Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

Here’s my deal; I fell asleep last night while watching another TV show on a different channel, “The UnXplained” hosted by William Shatner (Shat’s in the house and he’s 95 years old!) before the movie Dr. Cyclops came on. I missed a little over 6 minutes and had to watch that part on the Internet Archive. It was mainly the introduction of the characters which include:

Dr. Alexander Thorkel (Albert Dekker); Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley); Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan); Dr. Rupert Bulfinch (Charles Halton); Steve Baker (Victor Kilian); Pedro Caroz (Frank Yaconelli); Dr. Mendoza (Paul Fix); Professor Kendall (Frank Reicher).

I didn’t fall asleep during this movie, I swear! Incidentally, Thorkel is not pronounced to rhyme with snorkel; it’s pronounced snorekell with emphasis on the second syllable, which rhymes with hell, which is what you’ll be going through when you watch this movie. However, you will need a snorkel to get through the fairly deep melodramatic dialogue. I think you can order it through Walmart.

While some of the foregoing might suggest that I’m going to write a serious movie review this time, nothing could be further from the truth.

This 1940 film was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and produced by Dale Van Every. Tom Kilpatrick wrote the original screenplay. A notable thing about this movie is that it was shot in color, which was called three-strip technicolor. It looked really good although some of the costumes were designed mainly to call attention to the color rather than to advance the plot.

The gist of the story is that Dr. Thorkel lures three scientists to his home in Peru to look through a microscope because his eyesight is very poor. After they identify the tiny kids swimming around in the little pool of uranium on the slide as the actors from the movie “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” (it’s a wormhole vortex time travel thing) he fires them all, but they refuse to leave and remind him their contract says they have to stick around and get Rick Moranis’s autograph. Dr. Thorkel makes peanut butter bars spiked with uranium and serves them to the scientists and Pedro. This makes them shrink so small they can’t wear regular size clothes and have to wrap white hankies around themselves because this is not an X-rated film. Later, they industriously use huge needles and thread (they have been working out!) to make stylish three-strip technicolor outfits.

Hey, let’s start with the title “Dr. Cyclops.” Even before I saw the movie, I noticed that the mad scientist, Dr. Thorkel, had two eyes although his vision was worse than mine. I kept listening for any of the characters to call him Dr. Cyclops, but I don’t think anyone but him called attention to it—after Bill broke one lens of his pop bottle bottom glasses. He had several spare pairs but the shrunken heroes flushed them all down the toilet. After Bill broke one of the lenses of Thorkel’s last pair and when he puts them on, he says “Now you can call me Cyclops, because I have one good eye!”

That line is almost at the end of the movie, so somebody must have called him that earlier. Every other time he’s always called Dr. Thorkel. I would have to scrub through the Internet Archive copy of the film to find out who and I’m just not up to it.

I’m taking a byway through Greek mythology for a bit because one of the myths is about the cyclops, a giant one-eyed monster. I noticed that one of the shrunken scientists was named Dr. Rupert Bulfinch. There is a classic 3 volume book entitled Bulfinch’s Mythology by American writer, Thomas Bulfinch. I’ve never read it; I just wonder if the character’s name was an allusion to it.

Actually, I learned some Greek mythology in one of my literature classes when I was a student at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University, one of the HBCUs) in the 1970s. My teacher was Dr. Jenny Lind Porter, who was famous for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to being named Texas poet-laureate in 1964.

During one of Dr. Porter’s classes on Greek mythology, she got me to act the part of Theseus while she acted the part of the Minotaur (a huge bull) who hid in the labyrinth where several youths and maidens were sacrificed to it. Theseus volunteered to slay the Minotaur and after he did, using a .357 Magnum, he found his way back through the labyrinth using a ball of twine Ariadne (daughter of King Minos) gave him because she had a serious crush on him. We acted out the very short battle in the classroom without props of any kind, a totally spontaneous stunt which was not unusual for her. Also, she and other faculty members put on an annual show on campus and many were multi-talented. Dr. Porter did this hilarious strip tease which brought the house down!

Anyway, the Greek myth about the one-eyed cyclops was part of The Odyssey of Homer in which the hero Odysseus and a few other crazy seamen on the way back from the Trojan war dropped by the island of a whole pack of cyclops one of whom was named Polyphemus. Polyphemus literally had a number of the sailors for lunch, but Odysseus defeated him by blinding him, stabbing his eye with a burning stake.

There are some similarities between the movie The Cyclops and the battle between Odysseus and Polyphemus, although they are anything but striking. I think the movie is just OK, and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.