Journey to the Far Side of the Sun

We've probably all seen our share of wonky movies over the years in some form or another. I still haven't absorbed many of the ones I've come across. Like ethereal haunts, they float around perpetually in my consciousness.

When I was a kid, I saw (on local tv) The Day the Fish Came Out (1967) twice in a row and remember Candice Bergen looking good in 60s fashions, walking around causing a commotion in a Greek fishing village. The film was odd, a little satiric but also apocalyptic and I was hooked by the title. What was that day? What did it mean? The story line involved two lost and inept astronaut-type guys running around looking for a radioactive cargo that had been dropped somewhere along the Mediterranean coast; village simpletons who came across said cargo and broke it open; and a lot of strange antics that showcased Bergen as Electra Brown. It ended abruptly and scarily with wildly menacing searchlights and a voice booming over a loudspeaker -- not sure if the village was being quarantined or doomed by the toxic release, or both.

Then there was Barbarella (1968), which seemed like One Million Years B.C. (1966), only instead of a scantily clad Raquel Welch finding herself in improbable situations involving dinosaurs, menacing cavemen, etc., there was a scantily clad Jane Fonda in even weirder situations involving motorized robot dolls trying to hack her up with small knives, some kind of giant sex-torture machine, lurid opponents, etc. In both cases, the only things worth a damn to me even then were Raquel and Jane in their interesting get-ups, such as the one pictured above. I guess that was enough -- it certainly was something.

There were tons of science fiction films in those days. Makes sense --we were in the middle of the space race, the arms race, Vietnam, all that scary Cold War business. Another one that sucked me in and left me scratching my head at the time was Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969). It was clearly some kind of Twilight Zone type mind game, either "real" or partly in the main astronaut's mind, and involved mirrors, mirror images, alternate realities, and all sorts of interesting things for a boy -- including stylishly attired future people and lots of campy cool atmosphere. I still don't know: was there a dual twin Earth hidden on the far side of the sun? Was the main dude simply mad, or had he gone crazy because he couldn't handle the mirror people? And furthermore, is this where Pink Floyd got their idea for the title of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)? If there is an identical twin Earth, is it as creepy as an identical twin sister? The mirror thing was spooky to think about. It still is.

So many films, so little time. One of the big daddies of that time, of course, was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That one I saw at the theater, and while there nobody seemed to know what the hell was going on. I liked that aspect when adults were thrown for a loop, which is where I lived most of the time anyway.

I read somewhere recently that Barbarella is being remade. Good God -- if it is, I hope they entirely rewrite the actual "plot." The original is horrible, truth be told. Save the Barbarella/ Jane Fonda images and forget about the rest of it. As for the other ones, I'll be looking out for them.

Meanwhile, remember to set the controls for the heart of the sun. Arrivederci!