Hello!

It’s a new Dick Dinman DVD Classics Corner on the Air podcast with George Feltenstein championing the recent Blu-ray restoration of the 1951 Technicolor remake of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat.

Dick really goes for this movie; the two of them compare and contrast it with the 1936 James Whale version. I have to admit that I too was impressed with the Technicolor restoration, even if my Irene Dunne fan membership precludes me from doing somersaults for Kathryn Grayson.

Is the science news of late imitating cinema?  This Land of Science article reports on a fairly amazing real phenomenon: Scientists Discover a Free-Range Planet with Unbelievable Magnetism. This celestial body is bigger than Jupiter, orbits no star and presently roams the cosmos only 20 light years distant. Although not a star itself, it radiates its own heat and is incredibly hot. Most importantly, it generates and incredibly powerful magnetic field, 4 million times greater than that of the Earth. It’s described as a ‘planetary Goliath.’

A ‘planetary Goliath?’   Shouldn’t Takashi Shimura or Morris Ankrum be saying that?

If that’s not enough, Land of Science’s visualization of the Lone Star Bandit Astral Body, sporting a ring of polar lights like our own Aurora Borealis made into a gas stove burner, looks remarkably like a certain nefarious planetary interloper that gave Earth (and Toho films) considerable grief back in ’62. It’s really big (check), extraordinarily magnetic (check) and on a collision course with Earth (no it’s not, that a total lie). Remember, we at CineSavant are avid science readers, but only when reality fuels our adolescent sci-fi fantasies.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson