Essays in blockbusting (7/13/98)
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Mars Needs Women. [Larry Buchanan, 1967.]
Compelled to seek mates elsewhere by a biological catastrophe which has erased the female population of their native orb and brought their race to the verge of extinction, an intrepid party of adventurers led by Tommy Kirk brave the gulf between the worlds and rocket through the void of interplanetary space to the Earth, to search for suitable female specimens to carry back to the Red Planet as experimental breeding stock.
Landing by virtue of some defect in their guidance mechanism in Texas, they stash their ship in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town, and, adopting protective coloration, set about the hunt — which, predictably, seems mainly to involve hanging around a lot of dimly lit smoky bars trying out lame pickup lines.
Their strange otherworldly hypnotic powers prove irresistible, and in short order they manage to carry off a stewardess, an artist, and an exotic dancer, pluck the homecoming queen of Delta Gamma from the bosom of her sorority, and, unkindest cut of all, seduce to their cause the very chick astrophysicist [Yvonne Craig] on whom the establishment is counting to mastermind the Earth’s defense; leaving the military-industrial complex and a lot of whitelabcoated Movie Scientists baffled, enraged, and gnashing their teeth, and the fate of the genetic purity of the planet hanging in the balance. Oh the humanity.
This cover story about the women dying off on their own world isn’t fooling anybody [though that Martian women would
rather be dead than be seen with these guys is certainly plausible], but there’s an uncanny realism in the idea that five geeks like these would have to travel forty million miles to another planet to score, that the uniformed military in all its iconic Cold War majesty would mobilize to try to stop them, and that the media would react hysterically and announce the news with screaming headlines.
And, in fact, the whole thing reminds me of a friend of mine who abandoned the bars of Boulder in midcareer, and, armed only with his copy of
How To Pick Up Girls, drove off into the badlands of New Mexico to try to find a mate. [He did succeed, but that’s another tale.]
Weird and funny, at any rate, and not without its moments of insight: “These ties serve no functional purpose,” sniffs one of the Martians as they don their disguises. “The Red Planet abandoned the use of ties fifty years ago...it simply reveals the environmental naivete of the Earthmen.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
____________Mistakes have been made (9/21/97)
