BudBrewster
Captain
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When this movie came out in 1956 I was just eight years old, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, Sputnik was a year away from making history, and there were 4,000 drive-in theaters across America.
Like this one, the Roosevelt Drive-In in College Park, Georgia -- where I grew up.
Sometime in July of that year my parents took me and my sister there to see Earth vs the Flying Saucers . . . and I haven't been exactly normal since!
Thank goodness.
Imagine being eight years old and seeing this through the windshield of the family car. It certainly impressed Hugh Marlow and Joan Taylor!
This was a dream come true for a kid who was already living and breathing science fiction, even though he hadn't been around one whole decade yet. This movie has everything a kid could want! It's got alien brain scans --
-- low-flying saucer in broad daylight --
-- battles with brave but soon-to-be-vaporized Army guys --
-- creepy aliens that absolutely, positively were NOT here to be anybody's friend --
-- saucers that cruised in formation over Washington like they owned the place --
-- lots of national monuments whose insurance rates were about to go way up --
-- amazing scenes of destruction which the guys in the Kremlin probably watched every weekend while they clapped and cheered --
-- and a brave scientist willing to try on a big alien helmet and risk having all the folks around him make funny faces while he couldn't see them.
If this great movie had a bigger budget, it would not have been stuck with these suits which had no eyes, no hands and (the one that really puzzles me) no elbows!
Instead, we'd have gotten something a bit more on the cool side of awesome, like this.
But this movie is still a crowd pleaser after 60 years, this coming July. Heck, I wish I had held up as well as this movie!
Bud