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IN OTHER BOOKS
E.C. McMullen Jr.'s

short story
CEDO LOOKED LIKE PEOPLE
in the anthology
FEAR THE REAPER
Fear The Reaper "This Ray Bradbury-esque is one of the most memorable and one of the more original stories I've read in a long time."
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HORROR 201:
The Silver Scream

Horror 201: The Silver Scream Filmmaker's Guidebook
featuring
RAY BRADBURY,
JOHN CARPENTER,
WES CRAVEN,
TOM HOLLAND,
E.C. McMULLEN Jr.,
GEORGE A. ROMERO,
and many more.

Extensively quoted in
Phantasm Exhumed PHANTASM
EXHUMED
The Unauthorized Companion


Robert S. Rhine's
SATAN'S 3-RING
CIRCUS OF HELL

Satan's 3-Ring Circus of Hell
Forward by
GAHAN WILSON &
FEO AMANTE.
Featuring comics by
ALEX PARDEE,
WILLIAM STOUT,
STEVE BISSETTE,
FRANK DIETZ,
JIM SMITH,
FRANK FORTE,
ERIC PIGORS,
MIKE SOSNOWSKI,
OMAHA PEREZ,
DAVID HARTMAN,
STEVEN MANNION,
and more!

And In
CINEMA

E.C. McMullen Jr.
Head Production Designer
Mine Games MINE GAMES
(Starring:
JOSEPH CROSS, BRIANA EVIGAN,
ALEX MERAZ)

Dept. head
Special Effects Make-Up
(SFX MUA)
A Sierra Nevada Gunfight A SIERRA NEVADA
GUNFIGHT

(MICHAEL MADSEN & JOHN SAVAGE).

Production Designer
Universal Dead UNIVERSAL DEAD

(DOUG JONES,
D.B. SWEENEY,
GARY GRAHAM)

Art Director
The Crusader THE CRUSADER

(COLIN CUNNINGHAM,
GARY GRAHAM)

SPOILERS AHEAD
!!!SCIENCE MOMENT!!!
BEWARE THE SCIENCE OF THESE TITLES FROM THE
1960s

1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s
1960
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
1961
VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE
1962
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE
1963
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED
1964
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
1965
1966
1967
1968
PLANET OF THE APES
THE LOST CONTINENT
1969
JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN
EUREKA!
9 MOMENTS OF SCIENCE AND COUNTING!


1960

Village of the Damned
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED - 1960
EUREKA!

Alien invasion stories invariably imagine the invasion to use methods that are just extensions of our own. The spaceships carrying the off world hordes are just futuristic versions of Naval troop ships, etc. But this movie is unique in that it imagines a method that doesn't involve any physical vehicle or object.

Instead some kind of force is projected that allows someone somewhere to manipulate humans on the genetic level and create a humanoid variant loyal to that someone. An invasion by proxy, if you will. And I can no more imagine how it's done than a jungle tribesman of New Guinea could imagine how television works. Not only wouldn't he know - there is nothing in his world view that would even serve as a basis for guessing or extrapolating how the magic picture box might be made to work.

Which means I have no science objections to this example of Clarke's Law: "A sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."


1961

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA - 1961

Could the Van Allen belt catch on fire?

Absolutely not.

The Van Allen belt is a region in the Earth's magnetic field that traps sub-atomic particles from the solar wind (electrons in the inner belt, protons in the outer belt). Radiation is higher than normal inside the belts but it's still the hard vacuum of empty space. There's nothing there to burn.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE - 1961

I understand the real purpose here is to express the fear people felt about nuclear testing.

These bombs were huge and scary and still a relatively new thing. Who knew what the consequences would be? Before the first nuclear weapon was detonated in 1945 there was some real fear that the heat of the explosion would ignite the atmosphere, incinerating all life on Earth (Now THAT would be The Day the Earth Caught Fire!). But could very large nukes actually change the tilt of Earth's axis or even change Earth's orbit and send our home world spiraling into the sun?

No. Not even close. Not even a little tiny bit.

On a human scale a nuclear explosion looks like a huge event of immense power, but from the Earth's point of view it's the tiniest of unnoticeable pinpricks.

