Sci-Fi The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

BudBrewster

Captain
I really hate the fact that I missed seeing this one in 1957, when I could have gotten the full soul-changing effect of being a nine year old kid immersed in a fantastic experience through that magic gateway -- a giant movie screen.

Instead, I was a teenager who saw it in the 1960s on a b&w television, and even though I enjoyed it, there's no comparison between the thrill of sitting in a large audience in a movie theater (or the backseat of the family car at a drive-in) and the comparatively mundane environment of the den in your home.

I missed my chance to be truly transformed by this movie. Oddly enough, I saw one of Jack Arnold's other movies one year later, The Space Children, at a drive-in theater and it became my favorite science fiction movie of all time!

IMDB trivia says this: Several of the gigantic props (the scissors, nails, and mousetrap for example) were part of the Universal Studio tour for several years.

I took that tour in the mid-sixties with my parents and remember the guide pointing to the giant scissors mounted on the wall of a prop storage warehouse the tram drove through while he told his passengers what films they were used in.

While looking for a picture of those scissors I found this shot and several other interesting items.

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The Incredible Shrinking Executive?

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IMDB trivia: Richard Matheson had originally written a screenplay for the sequel called The Fantastic Shrinking Girl in which Louise Carey begins to shrink herself. Universal had planned to produce it but the project was eventually scrapped.

This is just a cute publicity shot, not a behind-the-scenes picture from the unfilmed project mentioned above. :D

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"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." But is bigger really better? When it comes to mouse traps, does size matter?

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A scene from the movie? No, not unless newspapers started downsizing much sooner than we realized. :D

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This would make a great picture for a poster that read Children, never play with matches!

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One real chair and two reduced-size props? Nope, same chair and two reduced-size Grants. Look closely for the clues: in the middle picture, the chair's legs cast shadows, but the man's leg does not. And in the right picture, the butt depression is not under his butt.

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The great thing about this movie is that is presents a story which fully explores the concept and gives the audience an amazing experience. I think I'm ready to hop into my combination time-machine-and-age-regression device so I can leave 2015 as a sixty-seven year old man and arrive in 1957 as a nine-year-old kid.

Then I can beg my parents to take me to the drive-in to see The Incredible Shrinking Man.
 
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