On a recent visit to a popular science museum of good reputation (name withheld to protect the innocent) I came across the following two artifacts in an exhibit on alternative energy which triggered mental associations with a meme often found here at EroticMadScience.
and
We gather our fetish fuel where we can, I guess.
Now where is that girl in the diaphanous veil?
If there are any among you who don’t know the core plot behind Roald Dahl‘s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its various film adaptations, it is this. Eccentric industrial chocolatier (and, as I would argue, first rate mad scientist) Willy Wonka sets up a world-wide lottery that picks five children (with one guardian each) to go on an exclusive tour of his rather strange and dangerous factory. Four of the lucky winners are beastly children whose misbehavior leads them to get into near-fatal trouble. The fifth is the penurious but angelic Charlie Bucket, whom Willy Wonka adopts as his heir at the end.
The first beastly child to get in trouble is Augustus Gloop, a gluttonous boy unable to resist the temptations of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Unsurprisingly he falls in and is promptly sucked up into one of the river’s effluent pipes wherein, due to excessive girth, he gets stuck for a while. In the 1971 film version, he looks like this:
What’s beneath him is high-pressure liquid chocolate (he’s lucky to have been sucked up head-first!) which will eventually push him up through the tube to a destination elsewhere in Wonka’s factory.
One obvious fetish that will be fueled by this scene is something called wet and messy fetishism, arousal brought about by being coated in messy fluids or semi-fluids, chocolate being a popular choice. It’s not something I know much about, but if you wish to suggest interesting resources in the comments, then by all means dive right in.
Fetish fuel for a new generation came in the 2005 version:
The prop designers deserve extra credit on this one, because the tube empties into a transport vessel that looks a lot like a flying saucer, thus giving the scene an additional alien abduction overtone. Some people are into that.
Of course there’s another bit of fetish fuel linked to girls in tubes, something for which these scenes provide a visual reference. Now I’ve certainly covered girls in tubes here at Erotic Mad Science quite a bit, so surely I’m not going to do it any more, am I?
Oh, please, just one more image? This one has robots in it as a bonus.
Found at Janitor of Lunacy, where else.
The process through which Aloysius and his ad hoc band of resisters swiftly wreck Colonel Madder’s mental equilibrium is the sort of Hail Mary play that makes basically no sense outside of a mad science-driven fictional world…
…and perfect sense within it. The fictional concept of resurrecting the dead to create an artificial woman has a long history. One of its most distinguished moments would be the appearance of ravishing Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein.
(Image source cinemastrikesback.com.) Though for my money, I think I like better the 1967 Hammer Horror production Frankenstein Created Woman, which among many other strengths has some very arresting imagery.
(Image source Frankensteinia, an entire blog devoted to things Frankenstein.) And of course Peter Cushing. Cushing might be best known to American audiences as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, but before that he had a whole series of brilliant British horror-movie roles. Naturally he gets a site of his own, from which this French-language poster is taken:
That’s an EroticMadScience two-fer at least, because not only does it make us of the whole “created/resurrected woman” theme, but it also makes good use of the tube-girl meme.
Unsurprisingly, “woman created to make trouble” is itself a very old idea: certainly as old as Pandora, represented here in an 1872 painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre.
And Pandora is also an Erotic Mad Science two-fer. Not only is she herself a woman created on purpose by a god associated with technology, but she is part of a plot by Zeus to punish mankind for the transgressions of Prometheus who, if mad science ever had a divine patron, would surely be it.
Not only does poor Marie get swallowed in a vore-like scenario as she gets abducted, she also gets deposited in a fluid-filled tube, prepared for transport.
Now this is a subject we’ve visited before here at EroticMadScience. Further digging has shown just how deep the whole “girls in tubes” trope goes. The blogger at Posthuman Blues refers to girls-in-tubes as “the meme that wouldn’t die,” and presents impressive evidence from the visual record of classic sci-fi to that effect. For example, this cover from Amaxing Stories (a publication we have also often visited before here at EroticMadScience).
A check against this astonshing cover archive puts this issue in January 1942. As usual, it’s hard to dig up much on the story, although one academic source makes it seem even weirder than the cover suggests.
Posthuman Blues also provides us with other fine examples of girls in tubes. This is my personal favorite example from a whole post dedicated to such.
From August 1955, at least according to one useful source. Beyond that, it’s hard to dig up much.
And then it gets stranger still. I recently found this image on Janitor of Lunacy:
And I think this is meant to be a girl in a tube. There appears to be lots of technical-looking information surrounding her, which seems just ideal from a mad science perspective. Though it is in Japanese, a language I don’t read. And since it’s part of the graphic image, I can’t even readily run through Google translate to produce weird-looking English.
If anyone want to pitch in (either explaining what the text in the image is about, or just tossing in your favorite girls in tubes images), by all means, feel free!
On the theme of traveling by (liquid-filled) tube, I have an image to share, courtesy of my friend Bacchus:
It clearly fits into the visual inspiration of the “traveling by tube” post, also seems to fit into the visual aesthetic of Professor Corwin’s Apsinthion device. (Hard not to think of Anwei, no?) But sadly, neither of us knows much abou the image’s actual provenance. I for one would dearly love to know, so if you do, please do comment!
Dr. Strangeways feels no small dismay when whatever rogue government operation he’s ultimately working for decides to dispose of his experimental material, but that’s an occupational hazard of being a mad scientist on Uncle Sam’s payroll. Dr. Faustus, on the other hand, delights in the image of naked girls, suspended in their tubes of nutritive and respirative fluid. That’s real mad science for you, and squee for the thaumatophile. (It’s also an opportunity to get the sinister Frau Kupler and her operation back into the plot, and set up more mischief, which will be coming in future scripts.)
Whence this peculiar image? There are many possible sources and precedents, which I’ll discuss in this and future posts, but the one that stands out most in my imagination is from a typically whacked-out Hong Kong movie, a live action version of a Japanese animated movie called Wicked City.
There are different races of humans and non-humans occupying parallel dimensions and villainous monsters and some kind of terrible super-drug and doomed inter-species love and…oh, I give up. I can’t really make that much sense of it, but there is a scene in which a non-human character named Gaye, played by the lovely Michelle Reis, gets captured by the human authorities and suspended in a tube full of fluid for some reason. I’m mean, I’m sure it was vital to, uh, National Security or something that she be naked and on display.
I’ve done my best with the images, which are blurry and poorly lit in the film. We do get one close-up.
Unlike the luckless State Home inhabitants, Gaye does get liberated in rather spectacular fashion, when her boyfriend shows up, punches out the technician on duty, and shatters the tube.
Depositing Gaye on the floor. If you ask nice, I might just post a picture of that as well.
It didn’t influence the writing of the scene, but I was tickled to find the tireless Drake over at Medusarrific (issue #33, p. 15) diverted momentarily from his more typical set of stories of beautiful women who unexpectedly turn into stone, plastic, or gold statues to explore the girls-in-tubes theme. He even hit the mad science theme right on the money.
I won’t provide an enlarged version here — I encourage you to visit Medusarrific for that.