The Earth is a huge body and the amount of energy it would take to alter its axial tilt in a single shove is more than humanity has ever produced in all of its history put together. If we tried to do it on purpose and detonated all of the 10,000 or so nukes the Russians and the U.S. own all at once, it still wouldn't be enough to nudge a body as massive as Earth. And actually changing Earth's orbit so it was heading for the sun would take many orders of magnitude more energy.

That being said I will point out that the movie does a good job of showing the kinds of climate shifts you'd get if an event like this did occur. The writers were much better climatologists than physicists. But if the Earth's axis shifted by 11 degrees as they describe it would be immediately obvious to even amateur astronomers, because constellations from the southern hemisphere would suddenly be visible. There would be no denying it.


1962

The Manchurian Candidate - 1962
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE - 1962
EUREKA!

Our science today is political science, which is why I want to tell you about something called the Venona Project.

This was a highly classified (and highly successful) effort in the 40's and 50's to break the encryption of Soviet cables.

From these intercepts (later confirmed after the fall of the Soviet Union) we know that there were many Soviet agents in the administrations of FDR and Harry Truman (the best known being Alger Hiss), that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really were spying for the Soviets and that many of the people Joe McCarthy accused of being Soviet agents actually were Soviet agents*

Keep this in mind when you judge this era.

The Soviet Union took the cold war very seriously and made a strong effort to infiltrate our government. The few who knew about Venona back then couldn't mention in public how they knew that there were communist agents (that would have compromised the operation), which made them seem to the public to be overly paranoid. They were not.

*More details are available here:
nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage
/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf
,

nsa.gov/public_info/declass/venona/chronology.shtml,

nsa.gov/applications/search/index.cfm?q=VENONA

The Brain That Wouldn't Die
Eddie McMullen Jr.
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
E.C.MCMULLEN JR.
THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE - 1962
EUREKA!

Could this really be? Could you remove a human head and transplant it onto another body?

Back in the mid 20th century, Dr. Robert White successfully proved the efficacy of the first head transplant of a mammal. He was able to repeat his method, making it fact. Others were able to repeat his methods, most notably Russian scientist, Dr. Vladamir Negovskii, a pioneer in reanimation in his own right.

Since the 1960s, humanity has had the capability of keeping a decapitated human head alive for days. Which means that any damage to the person's body could be repaired without worry of the damaged body killing the brain.

Which means that millions of people have died needlessly in the past 50 years. So why was this operation stopped? Why didn't the technology advance (repairing the necessary spinal cord between head and body)? The very idea made people squeemish.

Continued at SCIENCE MOMENT: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Trigger Warning, there are videos of actual head transplants and living decapitated heads).


1963

Children of the Damned
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED - 1963

Ah, evolution. Will movies ever get it right?

Not so far and this one is no exception.

At one point a character theorizes that the spooky children represent "man, advanced a million years" in evolution, which perpetutates the myth that evolution represents a process of advancement or increasing complexity.

It does not.

Evolution is driven by natural selection, a dynamic process that selects individuals best adapted to a given environment. As environments change so does the best adaptation. It's perfectly possible that the best way to adapt to an environment is to become simpler, less complex, dumber, whatever it takes.

The watchmaker is blind.


1964

The Last Man On Earth
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH - 1964
EUREKA!

John of Ephesus chronicled the bubonic plague that hit Constantinople in the late 6th century A.D.

He wrote:
"In some cases, as people were looking on each other and talking, they began to totter and fell on the streets and at home. It might happen that a person was sitting at work on his craft, holding his tools in his hands and working and would totter to the side and his soul would escape."

He goes on to describe how everywhere one looked were:

"corpses which split open and rotted on the streets with nobody to bury them."

This plague killed more than a third of the population of Europe and Asia

My point is that pandemic diseases are not unknown in human history. They've happened before and will happen again. But a disease that turns you into a vampire? Unlikely, I'll admit, but I have no problem with it here. You don't become a superhuman immortal demigod like Dracula. Instead you become a deranged shambling pitiful creature that feeds on blood.


