11/12/2022 0 Comments Black lagoon season 1 episode guide![]() All the screenwriters had to do now was pick up the Kong thread again, only more directly this time. Even before the numbers came in, and even before the original started shooting, work on the sequel was immediately underway.īy this time, Universal knew full well the value of a good monster franchise, and what’s more didn’t want to waste that amazing costume on only one film.Ĭoming up with a script for the sequel was much easier since the first time around Alland had pretty much just chopped his original treatment in half. Even the gills moved when it breathed.įilmed for under $500,000 and released in 3D (all that underwater photography made it perhaps the most effective use of 3D picture up to that point), by the end of 1954 the Creature from the Black Lagoon had already grossed over $3 million. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect an evolutionary missing link between man and fish would look like. With the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster, you always knew there was a man back there behind the makeup, but the Gill Man was so elaborate, so detailed and believable, and so utterly alien that it was easy to accept it as it was. But that’s beside the point.Īudiences had never seen a full-body monster costume like that before. The real star, though, was the Gill Man costume, designed by a massive team of artists and sculptors in the makeup department, though full credit was usually taken by Bud Westmore, who’d inherited Jack Pierce’s mantel but was by most accounts was nowhere near the level of talent. ![]() Richard Denning was cast as the trigger happy heavy who does, Julie Adams came aboard as the Gill Man’s unwitting love interest, and Whit Bissell was there too, if only because he was in everything. Jack Arnold, who was fast establishing himself as the king of Universal science fiction, was again brought in to direct, and Richard Carlson was again brought in to star as the heroic scientist who doesn’t want to hurt the Gill Man. The final script, which had been reshaped and redirected by Arthur Ross, remained mostly an amalgam of scenes and ideas from earlier films, including Kong, The Lost World, It Came From Outer Space, and The Thing from Another World. Once there, by law, the creature runs amok before being killed.īut even as the first few (of many) drafts of the script were being written and rewritten by a handful of writers, Alland decided to distance himself from the Kong connection by confining the action to the Amazon and leaving the creature’s fate in question at the end, just in case a sequel was called for. The Kong influence was clear, as Alland’s original treatment involved the creature falling for a young human woman and getting captured by scientists who drag him back to civilization. He whipped up a quick treatment in which he essentially moved King Kong’s storyline into the waters of the Amazon. It’s unclear if anyone ever took him up on that.īut a full decade after first hearing it, that Amazonian fishman story was still sitting there in the back of his head, nagging at him. The other guests got a chuckle out of that, but the cinematographer insisted it was absolutely true, even offering to provide photographic evidence. In 1941, Alland was at a dinner party at Welles’ home when one of the guests, a South American cinematographer, told the story of an amphibious humanoid creature who emerged from the Amazon once a year, grabbed a young woman from a local village, and then disappeared again. ![]() ![]() William Alland was a close friend of Orson Welles, a member of the Mercury Theater troupe, and the man who played the faceless reporter in Citizen Kane. Even if this aquatic fish face would go on to become the most iconic and influential cinematic monster of the 1950s, his isolation within the Universal pantheon is somehow fitting, given the storyline that plays out onscreen. In that way, the Gill Man was like the Mummy, forced to carry his series alone. Of course, given the three-film franchise’s contemporary time frame and American setting, it would’ve been a stretch anyway to find some reason to have him mix it up with the Wolf Man. Arriving six years after the golden age of Universal Horror was capped with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon was never able to clumsily shuffle his way into the expanded universe shared by Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and, if briefly, The Invisible Man. ![]()
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