Them!

I’ve long lamented the loss of old-time, pre-cable television. No, I don’t miss the old antenna on the roof (ask my dad about trimming branches or chipping ice off that one) or fuzzy reception, but I miss the variety. Yes, variety.

With our basic cable, I think I have like a million stations compared to the about seven (VHF and UHF) we had before cable, but the real variety isn’t there. True, I can get 24 hours of gardening or Paraguayan soccer semi-finals, but I can’t get variety. By the way, no one asked me if I wanted those stations, so it’s not variety. It’s like going to a buffet and being told what to eat. It’s not real choice.

In the old antenna days, I saw movies like “Casablanca” at 2 p.m. Saturdays, or the Woody Allen classics “Bananas” and “Take the Money and Run” at 5 a.m. weekdays. I saw The Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” at 11:30 p.m. You name it, I probably saw it (Even a cleaned-up “Midnight Cowboy.”)

My favorite day of those old antenna years was Sunday. Those Sunday afternoon movies ran the spectrum from Academy Award to trash, and I think I watched them all. Where are you going to see Charlie Chan movies now? Or “Land of the Giants”? I loved just being stretched out on the living room floor watching Westerns, a World War II movie or the best – sci-fi horror.

Reliving the old days

The closest I come to that now is on American Movie Classics. AMC does offer a variety – I caught “The Sand Pebbles” a few weeks ago and “MASH” before that. But Tuesday at 7:30 a.m., I relived those glory days of pre-antenna TV thanks to AMC. I watched “Them.”

How guilty I felt stretched out on the couch watching this classic! I should have been doing a million other things, but I couldn’t tear myself away from this film.

The 1954 film is about ants that mutate after the 1945 nuclear explosions and grow to enormous sizes. As a kid, I loved the idea of mammoth ants rampaging through the Los Angeles sewer system. How cool!

Now, I love the film for all subtleties it has and, like the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (which I first saw on an old Canadian station on a Sunday afternoon), that it isn’t about giant ants or, in the latter case, pods. It’s about American Cold War fears.

The film stars James Arness and James Whitmore. Fess Parker makes a great appearance as an “insane” pilot who sees a queen ant. Even Leonard Nimoy pops in for a cameo. I also think I had a crush the curvy female scientist played by Joan Weldon

Watching it the other day, I caught so many small things I just love:

-- The guys roll up their pants when they walk into the sewers.

-- They investigate a sugar theft on a Sunday morning, and the rail yard executive is holding a Sunday paper under his arm.

-- The drunks haggle and one of them sings about being in the Army.

-- James Whitmore’s character confuses the names of some low-level beat cops and can’t understand why the old scientist can’t work the airplane radio. Here’s a key because the police complain the scientist can’t talk “like everybody else,” but uses Latin phrases and technical jargon. But the police use their own language that the professor can’t follow. Man, this is great film making!

I love the pre-sexual revolution sparring with the female scientist and James Arness, including a few consciously sexist jokes. The debate about when the public should be told about the ants is relevant today, but substitute “terrorist threat” in place of “ants” or “Cold War.”

I don’t like that all the characters smoke constantly and that minorities don’t exist in this film, save the shoe-shine man who is African American.

I recommend you watch the film on a cold, snowy Sunday afternoon. It’s oddly relevant for the black-and-white era it comes from. And it’s entertaining.

Thought: Next is my analysis of "Gilligan's Island."