Monthly Archives: August 2010

Origins of tube girl meme?

I’ve done a lot of posts here at Erotic Mad Science about what I call the “tube girl meme,” the visual depiction of a pretty woman, often nude or scantily clad, sealed in some sort of transparent tube (often suspended in fluid) for the purpose of preservation, experiment, or some perverted purpose — let your imagination run free there.  It’s clearly a pretty prominent visual motif in the mad science genre and really takes off with pulp covers after the Second World War.  But where did it come from?

I’ll offer a conjecture, and kindly keep in mind that it’s only a conjecture so if any of you who read this blog know of an earlier or better one by all means please comment.   It goes back to a locus classicus of cinematic mad science, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

In this film, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, one of Frankenstein’s former teachers, demonstrates to Frankenstein a set of experiments in creating life, in this case Pretorius’s creation of a set of homunculi that live in cylindrical glass jars. It’s a pretty good effect, given that it’s 1935.

Among these are a dancer, (who, Pretorius laments, will only dance to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song”)…

..and, perhaps more on visual point, a mermaid.

Origin of the concept?  Maybe.  I’m willing to bet that all those pulp artists and the public that patronized their work both watched Bride of Frankenstein a lot.

Bonus erotic trivia: The mermaid in the jar is played by Josephine McKim, a swimmer who won a gold medal in 1932 Olympics and who was the body double for Maureen O’Sullivan during her famous pre-code “nude swim” sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

Is there video? You betcha!

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Of course we have also visited the contributions of Olympic swimmers to erotica on this blog before.

More Weird Science liquid girl (in reverse)

Al Feldstein and Jack Kamen back at Weird Science sure seemed to like the liquid girl trope.  I’ve found another example, this one from Weird Science #15 (September/October 1952).

What on earth is going on here?  Well, it’s yet another story of loneliness and sexual failure.  Melvin Sputterly is a bachelor who lives alone in rented rooms.   One day he receives a mysterious package bearing  a postmark from the year 2952 and, internally, a label reading “De Luxe Personal Harem Kit:  Not for sale to minors or married men!”  A package from the far future! And it contains — dehydrated harem girls.  Just follow the directions that involve adding certain quantities of water and table salt.


How interesting that there’s still a Post Office that uses physical postmarks in 2952, also that at least some norms of sexual propriety from 1952 continue to flourish almost a thousand years into the future.  (Focus on the Family must be so pleased.)  But one thing that hasn’t endured that long are units of measure familiar to Melvin, or us.  So he has to experiment.  The first experiment produces a girl rather to plump for Melvin’s tastes, so he administers a solvent (included in the package) that causes her to dissolve away, thus the panel above.

Melvin tries the other girls, but manages to mess up their rehydrations as well, making girls to skinny, small, large, etc.  He rejects them all, dissolving them as he did the first.

Perhaps Melvin Sputterly deserves to be a lonely bachelor living in rented rooms.

Jekyll and Hyde a bit better (…or Misty Mundae on Monday)

Though I wasn’t terribly impressed with David Friedman‘s attempt to make a dirty movie out of the Jekyll and Hyde story, there is a more recent example from Seduction Cinema that does a somewhat better job.

Dr. Jekyll & Mistress Hyde (2003) is the story of one Dr. Jackie Stevenson (cute naming, guys), played by Julian Wells, who holds the not-too-original theory that we’re all divided internally between the “pure” and the “lustful” selves.  She’s hard at work on a drug that will let the lustful self out.  She tests the drug on her patient Martine Flagstone (Erin Brown, playing under the name Misty Mundae).  In typical mad-science fashion, anything remotely resembling safety protocols are ignored.  The dosage is too large, and poor Martine does a world-class sexual flip-out, ravishes Dr. Stevenson right on her desk, and then ends up in an asylum, thus playing to one of Dr. Faustus’s own fears.

Oh well, back to the laboratory for Dr. Stevenson.   At least she has a better lab than Dr. Chris Leeder.  (And yes, I realize that it is a little eccentric of me to be impatiently forwarding though “normal” sex scenes hoping to see something kinky going on amidst lab apparatus.  I guess one reason I write this blog is my hope of proving that I’m not the only person who does this.)  She also has an appealing meganekko thing going on.

Dr. Stevenson resolves to be her own guinea pig this time.  The result is a slightly-less histrionic freak-out than we’ve seen so far.

Which ends gratifyingly for her, as she is transformed into sexy lesbian aggressor Heidi Hyde, and gratifyingly for the hetero male-gaze viewer because she manages to lose her clothes in the process.

Much girl-on-girl action follows, but there is trouble lurking for Stevenson/Hyde in the end, of course…

Very bad spiderweb

Having explored certain erotic possibilities inherent in spiders and their webs both in past posts and in scripts I would be remiss in not passing along a few images found in a recently-viewed public domain movie with the unimprovable if not really accurate title The Bloody Pit of Horror (1965).

