film and architecture section: Just Imagine by David Butler, architecture and film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film (The waterloo University syllabus) (click HERE for syllabus)
film index: 30

film: Just Imagine
director: David Butler
writers:
production: US Fox FIlm
release: 23 November 1930
playtime: 108
visual: BnW
Language: English
Subtitles:
Genre: sci fi, comedy
Cast: El Brendel, Maureen O'Sullivan, John Garrick, Marjorie White
size: 672 mb

reference: avaxhome.ws

Description and download:

Just Imagine is a humorous science-fiction movie musical presented by Fox Film Corporation in 1930, directed by David Butler, to console audiences distressed by the Great Depression.

New York, 1980: airplanes have replaced cars, numbers have replaced names, pills have replaced food, government-arranged marriages have replaced love, and test tube babies have replaced ... well, you get the idea. Scientists revive a man struck by lightning in 1930; he is rechristened "Single O". He is befriended by J-21, who can't marry the girl of his dreams because he isn't "distinguished" enough -- until he is chosen for a 4-month expedition to Mars by a renegade scientist. The Mars J-21, his friend, and stowaway Single O visit is full of scantily clad women doing Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers and worshiping a fat middle-aged man.

Very rare 1930 science fiction film about futuristic 1980 New York where airplanes have replaced cars and features a combination of booze jokes, sci-fi, lewd sex, vaudeville jokes. Babies are gotten through vending machines, and a trip to Mars proves Martians to be twins, (Each set has a good over-sexed one, and an evil homicidal one.) Pepper this oddity with bad puns, miniature effects, and musical numbers and you got a bizarre wacky film! It stars El Brendel, Maureen O'Sullivan & John Garrick.

Clips of the cityscape from this movie were later used in the Universal serials Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; the mock-up Mars spaceship was reused in the former, as Dr. Zarkov's spaceship. Also seen in the first Flash Gordon serial are the strange hand-weapons carried by J21 and RT42 on Mars, which are held under rather than over the fist, and re-used footage of dancing girls cavorting about and on a Martian idol with moving arms.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021016/
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Imagine

screenshots: