Hey now, GORGO’s got it going on. Trucking the scale model through London alone is priceless.

I’m sure it would be, just like everything would be groovy if a host of archangels were in charge. The difference is that I actually believe in archangels.

In the popular arcade game on which Rampage is based, of course, Chicago is just one of the many cities the players are called upon to “renovate” in the manner the monsters in the movie do. The way things are going in virtually all those cities these days, seems to me that game should be more popular than ever. (As noted in a history book on Marvel Comics, one of the popular things for comics and other pulp fiction to do during the Great Depression was portray major cities—especially New York City where so much of this stuff was being published—being destroyed, because so many of the unemployed men who were struggling to make a living at the time were feeling bitter and betrayed, thinking civilization had failed them and therefore might as well be swept away.) That’s kind of a funny choice of games on which to base a video game movie, but as you and I well know, Hollywood could make worse choices; and has on numerous occasions.

I’ve never seen all of Bell, Book, & Candle, but yeah, I know how interesting it can be to see how some famous actors (like Jack Lemmon) and actresses looked when they were just starting out and hadn’t yet been typecast in certain roles. Though he later went on to star in a lot of more comedic roles, Leslie Nielson always appreciated how Forbidden Planet came to be such a popular nostalgic classic with him playing the serious protagonist because, as he put it, “I was looking good!” My late mother and I had a similar reaction to seeing young Bruce Willis and Jonathan Frakes in certain episodes of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone (although they were playing more according to type already by then).

Speaking of my late mother, I never saw all of Earth Girls Are Easy either. No one in my family ever even thought to rent a copy for so long as she lived, probably in part because my hard-working honey-haired late mother really hated “dumb blonde” jokes. That hilariously offensive “‘Cause I’m A Blonde” song would undoubtedly have had her constantly giving the screen two one-fingered salutes if we’d ever screened it back then.

As for Things To Come, yeah, I already thought that guy from the “Wings Over The World” organization sounded mighty puffed up and pretentious even when watching that movie as a kid. H.G. Well’s naive utopian notions that we’d all be living in a veritable Paradise-on-Earth if we just put all the Right People™ in charge originates from even further back than the Socialists in many of the conceits Plato laid out in his book The Republic. What’s rather disheartening is seeing how after so many centuries of failure, so many people still believe putting the Right People™ (be they philosopher kings or scientists or D.E.I. hires or whatever) in charge is totally going to create a utopian society like the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek franchise rather than the kind of bankrupt crime-ridden gangster-government-run hellhole of Turkana IV (also from the Star Trek franchise, oddly enough) it always does in real life when people try organizing their governments this way in places like… well, Chicago, to cite a particularly recent example.