gives-me-more-oxygen.html

Bohr Effect: Healthy vs. Sick People
Bohr effect (medical or scientific explanation is below)

http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-bohr-effect.php

A knife works because it concentrates a larger surface area force into a hard thin point. A hammer works because it focuses the strength of the arm plus the kinetic velocity of swinging the hammer into a tiny hard spot the size of a coin.

Now if the humans were enlarged by a "growth ray", the duration of exposure effect and the resultant enlargement size would be critical to the final state of the enlarged object. If you "growth ray" enlarge an apple to 200% size in a few seconds, the apple (at room temperature) would lose proportionally lose 50% of it's internal temperature and potentially freeze solid. The temperature of the object depends on the density of the object at that room temperature, a 50% near-instant density decrease results in a 50% loss of temperature until the room warms the object up (thusly the reason why compressed steam can freeze upon expansion). The other problem is that unless any "Growth Ray" was applied to 100% of the body all at once, some areas would enlarge faster and usually in a mere soft circular (denser at the center & thinner at the edges) or a hemispherical pattern. Which is horrifying if you think of what this would do if aimed at the chest (causing it to grow 200 times faster than the head / arms / legs) and only causing growth at the front of the body while doing no change to the body areas behind the chest. Now visualize that. Ech! Needless to say, any enlargement process would have to be 100% instantly penetrative and dispersed enough to not cause any body area to grow faster than another.

The truly scary parts of science fiction growth-rays or shrink rays when you realize that they affect every object in the path of the beam. Oxygen molecules, nitrogen atoms, carbon dioxide, etc will all grow in accordance to the scaling factor of the energy beam. If density is increased, then imagine having nitrogen atoms the density of a ball bearing and size of a marble bouncing around the room at relative velocities. Pew pew pew! And if the growth or shrink rays are "enlarging atoms" as part of their process, then the enlarged/shrank object will no longer work properly in terms of chemical interactions any more (breathing being the most immediate concern) and thermal absorption / radiation. If you can still eat normally, the normal-sized atoms you consume will scale down or up when you are scaled down or up. A gut full of now 1/2 or 2x scaled atoms wrecking havoc in your guts. Or if you eat, then later having your scaled atoms "snap back like elastic" to normal scale, then imagine having all your food forcibly extruded by compression forces from your cells. Fun times, fun times. Like a fountain of goo squeezed from a tube of toothpaste.

Large-sized mechanical equipment has to move slowly for a number of logical reasons. One is hydraulic limitations (overheat the hydraulic oil and really undesirable things happen). The second is material density. Hardened steel can resist impacts and heavy weight, but becomes vulnerable to stress fracturing with twist forces. The bigger, thicker, denser metals cannot radiate absorbed heat as quickly as thinner less-dense metals, so if enough heat builds up rapidly, the metal can weaken by thermal forces alone.

Take metal bar for example, in the thinner human-sized diameters, you can whack that against a concrete wall top with minimal damage to the metal bar (depending on the cross-section diameter and metal type). The same metal scaled to the size of an earth moving crane, whacked against a proportionally-scaled concrete wall top, now has many times the weight being divided into moment-impact force sections by the impact stop. The earth moving crane has a much higher chance of splitting and bending by the impact versus the human-sized metal bar because there is so much more mass coming to a dead stop instantly with a very similar metal.

The only exceptions to this physics / biology rule are found in comicbooks. PYM PARTICLES add similar-type mass temporally to an enlarged object, thusly increasing density (but not changing the bone-length to muscle thickness / muscle length rule). The character of Colossal Boy in the Legion of Superheroes was empowered by "meteorite radiation" which I would assume gave him the ability to enlarge his cellular structure (creating adhesive force fields around those cells) and somehow increasing his mass safely. Needless to say, at this point, no serious scientific effort has been put in play to resolve the biological mass issues of enlarged / shrinking heroes & villains.

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Excellent work! This movie begs for a remake. If Quentin Tarantino used the music from VTOG, why not have him remake the film? ;-)

Ronny Howard (Genius) and Joe Turkel the Sheriff) later guested starred as giants themselves in separate episodes of "Land of the Giants".



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This was wonderful. Thank you! I especially enjoyed reading the interviews.

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Thanks for the kind words. The recent screening on Turner Classic Movies really brought out several people (we're also on Facebook as well, and got an extra 4-6 persons, bringing our 'Friend' total to 22).

I'm currently working on compiling the text for an interview I did with Mike Clifford. Mike also provided us with audio of the two songs he was credited with in the film, but until now, never heard fully through. You can find them on the 'Music' page under the 'Information Section.'


"Thanks, guys." "So long, partner."

- Toy Story 3 (9/10)

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There's a lot to enjoy in this movie, what with so many familiar faces and cool music...while MST3K makes it fun, I can watch it on its own (which I can't do with 'Santa Claus Conquers the Martians' - and I won't even think about 'Manos')

What intrigues me is that this genre hit its peak some seven years earlier - I can't think of another movie like this made in the mid-sixties. Earlier on it would have been atomic radiation at work, but here it was a compound that held optimistic prospects for the food industry (which wouldn't have been touted as a good thing in later years).

As for the 'bad kids', where they might have been beatniks or juvenile delinquents earlier, or hippies a couple of years later, here they're comfortably middle-class 'normals' - interesting choice. Were they making an Important Statement about the booming youth culture holding sway over society? Or just an excuse for slo-mo go-go dancing?

And what's up with the fat guy in the porkpie hat who's supposed to be one of the good kids, but looks like he's 40? Didn't he show up in Tommy Kirk's 'Catalina Caper' too? So many questions.

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The use of a food/compound to allow growth was very similar to what occurred in 'The Food of the Gods.' Two scientists created a compound that caused things to grow to large size. However, it wasn't instantaneous like in Bert's film. Regarding human growth in Well's FOTG, given to babies/very young children, it allowed them to grow into giants until they topped off in their late teens.

Maybe the good teens/bad teens scenario was meant to be some kind of showing that even suburban teens can't be all clean-cut. Tommy Kirk and his friends all seemed like they were heading down the bright path to a perfect little family with a mortgage on the side, willing to conform to society's rules.



"Thanks, guys." "So long, partner."

- Toy Story 3 (9/10)

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