Seaing 2020

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It’s funny what sticks in your head.  As a ten-year-old 2020 seemed impossibly far in the future.  And it was very wet.  Not because of global warming, but because of a Saturday-morning cartoon called Sealab 2020.  Suffering from thalassophobia, the idea of living under the ocean was both intriguing and terrifying to me.  I recall that these underwater scientists had “aqua-gum” that they could chew so they’d be able to breathe and talk when not in the giant domes of the lab itself.  While checking out the series online, I was surprised to learn it only had 13 episodes and lasted but three months.  I’ve been thinking about it for over 40 years now, silently waiting to see if we would have such places as the deadline drew near.

This image is protected under copyright by the owner. It is reproduced here under the fair use doctrine, in low resolution. From Wikimedia Commons.

Instead in 2020 we have a record low of scientific projects being supported by a science-denying government.  Ironically the sea levels are rising because of global warming.  We haven’t done our homework and we’re pouting that things aren’t turning out the way we wanted them to.  Ours is no longer an evidence-based reality, but one where a tweet of “fake news” is all we need to make the truth a lie.  And as the water laps our ankles my thalassophobia starts to kick in.  The thing about Sealab is that they had kids there too.  Kid scientists.  Even more ironically, Richard Nixon was president.  His downfall was Watergate—coincidental?—and now we have a president caught red-handed (very Red-handed, even) in crimes while in office and Nixon’s beginning to look like a saint.  When did the water get up to my knees?

They wore wetsuits and swim fins quite a lot in the show.  Moving under water looked so natural—unlike my flailing when I attempted to swim.  It was all about not being able to breathe, in my case.  They showed us all kinds of strange animals under the water in Sealab 2020.  Animals that we could drive to extinction, it seems, if they got in the way of unbridled greed.  I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that Sealab misled me.  We were heading for an optimistic future back then, even with Nixon justifying the Vietnam War and spying on his political opponents.  People were still able to look forward four decades ago, in hopes of a better future.  For all these years I’ve been awaiting 2020 only to find the world back behind where it was in 1972.

Noah in the Underworld

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I recently was subjected to the 1940 sci-fi/western film Radio Ranch (a compilation of the series Phantom Empire). This happy-go-lucky story with Gene Autry in his first starring role is a romp through the unbelievable in just about any sense of the word. Based on the premise that there is an underground world called Murania, the film pits Autry against evil scientists who want to get a “bushel load” of radium from Murania, the “Thunder Riders,” or national guard of Murania, and indeed, against his corporate sponsors who will cancel his contract if he ever fails to get to Radio Ranch by 2 p.m. for his singing broadcast! This creative approach to early science fiction will be reincarnated more successfully in The Mole People, a movie that I wrote about a few weeks back.

The connections between the two films do not stop at an underground world with humanoids wearing Egyptian costumes (there is an unmistakable uraeus on the helmet of Argo in Radio Ranch), but go as far as the associations with the Flood Myth. I pointed out the flood connections in my post on The Mole People, and it was startling to note that Radio Ranch begins (and ends) with Gene Autry singing “Uncle Noah’s Ark.” That coincidence is, in itself, barely worth noticing. When the evil scientists invade Radio Ranch, however, they are shown an artifact from the Thunder Riders (whose thunder-producing horses are, admittedly, pretty cool) and they immediately identify it as an “antediluvian” idol. At this point it became clear how deeply embedded the biblical flood story has been in our culture, and how freely it was used in early science fiction films.

At a guest lecture in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers on Friday, I mentioned that the flood story goes all the way back to Sumer, making it among the earliest religious stories in the world. Several students had difficulty with this and began asking, “but when was Noah actually alive?” These college students, well educated in science, engineering, or political science, can’t get beyond the biblical literalism they were raised with. It is no wonder that America is falling behind much of the world in science education: we haven’t moved beyond Gene Autry’s overly cheerful belief in a deluge that never occurred.