The plot revolves around a group of models who, together with their photographer, publisher, and a writer, stop a spooky old castle in order to shoot covers for a series of horror novels.  Hardly the worst idea anyone has ever had (I’ll bet kink.com could have great stuff with the setting) but unfortunately this particular spooky old castle turns out to have been the execution site and final perhaps-not-resting place of a sadistic killer “from centuries ago” called the Crimson Executioner.

Uh oh.  Well, as you can probably guess things are not going to turn out very well for this exceedingly dim-witted ensemble as they are stalked about the castle and cruelly done in by a mysterious killer.

The spiderweb is one of the killer’s ploys.  One of the characters is bound in it.  The ropes across the floor will trigger a cascade of arrows at her if touched, and thereby turn her into something like St. Sebastian.  Meanwhile, the exceedingly cheesy fake spider is working its way toward her, complete with lethal venom.

The actress playing the part (I believe Moa Tahi, whose film credits include such interesting-sounding projects as The Topless War and Dr.Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs) manages to look the part of someone in her situation.

Bloody Pit of Horror ain’t mad science (although the spiderweb thingy is almost technological enough to qualify), but it sure keeps up a level of stupid that kept me laughing; it might also have some appeal for fans of dungeon and torture scenarios.  We also get to see Mickey Hargitay, then-husband of Jayne Mansfield and father of Mariska Hargitay, chew the scenery in a villain speech in which he denounces women for threatening to ruin the purity of his perfect body and declares his intention to purify the world through murder, all the while rubbing his half-naked body with oil.  Hmm….

It’s also in the public domain and available at the Internet Archive.  I embed below.  The color is rather washed out (the Crimson Executioner barely makes it to Salmon Executioner here) and the dubbing adds a level of hilarity.

I recommend watching with the help of your robot friends.

Weird Science anticipates me

…in the matter of the whole Apsinthion Protocol/liquid girl thing.

Time I guess for another one of my melancholy Dr.-Fausuts-has-no-original-ideas posts.

A word first on how we might have gotten to the strange situation depicted in the panel above, and the provenance of the art.  It’s a panel from Weird Science #7, not a comix-format of the 1985 John Hughes movie, but an actual series put out in by famous EC Comics.  EC’s publisher William Gaines is an underacknowledged hero of American culture.  His comics lines broke new ground in many areas including horror and science fiction.  He acted defiant in front of a persecuting congressional committee.  He put an African-American character in a position of high competence and responsibility at a time when they were largely confined to menial or comic relief roles in mainstream fiction.  And when it became impossible to sustain his comics-making enterprise in the face of cultural backlash, he founded Mad magazine, which I’ll bet did more to train the satirical intelligence of generations of young Americans than any other publication — a latter-day American Mercury for the adolescent set.  A great story, which you can find entertainingly told in David Hajdu‘s The Ten-Cent Plague:  The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America (click on image to the left).

But before Mad and all that, EC had Weird Science, a pioneer of science-fiction comics.  The stories were largely written by Gaines and Al Feldstein, and drawn by a remarkable set of comics artists the included Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Orlando, and the great Wally Wood.   Though the story of this post, “Something Missing!” was written by Feldstein and drawn by Jack Kamen.

Submitted for your consideration:  Professor Roger Lawrence is miserably married to Hannah, a shrewish middle-aged woman who rides him hard to give up his experiments and teach more classes so that they can have more money.  It’s not his fault:  Professor Lawrence’s life is the way it is because he lives in the EC Comics fictional universe, where bitterly unhappy marriages are the norm.  They drive plots forward, you see.  Lawrence finds comfort in two things:  the laboratory in which he has just perfected an amazing machine he calls the “Physio-Chemical Decomposer and Re-aligner,” and his pretty blond undergraduate research assistant, Sally Chadwick.

Lawrence and Sally successfully test the machine on a mouse, which they decompose into slime, then recompose into — a piece of cheese.  Sally’s explanation:  “…that’s what it was thinking about when the machine dissolved it.”  They reverse the process, restoring the mouse.  Then, of course, they fall in love.

Well, Hannah is not pleased at all when she sniffs out this turn of events.  She marches to the laboratory and demands admission.  Sally is trapped:  there will be scandal, ruin, unless she can improvise a method of escape.  And, being a brilliant as well as a beautiful girl, she quickly improvises one — leaping into Lawrence’s amazing machine and melting herself into something else!  (Thus the panel above.  For the fetishist, the detail of Sally’s abandoned dress and shoes on the edge of the machine really makes the scene.)

However, this does not work out quite as well as one might have hoped once Hannah storms in.

Doubtless an “oh shit” moment for Professor Lawrence.  For Dr. Faustus, though, it was a moment of marvel, because not only has Feldstein anticipated the whole “liquid girl” scenario, but in having Sally turn herself into a statue, he’s also anticipated the whole A.S.F.R. thing.   I mean, damn!  (And don’t get me started on the whole professor-scientist/student experimentee thing.)  Probably the deepest thrill, though, comes from the willingness of the girl to jump into the machine.

All is not lost, though, because Lawrence still has his machine.  Or…

I’ve omitted the last panel, because your imaginations may be better than fiction.  But if you really must you can, with some effort, find a reprint of the story.

