Dino Boy and Ugh

Did we actually watch Dino Boy in the Lost Valley in the 1960s?

Ok, we watched -- but we didn't watch very closely.  "Watching TV" meant talking, reading, or playing with the TV set on, a flickering series of background images.

It was a supporting feature to the Space Ghost series, about a boy named Todd who parachutes from a crashing plane into the The Land of the Lost, an isolated valley with cave men and dinosaurs.

He befriends a cave man named Ugh, who somehow learned to speak a "me-Tarzan" English patois, and they set about looking for a way home.

7 episodes have Dino Boy captured (by Worm People, Moss Men, Tree Men, Sabretooth People, Giant Ants, Vampire Men, a Pteradon), so Ugh can rush to the rescue, and they can hug.

Three episodes have Ugh captured (by Wolf People, Ant Warriors, Sun People) and Dino Boy must rush to the rescue.

Two episodes have Bronty, their pet brontosaurus, captured (by Wolf People and Giants).

Four episodes have strangers captured (by Snow Monsters, Rock Pygmies, Birdmen, and Moss Men).

You get the idea -- a lot of attempted human sacrifices and cannibalism going on.

What made it worth watching -- or at least looking up at one of the flickering images from time to time -- was the cute boy our own age, the uber-muscular Ugh, and the buddy bonding rescues.

And a comparison with other constantly-rescued boys of the 1960s, like Jonny Quest and Tarzan's Boy Johnny Sheffield (from 1930s movies that played constantly on 1960s tv).

This isn't deviantart.com, it's an actual screen shot.  Surely they're about to kiss.

The episodes were rebroadcast on the Cartoon Network in the 1990s, but haven't appeared in any other medium.

Dino Boy was voiced by John David Carson, who went on to a long career in movies and television.  He may be best known for The Savage is Loose (1974), a take on Oedipus set on a desert island, with lots of beefcake.

Ugh was voiced by Mike Road, best known as the voice of Race Bannon on Jonny Quest

"The Society":Two Gay Guys, No Beefcake, Not Enough "Lost"

In the elite, entitled small town of West Ham, Connecticut, 200 high school kids ignore the ominous portents around them (a mysterious smell, the phrase "mene mene tekel upharsin" scrawled on a wall, a production of Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead), and head out for a school-sponsored camping trip.  They don't get far.

"Change of plans," the bus driver announces."Rock slide, road closed, you're back home."

They get out. The buses drive off. There is no one to pick them up, so they walk home. But home is deserted. The whole town is deserted.  Cell phones won't call out; there's no tv or internet;  no way to communicate with the outside world. Eventually they discover  that there is no outside world, just a wilderness (no predators though, just wild turkeys).  They are alone.

Once they realize that they will not be rescued soon, the castaways rename their town New Ham and set up The Society.

Most episodes are about the growing pains of the colony, with checks and balances, crime and punishment, and various power struggles, along with standard survival problems and a lot of high school "who's hooking up with who?."  More Lord of the Flies meets The O.C., not so much Lost.  

Sidebar: How much survival do they need in a fully-equipped town? Surely there's enough frozen and canned food to last for years.

And why do they wait six months to explore beyond the town limits, to see if there are animals to hunt, streams to fish in, fruit trees, amber waves of grain?

I would definitely prefer more Lost.  Ordinary survival problems are not particularly interesting without zombies to fight. And the cast is very large, with nothing particularly distinctive (they're all Golden Boys and It-Girls), so it's often hard to determine who is allied with, romantically interested in, or feuding with whom.  I needed several articles to pull them together.

1. The Student Council. Cassandra (Rachel Keller), former student body president, becomes the first leader of the colony.  She is eventually murdered.

Casandra's sister Allie (Kathryn Pressman) becomes the primaryleader,  but not without opposition. Her main allies are Cassandra and Will (Jacques Colimon, left), a poor foster-care kid, who dates her except for a brief fling.

2. The Science Club.   Gordie (Jose Julian, left), who uses his Gilligan's Island Professor-type trivia knowledge to assist the castaways in the absence of the internet, has a crush on Cassandra.

