June 22, 1999

'WILD WILD WEST': BUCK ROGERS IN THE 19th CENTURY

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

Imagine a history class sometime around the year 2100.
PROFESSOR: "Then a country called the United States of America finally landed a man on the moon in 1969 ..."

STUDENT: "But, sir, according to my database, some English people actually traveled to the moon via anti-gravity technology as early as 1900."

PROFESSOR: "Son, I'm afraid what you've got in your database is an old movie - pure fiction."

STUDENT: "I doubt that, sir. Take this documentary I have up on my screen right now - 'Wild Wild West,' in which an African-American secret agent in the 1870s goes up against a giant, mechanical steam-driven spider. Surely you're not suggesting someone made this up?"

We have the Industrial Revolution to thank for giving writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells the impetus for imagining all kinds of advanced technology decades and centuries before reality could catch up with them.

Once our own century got under way, some of those antiquated fantasies made it to the screen in period dress. Think proper gentlemen in waistcoats traveling through space and time by means of deucedly clever contraptions, all in glorious Technicolor.

The creators of "The Wild Wild West," the TV show starring Robert Conrad, which ran from 1965 to 1970 and is now the basis for a gigantic special-effects-laden movie starring Will Smith, obviously knew a good, fun thing when they saw it. That's why they dreamed up an action-packed TV program in which post-Civil War government agents track down malefactors with the aid of flying machines, jet packs, hlgh-yield explosives, and every other sort of anachronistically high-tech device.

Verne, Wells and their Hollywood acolytes were there long before them.

Consider a Victorian sea captain who tools around in the deep in an atomic-fueled submarine called the Nautilus, which comes complete with a pipe organ. In Disney's version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1959), based on the Verne novel, it's James Mason as the undersea commander and no less odd (and sinister) a couple than Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre as the two hapless tars held captive by his nefarious scheme for world domination. (The 1916 silent version of the tale is touted as one of the first special-effects extravaganzas.)

Speaking of world domination, who can forget "Master of the World" (1960), with Vincent Price as a well-meaning megalomaniac bent on forcing the pre-World War I commonwealth of nations into a state of permanent detente through the agency of a massive dirigible armed with advanced weapons systems? This time Charles Bronson - in the days before he became one of the biggest box-office draws in movie history - is the Joe Blow who falls afoul of the mastermind's schemes yet manages to thwart them.

In at least one classic case, H.G. Wells dreamed up a device that scientists of our own time haven't been able to replicate. We're talking, of course, about "The Time Machine" (1960) that turn-of the-century English gentleman Rod Taylor makes out of gleaming ivory and then pilots into the far future, where he meets up with an effete belle played by Yvette Mimieux and a bunch of boorish trogolodyes known as Morlocks.

Bear in mind that the tale begins and ends within the confines of the Taylor character's genteel London dining room, where he and his gentlemen cronies smoke cigars and swirl brandy while Rod explains why time is "the fourth dimension."

Now, any American male born between 1945 and 1955 will tell you that the greatest motion picture in history is not "Birth of a Nation,""Potemkin," “Citizen Kane" or “Children of Paradise." The greatest movie in history, such men assure us, is "Journey to the Center of the Earth," another Jules Verne tale, filmed in 1960, with James Mason (again) as an Edinburgh University pointy-head in full tweeds who explores a mysterious subterranean realm with the help of his plucky assistant, Pat Boone.

This one's got it all - erupting volcanoes, waterfall chambers studded with jewels, dinosaurs, the ruins of Atlantis, an underground sea. There's a dearth of high-tech gadgets, but you can't have everything.

And what about the late Victorian mission to the lunar surface our history student was talking about? It's all recorded in "First Men in the Moon," a dandy 1961 Wells-based adventure with veteran screen actor Lionel Jeffries as a scientist who invents a substance that repels gravity. Before you know it, he and a couple of charming young people are rising into space in a vessel fashioned from the stuff - and they don't stop rising till they reach our nearest celestial neighbor.

And now here we are about a breath away from a brand-new century. If "Wild Wild West" itself is anything to go by, we are about to embark on a whole new round of anachronistic Victorian-age sci-fi. With no real-life time machines or anti-gravity ships on our technological horizon, the question becomes: Will our reality ever catch up with the fantasies people had back in the days before the horseless carriage?

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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