Mad Science pulp art — Virgil Finlay

The cover of Weird Tales, February 1938, done by prolific pulp artist Virgil Finlay (1914 – 1971), and depicted at left.   A win for the thaumatophile:  Weird Tales was were much of H.P. Lovecraft‘s work first appeared.   The story it illustrates is part of Seabury Quinn‘s “Jules de Grandin” series of occult detective stories.

It’s exquisite (I think) by pulp cover standards.  I love the way the central figure appears to glow; and her attitude recalls that of Ashley Madder at the end.  An anticipation of cryonics?  I can’t say — the nearest libraries that are likely to contain the story are a good hour’s travel away from my personal mad lab.  But someday perhaps I’ll find out.

Found in a gallery at this French-language site.

Adult Jekyll & Hide?

No, that’s not a spelling error.  Or at least, that’s not my spelling error.  And I’ve got the screenshot to prove it:

A real movie, it turns out (made in 1972).   Now the Jekyll and Hyde (ahem) story would seem almost tailor-made for erotic mad science exploitation:  there’s dangerous self-testing of a chemical formula, transformation, liberation of repressed selves, and so forth, all boiling up from the original Robert Louis Stevenson story.

Now if you, dear reader, were making an adult version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, you might try any number of things.  Perhaps Jekyll could be a timid individual transformed into bold, sexy one.  Or perhaps you could play games with sexual orientation — straight to gay, say, or vanilla to polymorphously perverted.  Or you could do it as a gender-bender.  This movie opts for the last one.  But it’s a fail because in spite of being a basically a soft-core porn film, a sort of shocking sex-negativity runs through the whole movie.

To put things another way, the Jekyll and Hyde story doesn’t have to be a good vs. evil story to work.  But it doesn’t really work as an evil vs. evil story.  It’s possible to make Dr. Jekyll a schlub, but for the story to have much of a point he would have to be a basically decent, perhaps even somewhat likable schlub.

The central character just fails, pretty much, because as both Jekyll and Hyde he’s despicable.  As a Jekyll figure — a “Dr. Chris Leeder,” the movie opens with his cheating on his fiancée.  When he’s dragged rather reluctantly on an antique-shopping detour by the same fiancée later that same day, he discovers the notebook of the “historical” Dr. Jekyll, describing his experiments.   Leeder becomes obsessed with the book.  When the shopkeeper later refuses to sell it, Leeder stone cold strangles the poor man.  So much for the good, sociable Dr. Jekyll figure in this movie.

Leeder reads the book, fascinated with the adventures of Hide.  The story is told in flashbacks, and at this point I had the curious feeling of watching something that resembled less a early 70s softcore movie and something more like an 80s slasher flick with an unusual amount of nudity.  In the repellent values system of this fictional world, sexuality courts violent death:  Hide rapes and murders two women:  one a prostitute who offers him her services, another a a masturbating woman he spies through a window.

Back in the 1970s, Leeder recreates Jekyll’s formula and uses it on himself.

It induces agonizing transformation…

..into a beautiful woman.

Yep.  A woman.  I should note that while the Jekyll-derived transformation potion does not provide a female wardrobe, it does at least do hair, makeup and nails.

(If you’re hoping for a transformation effect here — which I was, irrationally — you’ll be disappointed.  Actor Jack Buddliner as Dr. Leeder drinks potion, falls on bed, does lots of excruciating histrionics, cut, camera pans to his shoes, cut, new scene with actress Jane Louise as Miss Hide in Leeder’s clothes, which she at least has the decency to remove completely.  What a wasted opportunity.)

Of course, Miss Hide is not just a lesbian, for watching her I had the feeling that I was now watching one of those 1960s sexploitation flicks that have their own ugly value system:  lesbian = psycho.  A girl fight and the gratuitous castration of a sailor picked up in a bar happen along the way.

What a disappointment for thaumatophiles.  If you really must, it’s available from Something Weird Video.  But personally, I’m hoping someone will do better in the future.  Which shouldn’t be very hard, in all honesty.

Something good from PZ

PZ Myers‘s blog Pharyngula has occupied a quiet, honorable place on Erotic Mad Science’s blogroll almost form EMS’s inception.  This might seem like a curious choice in some ways — PZ being a real scientist and all while I bear a perhaps-more-than-passing resemblance to something that escaped from the lunatic asylum.  To be sure there have always been areas of overlapping interest.  I have always admired PZ’s take-no-prisoners approach to memeplexes for which I myself have no love.  And it would seem that both of us share a profound respect for that most noble order of mollusc, the octopuses.

Now I always had a feeling that PZ might come up with an even greater  payoff, and just recently it came .   The context was a discussion of cheesy ads that have been appearing at Scienceblogs, which hosts Pharyngula among others.    Handed a golden opportunity to snark at how immature you’d have to be to be looking at the ad on the left, PZ instead takes up a sentence which begins

Although the “build an ideal woman” does appeal to the mad scientist in me…

Way to go, PZ!  That’s a theme that has a lot of a appeal over here, too!