His brainy sister Bean (Salena Quershi) wears a hijab, suggesting that they are both Muslim.

3. The Van Snobs.  Rich bitch Harry (Alex Fitzalan) becomes one of Allie's main opponents in the various power struggles. Maybe he's mad because Allie's boyfriend Will had an affair with his girlfriend. 

His allies include fellow rich bitch Lexi (Grace Victoria Cox);  and Campbell (Toby Wallace, left), a gun-wielding psycho who is abusive toward his girlfriend Elle (Olivia de Jong). So she tries to poison him, and ends up poisoning half the town.

4. The Gay Kids.  Campbell's younger brother Sam is deaf and gay, played by a deaf, non-gay actor (Sean Berdy, left).  His main ally is Becca (Gideon Adlon); she becomes pregnant (not from him), and he vows to help her raise the first baby in the brave new world.

Later in the season he starts a romance with outdoorsman Grizz (Jack Mulhern).

5. The Jocks.  Luke (Alex MacNeill), Jason (Emilio Garcia-Sanchez), and Clark (Spencer House) continue to wear their lettermen's jackets and sign on as the colony's police force.  They have some gay subtexts, although .Luke is also dating the super-religious Helena (Natashia Liu Bordizzo), who won't have sex with him.

Got all that? It's really not worth the trouble.  Especially when the gay guys get only two kissing scenes, and the beefcake is minimal. We're a long way from Riverdale.

And when the mystery is eked out in a few throwaway scenes, as if the writers forgot about it until the last minute and said "We should throw in a clue or something."

Hint #1: The stars are a little off, like they would be in the distant past.
Hint #2:  A mysterious Pfeiffer demanded $1,000,000 to remove the smell, and later was the bus driver who took the children (the Pied Piper?)
Hint #3: About that rockslide....

Swiss Army Man: Boy Meets Corpse

Swiss Army Man is a gay romance about a man and a corpse.

Hank (Paul Dano) has been trapped on a desert island for a long time, and is planning to commit suicide, when a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washes up on the shore.  Hank names him Manny.  He discovers that he can use Manny's superhuman flautulence to propel them to another, bigger island.

And, when needed, a stream of water comes out of Manny's mouth.

And his erect penis acts as a compass

Manny revives enough to be able to speak, but he still can't move, and he remembers nothing of his previous life; he has to be taught basic human concepts.

They build a hut and start a Robinson Crusoe-style life together.  They hold hands.

Make out at pretend movies (where Manny reanimates enough to hug and kiss).

And no doubt do other things.  Manny can get an erection, after all.

But then one day Hank and Manny wake up in the midst of civilization, in the town of Eastborough, on the lawn of Sarah, a woman he used to photograph on the bus back home. Now married, with a young daughter, who is staring at them.   
And Manny can't talk anymore.

Sarah,naturally concerned with the man and the corpse on her lawn, calls the police.  Reporters show up for the news story "Lost Man Stumbles into Local Yard." Hank's father shows up. They all discover Hank's hut -- in the woods nearby. 

He was never in the South Pacific at all. He was never shipwrecked.  Manny the Corpse was never re-animated.  It was all a massive delusion that Hank experienced as he tried to run away from his miserable life.

Right?

Maybe not. 

No one believes his story about the reanimated corpse, so Hank grabs Manny and takes him to the beach, begs him to re-animate so they can escape and return to their life together. No dice. 

He's arrested on suspicion of murder, desecrating a corpse, and who knows what else, but as he is dragged away, Manny reanimates, and, with a smile, propels off to safety.  Now everyone believes...in the power of love....

I have heard this a lot.  Same-sex desire cannot exist,or if it does, it is evidence of insanity.  You might as well fall in love with a corpse.

Well, in this case, Hank did.

Besides, I don't care if it's just special effects, I got to see Harry Potter with an erection.

The Fate of "Gilligan's Island"

What Boomer kid doesn't get all wispy and nostalgic upon hearing "Just sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."

