 623 - THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN with short: THE DAYS OF OUR
YEARS
Genre: Madman Wants to Rule the World (S: 1955, Color;
F: 1959, B&W)
Short: The short The Days of Our Years (the title is something about having 10 years to score) is one of my favorite
shorts of all, as it is some odd thing on safety produced by a railroad company and narrated by a folksy minister.
The riffing on this is some of best ever on the show, which is why this short is featured on the
MST Shorts Vol. 2 video from Rhino.
Synopsis: In this film, a safecracker is busted out of jail by a mad man, I mean businessman, who has a funny-accented scientist working for him on a radium-powered invisibility ray.
The scientist works for the businessman against his will because the businessman is keeping his daughter locked up in a room next to the lab as a hostage.
(...So the scientist is brilliant enough to create an invisibility ray but
can’t pick a lock... I guess that means he’s no Richard
Feynman!)
The businessman wants the safecracker guy to become invisible and steal more radium for more experimenting with the ray.
The safecracker guy gladly does it when told that it’s “perfectly safe” (I
can’t believe he fell for that sucker line) and it allows him to continue his bank robbing hobby on the side, with the help of the wife (I think) of the businessman/madman.
Anyway, the invisibility ray starts to become unreliable, causing the safecracker guy to fade in and out.
The scientist tells the safecracker guy that the ray really wasn’t safe and
he’ll die in a few weeks (sorry about that
– it’s a tricky thing, that radiation). So, after freeing the
scientist’s hostage daughter, the safecracker
guy has a bit of a showdown with the madman and, along with the radium he stole, the two of them go thermonuclear.
Don’s Review: The feature is another one of those
“madman who wants to take over the world with his invisible army flicks” that were popular in the
’50s and ’60s. While the host segments and the feature riffing were decent but nothing to write home about, this experiment is worth seeing for the great short.
Of course, if you’ve already seen the short from the Rhino tape, you might not think this episode is all that great.
Don’s Rating: 
[ S: 
F: 
]
Related Link:
(1) SciFilm.org
(Movie
Review)
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