A favorite thesis of mine is that we kinky people will always be able to find loads and loads of fetish fuel in popular culture, and that since as kids we began getting kinky but didn’t have access to porny stuff (well, usually) most of our early erotic memories are going to be tied to pop-cultural experiences of the “innocent” material we did have access to.
There are two reasons we can always expect this to be true, having to do with the twin facts that we’re all hypersexual primates and many of us are kinky in some way, so therefore
- The people who create all this popular culture are going to work their kinks into it, intentionally or not and;
- Whether any creator put anything there or not, we will find our kinks in their material anyway. There’s a reason why there’s a Rule 34, after all.
I wrote the first part of my Thaumatophile Manifesto so that my readers could have a sense of my formative pop-cultural experiences, and naturally when I started corresponding with Dr. Robo I just had to ask whether he could point to a similar class of material in the formation of his own thing for mind control and sexy robots.
Boy, could he ever. Here are some things he was able to point out to me.
He began with an episode of Gilligan’s Island, of all things, in which Ginger gets mind controlled by a mad scientist. I can’t embed the video, but you can see it here. (Well, if you were living on a tropical island with Ginger and Mary Ann, would you fix the damn boat?)
Another example, from the TV series of Wonder Woman, in which a toymaker played by Frank Gorshin builds a life-size duplicate of the heroine.
And another example, the 1982 sci-fi film Android, in which a somewhat mad scientist builds two androids, one of whom is a pretty blonde.
Dr. Robo pointed to some influences he has in common with me, such as Robotrix and The Bride of Frankenstein and also Weird Science, although actually had something in mind from the 1990’s television series rather than the 1985 movie which so influenced me. In the version pointed to by Dr. Robo, a mad scientist tries to drain created woman Lisa’s energy to power his own “bride.” Again, I can’t embed, but you can see the episode on Hulu here. And there’s also a scene in Superman III in which a henchwoman gets sucked into a machine and cyborgized.
But the best overlap we had was Metropolis. You know the scene. Everybody knows the scene.
Can’t see it too many times, and that thought will take us to tomorrow’s post…
Update: Some of the video embeds in this post were crushed by WordPress for the first few hours it was up. I hope it’s fixed now.