Friday, July 08, 2011
A. went to yoga last night, and made me promise that I wouldn't watch anything that she was interested in seeing while she was out, so I watched Flash Gordon: The Deadly Ray from Mars, from 1938. We used to watch these when we were kids-- I guess they must have been on Saturday mornings, probably on WPIX, but I'd never realized until now how deeply this stuff informed our play and our imaginations. This particular episode featured the fearsome Clay People, who I had forgotten about, and of course all of the rocketships made that iconic electronic buzzing sound as they flew. When Ming (The Merciless) operates the television that they use to communicate (an early surveillance society technology), he tunes it in by using both hands to manipulate the knobs on the set. Things explode, and sparks fly. Electricity arcs. It is pretty fabulous, and it is interesting to think that this sort of fascination with science and space travel is probably now more or less a thing of the past. As a child of the 60s I know I dreamed of being an astronaut, and in fact I have a cousin who was so absorbed by the whole NASA mission that he went on to become an astronomer. If you offered David a chance to go to Mars tomorrow he'd jump at it.As I write this the last space shuttle has just taken off for its final trip, and space travel, except for low level orbital stuff seems to be pretty much a dead letter. I suppose there are any number of sound reasons for this, but it makes me sad, and impresses the Major Matt Mason playing kid that still lives inside me as a generational failure of imagination. These days an interest in space travel is kind of a phase, like a fascination with dinosaurs. Some people grow up to be palaeontologists, and I suppose there will always be aeronautical engineers, and astronauts too, but somehow I'd have reckoned that the latter would be a different sort of profession by this time.
// posted by Bill @ 1:48 PM 
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