Goo-Type Egg

Some of the most enjoyable times in my life are when Little One and I spend a quiet Saturday afternoon watching a science fiction flick. She’s only eight, so I have to go easy on her, and that means, more often than not, a kinder, gentler monster movie from the 50s or 40s. We began this little mini-tradition two years ago, and watch a DVD or a DVR’d movie together every couple of months. So far we’ve watched, in an order that escapes me, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Jason and the Argonauts, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, Rodan, Godzilla, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Last Saturday I felt it proper to introduce her to another Harryhausen tour-de-force: Twenty Million Miles to Earth.

This is the black-and-white one where the American spaceship returns from Venus, crashing in the Mediterranean. Two astronauts are rescued, one of whom dies immediately after warning about the metal canister. Which is immediately found by “Pepe” on the shores of an island off Sicily. The canister contains a gelatinous semi-transparent mass about the size of a man’s arm, which Pepe immediately sells to a local zoologist for money to buy a cowboy hat. Immediately after (actually, later than night, but I like typing “immediately”), the mass cracks open and a baby Ymir emerges – a half-lizard, half-humanoid manimal that looks not unlike that old guy who has the motorcycle show on the Discovery channel show.

The zoologist’s beautiful daughter – an “almost” doctor – nurses one of the astronauts back to health. The astronaut – “Bob,” who’s the spitting image of Steve Martin – begins a hunt through the Italian countryside to find the ever-growing Ymir. Indeed, the stop-motion critter grows from the size of one of Little One’s Barbie dolls to the height of my two-story Cape Cod. The hunt concludes with the army blasting the poor, homesick creature – and half the Coliseum – to kingdom come. That’ll teach it to want to survive after being abducted off its home world before birth!

So – what did Little One think of this, one of the greatest films from my youth?

“Eh, it was okay.”

Incredulously, she was rooting againt the Ymir from almost the start. Well, actually, ever since the Ymir kills a dog about twenty minutes in (it was done in self-defense, mind you). Then, later on, the Ymir actually kills an elephant in battle – which nearly turned on her waterworks. But later on, getting dinner that night, we reminisced about the film, and the image that immediately came to her mind was that gelatinous, semi-transparent mass – the “goo-type egg,” as she called it.

I love it: Goo-Type Egg. If I was still in a band, that’d be the name of the instrumental off the latest CD.