1968

The Planet of the Apes
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
PLANET OF THE APES - 1968

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PARALLEL EVOLUTION!*
(Read anything by Stephen Jay Gould, but especially Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History).

Of all the reasons why they should have known where they were, the most obvious is life.

Every person, every oak tree, every blade of grass should have been a clue.^ And let's not even get into the fact that the apes spoke perfect, 20th century English! At the very least they could have made mention of the idea that perhaps after they left Earth some one invented faster than light space travel and colonized this world a thousand years before they got there.

Continued at SCIENCE MOMENT: Planet of the Apes.

The Lost Continent
Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
THE LOST CONTINENT - 1968

When you want to make a movie about a weird place where interesting weird stuff happens to topless natives, they're gonna have to be topless alien natives, because even in 1968 when this movie was made, the entire surface of the Earth was extremely well mapped.

There are no uncharted islands or hidden valleys or, especially, lost continents. ("Now where did I put that continent? It was here a minute ago . . . ?")


1969

Kelly Parks
SCIENCE MOMENT BY
KELLY PARKS
Journey to the Far Side of the SunJOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN - 1969

Let's set aside the fact that if there's a planet opposite Earth, why isn't there an opposite Mars or opposite Venus? I'll do that because the whole premise, though interesting, is impossible.

A planet that shares Earth's orbit 180 degrees away is in an unstable position. Perturbations from the other planets would draw it more and more out of alignment and there's a good chance it would ultimately collide with Earth. This would happen quickly on the geologic time scale, which means if it were there we'd know it by now (there are more science problems than this, but to tell you more would spoil the movie -feo)

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Links To The FUTURE!

MAN CONQUERS SPACE
What a beautiful future it was.

BUZZ ALDRIN
He walked on the moon!
Neil Armstrong took his picture! On! The! Moon!
He became an MTV Award!
He flew Homer Simpson into space and put the "Buzz" in Buzz Lightyear!


SCIENCE LINKS!

BAD ASTRONOMY
debunks the myths with clear, easy to understand facts.

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SCIENCE FICTION

JUNK SCIENCE
debunks the myths and the myth makers.

MADSCI.org
Where your science questions are answered by REAL (though not necessarily mad) scientists!

NEW SCIENTIST

SCIENCE DAILY

SPACE

SPACEDAILY


LINKS TO THE PAST!

NASA.gov
See history archived before your very eyes! NASA's own online mausoleum!

FEO'S BRAGGADOCIO

The ScientistFeo Amante's Horror ThrillerSome people think I'm more important than you (I don't, but they do. You know how they are) and this is their (HA!) evidence.

INTERVIEWS
Joe Mynhardt interviews E.C. McMullen Jr. in the book HORROR 201: The Silver Scream.

Matt Jarbo's interview with Feo Amante at The Zurvivalist.

James Cheetham's Q&A with Feo Amante at Unconventional Interviews *.

Megan Scudellari interviews Feo Amante and Kelly Parks (of THE SCIENCE MOMENT) in The Scientist Magazine.

Check out our interview at The-Scientist.com.

REFERENCES
Anthropologist Gretchen Bakke, PhD, references my UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHE ALERT as an expert resource in her 2010 Anthropological Quarterly essay @ Johns Hopkins University

Researcher David Waldron, references my review of UNDERWORLD in the Spring 2005, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture entry, Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic (downloadable pdf).

E.C. McMullen Jr.
Author page at Amazon (Amazon.com)
Listed at GoodReads
Internet Movie Database resume (IMDb.com),
Stage 32 listing (stage32.com),
Listed at Academia.edu and is a
19 year member of the San Diego Comic Convention (SDCC).
Wikipedia 1, 2, 3, 4
Starbucks Cup #118
E.C. McMullen Jr. / Feo Amante is quoted throughout the Internet and print as a resource on,

Books That Bounce Inspiration from Shivers?*
Cirque Du Freak My Weekend of Horrors*
FilmSchoolRejects The Science of Fiction
In Defense Of J.J. Abrams PHANTASM EXHUMED: The Unauthorized Companion

*Linked to archive.org

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