WHY I DON'T WANT TO TRAVEL BACK IN TIME

I used to want to, but after seeing Back to the Future I changed my mind. It would be rather scary to have the rest of your life depend on whether or not a time-traveling device could take you BACK...one stomp to the machine from a dinosaur and you'd be stuck in prehistoric times forever, and then no doubt get eaten by something. There are worse times, however, and Back to the Future already mentioned one, the 50's. Now, actually, Marty didn't really have that much to worry about besides getting home. You know that problem where his mom fell in love with him? That would be fixed by time itself.....see, if Marty blipped out of existence, then everything he ever did would have never happened, meaning he would have never taken Doc Brown's car, meaning he never would have even been there in the first place. Meaning his mom would have never "met" her son, so that solves that. No, wait....then he would go back INTO existence, and everything he ever did would AGAIN happen, meaning he WOULD take the car and....hmm, it seems from then on he would have flashed in and out of existence at the speed of time, which is no doubt faster than the speed of light. So Marty would still be around, but he'd be flashing like a strobe light and he'd give a small percentage of the population he met seizures. But then with his annoying flashiness, he could become a SUPERHERO! Or not.... Sorry if you read that paragraph, but you get the idea....one of the main reasons I don't want to go back in time is because so much can go wrong. Plus, I would miss a lot of the inventions we have now....I ain't washing dishes by hand; forget that. But I haven't mentioned the absolute worst aspect traveling back in time would entail---THE MOVIES!!!! AAAAAAAAAGGGHHHH!!! If you don't know what I'm talking about, you will. See, if Marty went back to the 50's and stayed there, he would never see a good movie again for at least 20 years. I wouldn't be able to stand that. Let's take a look at what our parents and grandparents actually paid to see. You will be completely shocked....nothing can prepare you for what you're about to see. In the 20's and 30's, movies had to be in black and white and simply staged(Meaning you wouldn't get all that much action besides people standing around and acting--go turn on AMC if you doubt me!). This would not be fun for me to watch. They also had to have an hour's worth of extra material preceding them--newsreels, cartoons, weird "spaceman adventures" serials--because nobody had a TV yet. When TV came out though, and everybody got one, the film industry went from bad to extremely bad. This is seriously what film executives were thinking then: "Now that the TV is here, it will totally replace the theater, and we have to come up with new ways to get people in there." They expected the big screen to become like the vinyl record was to the CD player--useless, awkward and obsolete. And they had to fight it--how? By redefining exactly what a theater was for. The drive-in fad kinda helped. Once that kicked in high gear, people went to see movies for basically only one reason---to make out. The film had become semi-important--it could be basically anything, and the special effects could be as cheesy as a cardboard box because people were going to watch it through a smeary windshield, steamed up from love. So film standards became relaxed, and the people who profited the most from this time until the late 60's were the most crooked film companies of all. If you've ever wondered why there are no memorable films from the 50's or early 60's (except for James Bond), this is why. The company that earned the most dough was American International Pictures, headed by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson. AIP is mostly known now for making all those Annette Funicello beach party movies, but they did a lot more than that....they redefined the movie for the 50's. And not in a good way either--let's see one of the things people were paying for in 1955.

AIP followed a formula for films: budget $300,000 for one, spend most of the money on the poster and the publicity, then film the movie itself in 2 weeks maximum as cheap as possible. True. For "The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes!!" they were doing the same thing, but they hit a snafu. They blew the whole 300K on the poster. What??? (By the way, absolutely nothing I share with you here is made up--it's all true.)

So AIP gave the producers a little extra money, but not really enough. And they had to film the monster scene now! Luckily, the producers had a brilliant solution. The part of the monster was played by a hand puppet, and it's spaceship was a teakettle they bought from Woolworth's. The top executive at AIP had to view this before it was released. And no, he wouldn't let it pass. So THEN they took a knife to the negative and scratched lines all over the teakettle, which was supposed to be "DANGEROUS RAYS" emitting from the ship! Then it passed inspection. So, uhm......what else did you parents pay to see, and took seriously? Look for yourself, but it's by no means pretty.

DONOVAN'S BRAIN: A dead man's brain in a hidden laboratory told a scientist to.....KILL NANCY REAGAN!!!!

They waited almost 10 years after Dr. Seuss perished to make a movie out of the Grinch. But why? This is probably why....they remembered THIS. Yes, Theodor S. Geisel (Seuss) was meeting with moderate success at the time (1953), so he directed a MUSICAL: "THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T!" It bombed. The fine print says, "The T stands for entertainmenT!!" I bet....

"Women" were a popular subject.

"See: Super Women! See: 8-foot Spiders!!"

But the dang question that stumps me is, why would anybody want to take his girlfriend to "The Wasp Woman" and make out?

Men weren't immune either....

Or, if they couldn't make up their minds....

And this is Stanford University's tree mascot, who replaced their Indian mascot in 1972 because it was deemed "too offensive." This thing has nothing to do with the story; I just thought it was worth mentioning.

More coming up next--WOW!