Gilligan's Island (1964-67) was an iconic Boomer tv series, part of the "lost far from home" genre, about seven people who set out from Hawaii on a "three hour tour" and ended up shipwrecked on a desert island.  We didn't care that their escape attempts were ludicrous, or that visitors managed to make it off the island with no trouble.  What counted was the adventure: they fought pirates, headhunters, mad scientists, Russian spies.  They found a Jungle Boy and a buffed surfer. 

It was a "boys only" paradise, with no girls or grownups around to spoil the fun. 

Ok, the Howells were grownups.  Sort of.

Ok, there were two girls, Ginger and Mary Anne, but no one acted all goofy around them.  They were like big sisters.

Although they paid lip service to the goal of getting off the island, it was obvious that no one really wanted to leave.  Back home they were failures, parodies of themselves.  Ginger was an actress relegated to horrid B-movies, but on the Island, she was a star.  The Professor was a polymath teaching high school science, but on the Island he was a genius.  On the Island they could shine.

There was no ongoing plot arc, as is common in tv series today, nor was there a conclusion.  The last episode of the series leaves them still stranded on the island.

But iconic Boomer tv series don't stay dead for long.  There were endless reruns, and, 10 years later (1974-77), The New Adventures of Gilligan  appeared as a Saturday morning cartoon. Most episodes involved inter-group squabbles, with an 1970s "the more you know" moral, rather than escape attempts.



The characters look considerably younger than the actors they depict.  Gilligan and Mary Anne could be in their teens, and Skipper and the Howells look barely 30.

.

In October 1978, I was a freshman in college,  and like every Boomer kid, I had no choice but to watch the tv movie Rescue from Gilligan's Island .  They finall made it back to civilizatioN!  Except instead of having them shipwrecked for a reasonable amount of time, the premise is that they've been on the island since 1964.  They're obviously older, well into middle age or old age, which makes their stuntwork cringeworthy.

They arrive in Hawaii to a huge crowd of well-wishers and fans (except none of their family or friends).  The moment Gilligan leaves the coast guard ship, a soldier hands him an ice cream cone.

Giving a middle-aged man an ice cream cone rather than a hefty check from the insurance company? Bogus!

 They try to go back to their old lives: the Professor to his research university, the Howells to their snooty friends, Ginger to the movies, Mary Anne to her farm in Kansas.  But it's the midst of the sex-and-sleaze disco era, everything has changed, and they're miserable. Fortunately, they end up being shipwrecked on the same island again.  There's no place like home?

Every Boomer kid watched them being rescued again in The Castaways on Gilligan's Island (1979).  This time they return to convert the island into a resort, where they proceed to solve guests' soap opera problems.  Apparently this was the pilot to a proposed tv series, with different problems every week, sort of like Love Boat and Fantasy Island. 

First up: a workaholic husband whose wife wants him to relax (played by Happy Days' Tom Bosley and The Bob Newhart Show's Marcia Wallace), and an unaccompanied minor (popular child star Ronnie Scribner) turns out to be a runaway.

Plus since this is a tropical island, there is some beefcake among the extras lounging at poolside.

Not many Boomer kids, now young adults, cared enough to tune in to The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981).  The island is still a resort, with the Harlem Globetrotters as guests, but the plot involves the villainous Martin Landau trying to get control of the valuable mineral "supremium."

Jim Backus, who played Thurston Howell III, was in poor health, so he appeared only in a cameo; his character was channelled by David Ruprecht (left) as his never-mentioned-before "son,"  Thurston Howell IV.

The last gasp of Gilligan's Island, except for in-character guest spots and retrospectives, came in 1982-83, with the Saturday morning Gilligan's Planet. The Professor can't built a boat, but he builds an interstellar spacecraft to get them off the island.  They end up spacecraft-wrecked on an uncharted planet. 

Really?

I was in grad school at Indiana University at the time, too old for cartoons.  But even if I was 10 years old, the premise seems unbearably far-fetched.

Besides, I had already seen Lost in Space.

See also: Gilligan's Island