An intellectual carrot? The mind boggles...'
Great line :)
shareCould writer Peter Packer have seen this movie and it gave him the idea for his later script "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" for Lost in Space?
shareIn the book "What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History", they mention that "LiS" episode and the cast members were saying how they kept breaking up with laughter during filming.
Yippee: "For king!"
Yappee: "For country!"
Yahooie: "And, most of all, for 10¢ an hour!"
To the original subject: the mind does boggle when it turns out that the "intellectual carrot" is a goofy-mallet-hammered pseudo-Frankenstein's monster.
They should have either given him an intellect - language, an electronic coding device, SOMETHING that would show him as a sentient being - or not associated the term "intellect" with this star-beast.
By eschewing any signs of real intellect (doesn't require intellect to crash your saucer, especially if you're just a grunt, not a scientist or technician), the writers forced the "carrot" aspect to the surface. I mean, this space "intellectual" already has claws and a nasty temper. A wrathful carrot. He would have been much more menacing if he had been written to communicate intelligently, even if malevolently, with the film's Earthlings.
I think not giving him speech is what makes him so much more terrifying. We don't know why he's attacking the men until they come across his plant creatures being fertilized with the dead men's blood. Much like the creatures in Alien and Predator, The Thing maybe brutal and mute, but he's a smart one in the way that a vicious Earth animal maybe smart for an animal.
Yippee: "For king!"
Yappee: "For country!"
Yahooie: "And, most of all, for 10¢ an hour!"
Does a person stop to speak to the ants steps on? No. The thing didn't talk because he saw us as food; the one scientist even says that. He has no reason to talk to us, anymore than we talk to an ant we crush, a fly we swat, or a wasp we spray.
Here's to the health of Cardinal Puff.
Or, more to keep with your food analogy, to talk to the cow that becomes our hamburger.
"I'm in such bad shape, I'm wearing prescription underwear." Phyllis Diller 1917-2012
Political pundits of both parties could have paraphrased Scotty's trenchant observation for use during the US Presidential campaign of 2012:
"A former US Olympic chairman as President of the United States? The mind boggles!"
-or-
"A former community organizer as President of the United States? The mind boggles!"
I agree that it is a mistake (for the story-line) to simply make the alien out as a monster rather than as of space-faring intelligence. That is one element that is presented in the original written story that wasn't picked up on very well. In the original story the alien starts making a flying machine and something else.
The alien is a much more formidable opponent if it is of great intelligence.
Sig, you want a sig, here's a SIG-sauer!