The high-stakes hell of 'When Worlds Collide'

George Pal gave us a glimpse of the apocalypse.

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov (1956)

The end of the world. Like it or not, it will happen someday—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps ten thousand years from now. But how? 

"I have a plan!"

I recently rewatched Stanley Kubrick's "nightmare comedy" Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) in which the human race blunders its way into a thermonuclear war that dooms the entire planet. The film's sinister title character (Peter Sellers), an ex-Nazi scientist now working for the US government, outlines an outrageous scheme for preserving "a nucleus of human specimens." It involves relocating a few specially-chosen humans, including top government and military leaders, to mineshafts "thousands of feet deep." There, the survivors could breed "prodigiously" while they wait for the surface world to become habitable again.

Even if Strangelove's perverse plan could work, it's way too late to implement it. By the time he proposes this solution to the sitting American president (also played by Sellers), the human race has about five minutes left to live. If we were serious about Project: Mineshaft, we should have started on it years ago. But we didn't. And so, the human race (presumably) dies out at the end of the movie.

The characters in the classic sci-fi movie When Worlds Collide (1951) are also prepping for the end of the world, but they've gone about it somewhat more sensibly. Emphasis on somewhat. An eminent scientist named Dr. Cole Herndon (Larry Keating of Mr. Ed fame) has determined that a "rogue star" called Bellus and a planet called Zyra are on a collision course with Earth. After a series of catastrophic tidal waves and earthquakes, our world will be totally destroyed by them in eight months. Herndon's "Hail Mary" contingency plan is to put a few humans on a rocket ship, a la Noah's Ark, and take them to Zyra to restart the human race from scratch.

The low-stakes fun of 'Tales of the Wizard of Oz' (1961)

Who says every Oz story has to feel monumental?

A more obscure Baum work.

There have been, let's say, plenty of television, film, and stage adaptations of L. Frank Baum's famed Oz series of children's books. In fact, these adaptations have been crucial to the longevity and popularity of this 126-year-old franchise. A musical stage play based on Baum's first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), was such a success that it directly influenced Baum's sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). Generations have come to know Baum's characters through the lavish MGM musical The Wizard of Oz (1939). Decades later, author Gregory Maguire introduced a new generation of readers to this world through his novel Wicked (1995), which was later turned into an extremely popular mega-musical and then a duology of blockbuster films.

In short, there's a reason The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has remained consistently in print (and available at bookstores and libraries) for well over a century while Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) hasn't. Not that Dot and Tot is without merit. The book is quaintly charming, and it's even illustrated by the same artist, W.W. Denslow, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It simply didn't inspire a multimedia empire and dozens of bold, revisionist takes the way Baum's previous book did.

Oz adaptations come in all shapes and sizes—some very lighthearted and frivolous, others quite dark and foreboding. There are Oz adaptations for children, other for adults, and some for mixed audiences. There's so much of this material that even the most-dedicated fan will never get through it all. I learned about some of these spinoffs through various DVD releases of The Wizard of Oz. Hidden among the special features, you might find Ted Eshbaugh's 1933 cartoon, Larry Semon's 1925 silent feature, and Chuck Jones' prime time cartoon Off to See the Wizard (1967). More recently, however, I have become aware of a slightly neglected Oz TV series that might appeal to a wider audience if it were better known.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 297: The Crooked Path of Timothy Farrell (1922-1989) [PART 4: THE CONCLUSION]

Doesn't he look like a Mario Puzo character here?

Edward D. Wood, Jr. was not in a good place—careerwise, healthwise, or otherwise—in 1975. He was still writing short stories and articles for various pornographic magazines, along with the occasional dirty paperback, but he wasn't nearly as productive as a writer as he'd been just a few years previously. (Ed was at his most prolific from 1968 to 1973.) Ed's film career by then consisted of making X-rated loops and writing screenplays for other directors. And, by my count, only one more of those scripts would actually be produced in Eddie's lifetime.

As poorly as Ed was doing back then, one of his old cronies from the 1950s, actor Timothy Farrell, was doing even worse. Under his real name, Timothy Sperl, he'd been tried and found guilty of misconduct in his role as a Los Angeles county marshal—illegally dispatching his subordinates to work at campaign events for a politician named Jim Hayes, then covering up the evidence of this. As with the Watergate scandal, which was raging at the same time, the Sperl case was as much about the coverup as the crime itself.

After two months of damning testimony by Sperl's coworkers, Judge Richard A. Gadbois determined that the star of Jail Bait (1954) and Glen or Glenda (1953) had falsified timesheets, misappropriated funds, destroyed radio logs, and interfered with civil service examinations. He was looking at a six-month prison sentence, a $500 fine (that's about $3,200 today), and four years of probation. In addition, he had been publicly humiliated, and his reputation was tarnished beyond repair.

But his story wasn't over. As we shall soon see, there were more twists in the Timothy Sperl saga.

Podcast Tuesday: "Blow Up Your TV"

Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke bicker on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Garry Marshall served a long and productive apprenticeship in show business before creating the megahit Happy Days in the 1970s. He wrote jokes for standup comedians and late night shows, then graduated to writing prime time sitcoms. One of the most famous shows he worked for in the mid-1960s was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Not only was this series a critically-acclaimed classic with very decent ratings, it also put Garry in contact with some people who were important figures in his life, such as creator Carl Reiner and director Jerry Paris.

