Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
This big broadcast is about the upcoming Svengoolie show movie, “Them!” on October 11, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. One problem I have with this schedule is that the Iowa Hawkeye vs. Wisconsin Badgers football game starts at 6:00 p.m. on the same day. This happened previously with another Svengoolie movie last month, “The Bad Seed,” and I got around it by watching the movie on the Internet Archive. I may have to do that again.
Anyway, “Them!” is a 1954 classic atomic bomb testing leading to giant creatures film (in this case ants) terrorizing the desert southwest countryside. James Arness (who plays FBI agent Robert Graham although Arness starred as Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke a year later) who has run afoul with then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and heads to a New Mexico field office because he wanted to investigate the Mafia but Hoover didn’t think that gang existed, leading to Dillon’s famous quote heard around the world in many languages, “I gotta get outta Dodge!” As happens repeatedly in the 1950s, radiation-exposed insects grow to gigantic size, in this case ants who beat the living daylights out of grasshoppers running a protection racket on them for food (so much for Hoover’s dismissal of organized crime!) and in their headlong search for Insectopia, where the streets are lined with picnic baskets, trample on a tiny guy in a weird suit who is incredibly strong who charges the once oppressed lower class ants huge sums of money to defend them against the superior race of ants who have larger mandibles and shake down the lower class ants (leading agent Graham to write a letter to J. Edgar Hoover saying “That is why you fail!” which is yet another famous quote parroted by middle schoolers everywhere).
OK, so that’s not exactly how the movie goes, but I’ve never seen it so how should I know?
Go Retire Psychiatrist 