The Comic Critic Reviews "One Million Years B.C."

I was tempted to do a review of One Million B.C. (1940) with Victor Mature and Carole Landis as it introduced Victor Mature as a hunky leading man. Carole Landis wasn’t hard on the eyes, either. What was hard on the eyes was its horrific special effects. Thankfully, the director did what he could to hide the rubber suits behind lots of studio shrubbery. With the help of Ray Harryhausen, the historically inaccurate dinosaurs featured in the 1966 remake of One Million Years B.C. were far better. (Please note the slight name change.) There still were real critters blown up large on the screen as in the earlier movie, but Harryhausen claimed he did this so that the audience would think the creatures were real. I don’t think anybody bought that explanation, but they did buy tickets. This is no historical drama. This is a caveman movie. A flick that’s guaranteed to show a lot of skin under skinned skin. It was the highly unrecognized wardrobe efforts of Carl Toms that produced one of the most recognizable images from One Million Years B.C. , Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, that would go on to be a pop-culture icon.

The Comic Critic Reviews "Fantastic Voyage"

The Cold War inspired a genre of technology-race movies. Fantastic Voyage was novel in that it was about reduction technology. Then add to that the concept of seeing the human body from the inside on a cellular level—fantastic is the word. Audiences came to see how ingenious Hollywood could be in depicting the human anatomy with all its functions. This movie often played on television when I was growing up. What little kid wouldn’t be excited about seeing a submarine journeying through veins? The Proteus was rather cool-looking for the day. I loved the cool glass dome on the roof and the big fins. I wasn’t concerned about the Cold War aspects of the film. For me it was all about the cool-looking stuff, the giant cells, what they did, and the lasers. There have been a lot of other reduction sci-fi films over the years—some of them pretty good, like Inner Space. But nothing beats Fantastic Voyage as a classic that influenced pop culture. I wanted this strip to reflect my childlike excitement for Fantastic Voyage.

Winner of two Academy Awards.