I've been watching Dick Van Dyke reruns for decades now, but doing These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast has caused me to notice things in the show that I might have missed before. In particular, a 1966 episode called "Bad Reception in Albany" struck me as a precursor to Happy Days. The plot has comedy writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) trying and failing to watch a televised fashion show in an Albany, NY hotel overrun with rowdy, drunken conventioneers. It seems that a fraternal organization called the Seals have descended upon Albany the same weekend that Rob is there, causing him no end of trouble. Years later, Happy Days would have its own fraternal organization, the Leopards, and they would get into similar booze-fueled shenanigans.

This week on the podcast, we're talking about "Bad Reception" and the importance of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the history of Happy Days. As usual, this leads to us talking about a whole variety of subjects. If that interests you whatsoever, click the play button below.

Identifying the second-stringers from Little Golden Books

Not all of them are still superstars in 2026.

Like generations of American children since the 1940s, I grew up with Simon & Schuster's Little Golden Books. I was born in the mid-1970s, so my fondest memories of that venerable, much-loved literary franchise are of the titles released during that specific time period. From about 1973 to 1978, the standard back cover art for Little Golden Books featured a train populated by various licensed characters. Just seeing that familiar, friendly picture brings back a wave of nostalgia for me. I must have spent many accumulated hours studying it in my younger days, and I was glad to see it again on social media earlier today.

Upon closer inspection, though, I have a question: Who the hell are some of these characters?

The Beatles gave us a glimpse of their possible future... on their last song

No longer hungry: The Beatles as they appeared during their final photo shoot.

The future we didn't get.

To me, the breakup of The Beatles is no great mystery. It's simple math. When the group started in 1960, its members were about 20 years old and hungry for rock stardom and everything that went with it—women, money, houses, cars, publicity, screaming fans, etc. When the group ended in 1970, these men were about 30 years old and had had plenty of all that stuff. Too much, in fact. At every meal, no matter how delicious, there comes a point when you have to push your chair away from the table and declare that you've had enough. And so, they walked away under their own power while they still could.

I'm reminded of comedian Mitch Hedberg's description of pancakes: "All exciting at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em."

Many of The Beatles' contemporaries, like The Rolling Stones and The Who, decided to stay at the banquet for decades, even after the deaths of core members. Even the always-squabbling Kinks managed to outlast them. But the Fab Four remained stubbornly broken up, with each member of the quartet pursuing a solo career. Fans have naturally been curious about what kinds of albums John, Paul, George, and Ringo would have made if they had stayed together through the 1970s and beyond. Some fans have even created compilation albums and playlists with tracks taken from various Beatle solo LPs. 

But in 1970, just as they were disintegrating, The Beatles gave us a humorous glimpse into their own possible future as a band were they to remain together. Yes, I think there's a somewhat obscure Beatles B-side that demonstrates what would have happened to The Beatles if they hadn't broken up. And this song occupies a unique and important place in the group's discography.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 296: The Crooked Path of Timothy Farrell (1922-1989) [PART 3]

After this series, I may never read or write another word about Timothy Farrell ever again.

I learned a valuable lesson from the last two articles in this series. Namely, if I'm ever going to finish this series about B-movie actor turned disgraced lawman Timothy Farrell aka Timothy Sperl, I'm going to have to stick to just the highlights. Or the lowlights, I guess. 

So where were we? Okay, it was May 1974, and Sperl's criminal trial was underway. Witnesses were testifying about Sperl's alleged crimes as an LA. county marshal, which included: misappropriating funds, assigning his men to work at campaign events for Supervisor Jim Hayes, falsifying timesheets, destroying records, and interfering with civil service exams to favor particular candidates. Let's jump back into the timeline:

I've just seen what I've been told is 'Everything'

Nathan Fielder (left) questions Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything.

What the hell did I just watch? 

But can you, really?

If it's possible to emerge from a three-hour movie knowing less about its subject than you did going in, then that's the experience I had watching Nathan Fielder's You Can See Everything, his supposedly all-access look at now-imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. 

After emerging from this surprisingly dreamlike and artsy film, I'm not sure if Holmes is a master manipulator or someone who genuinely cannot distinguish lies from the truth. I'm not sure how sincere Nathan Fielder, known for his deadpan demeanor and high-concept stunts/pranks (like Dumb Starbucks), intends this film to be. I'm not even 100% sure how to pronounce the name of actress Amanda Seyfried, who famously portrayed Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout and who reprises the role here. And, yes, that last one comes up as an issue in the film.

Is this movie a documentary about Holmes, revealing the flesh-and-blood woman behind the scandalous headlines? Sort of, though the lady herself disappears (to a Texas prison) about halfway through and is "present" only through brief phone calls and a hologram after that. Is it a meta-narrative about Fielder trying to make a movie about Holmes? Sort of, though Fielder doesn't really let us in on his editing process (which must have been an ordeal in and of itself). Is it a sequel to The Dropout? Again, sort of, though Seyfried is the only returning cast member from that series. Is it a three-hour meditation on the slippery, elusive nature of truth itself? That may be the most accurate label I can give it.