I WAS A TEENAGE TIME LORD – In the style of Tom Baker & Jon Pertwee Doctor Who episodes and vintage Golden Turkeys of the past with faint undertones of old movie host shows comes this self-indulgent blog post.
Back when I was 12 or 13 years old and was getting heavily into really old, bad movies I combined that interest with my fondness for schlocky original series Doctor Who episodes. The result was much younger me lazily picturing myself in the Big Bug, Cheap Monster and Goofy Alien films from the 1950s or 1960s and earlier.
I never pictured myself as a Teenage Time Lord exactly, I just used that title for this blog post to capture the feel of ridiculous 50s flicks like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and others.
My imaginary character wasn’t an alien from Gallifrey or anything, he was just from Earth of the future and wound up stranded in the past. His futuristic science kept him from aging, and he spent his time helping human beings battle weird menaces.
In other words, whatever actions the hero of the movie was involved in, my imaginary counterpart was really the one doing them, dressed in sunglasses, an Indiana Jones hat and a baggy three-quarter length coat. No TARDIS of course, just the surviving segment of the crashed time machine in which he had traveled to the past, which served as my/ his mobile lab.
Some of the Psychotronic movies in which I used to half-insert my fictional alter ego long, long ago:
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965) – This black & white film is on many people’s lists of the worst movies ever made, so it was a dream come true for young me. Martian women have been rendered sterile from the radiation of the planet’s nuclear war.
The Red Planet’s Princess Marcuzan, her chief scientist Nadir and some troops have come to Earth, where they abduct nubile women vacationing in Puerto Rico to use as breeding stock. The aliens are opposed by a heroic android astronaut called Frank, supposedly short for First Robot Astronaut Corps.
The half-melted android (after crashing his craft) battles the aliens to save Earth ladies, ultimately fighting the space monster the Martians brought with them. For a couple minutes, anyway.
Sounds like a comedy … stings like a bee! All that plus groovy rock songs, too, in this 79-minute schlocker. Continue reading
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