Fact-Based "Blob"
I was nine years old when the movie “The Blob” first came out - way too young to go to such a “scary” movie.
Fifty-one years later, I came across the film on Turner Classic Movies. Somehow it didn’t seem all that scary anymore. That may be due to the fact that it was done on a super-low budget with little money for special effects and filmed on a darkened soundstage in Pennsylvania. But I did discover it was a prophetic movie concerning refrigerants and climate change.
In the movie, a very young Steve McQueen discovers that an alien pod from outer space morphs into a blob (that looks a lot like raspberry Jell-O) and proceeds to suck innocent people into itself.
At first, alarmist Steve can’t get the town’s folks to believe him, so he turns into heroic Steve to battle the Blob. After gallant Steve rescues his girlfriend (played by Aneta Corsaut, the actress who was Helen Crump on “The Andy Griffith Show”) from the Blob, he becomes refrigerant engineer Steve by figuring out the Blob can be neutralized by freezing it using CO2, which he gets from fire extinguishers. Then when the Blob is carted off to the Arctic Circle to stay neutralized, environmentalist Steve frets, “We are safe, unless the Arctic Circle melts.”
So there, in 1958, was R-744 (CO2) being put to practical use and a global warming prediction. And I thought all this talk about such matters was of recent vintage.
Fifty-one years later, I came across the film on Turner Classic Movies. Somehow it didn’t seem all that scary anymore. That may be due to the fact that it was done on a super-low budget with little money for special effects and filmed on a darkened soundstage in Pennsylvania. But I did discover it was a prophetic movie concerning refrigerants and climate change.
In the movie, a very young Steve McQueen discovers that an alien pod from outer space morphs into a blob (that looks a lot like raspberry Jell-O) and proceeds to suck innocent people into itself.
At first, alarmist Steve can’t get the town’s folks to believe him, so he turns into heroic Steve to battle the Blob. After gallant Steve rescues his girlfriend (played by Aneta Corsaut, the actress who was Helen Crump on “The Andy Griffith Show”) from the Blob, he becomes refrigerant engineer Steve by figuring out the Blob can be neutralized by freezing it using CO2, which he gets from fire extinguishers. Then when the Blob is carted off to the Arctic Circle to stay neutralized, environmentalist Steve frets, “We are safe, unless the Arctic Circle melts.”
So there, in 1958, was R-744 (CO2) being put to practical use and a global warming prediction. And I thought all this talk about such matters was of recent vintage.