Journey to the Just Off-Center of the Earth

A type of movie you don’t see anymore, or at least I don’t, are Journey to the Center of the Earth movies, and I at least am the poorer for it.

There was a time when you couldn’t drive by the movie theater without seeing one of them advertised.

The picture on the poster was of a type certain to grab the imagination of a young person.

Concerns regarding subliminal advertising were just then seeping into the culture, but as to the subtle or concealed signals that such a poster might convey…no worries.

These posters were about as subtle as combat between Gargantua and Mothra, a highly enlarged lizard and moth respectively if you don’t personally know the individuals, who exacted a lot of damage on the immediate environment simply by coming into the scene and saying hello, much less while engaged in mixed martial arts.

The story seldom varied from movie to movie — and there were more than a few of them — and it was conveyed in visual summary on the poster.

A group of generally intrepid explorers – though there was often a rat fink among the party – had found a way to exit the mere skin of the earth where nothing much exciting was happening, and descend through several miles and multiple layers to the earth’s core, a central location that was surprisingly pleasant or at least habitable.

The means of doing so might be to drop into a live volcano, which due to the obdurate stiff-necked-ness of the scientific community had never been tried before — go figure! — or to descend into the Marianas Trench in the Pacific, the deepest point on Earth as we were told by a military type guy pointing to a map of the Pacific, where the super-strong vessels is sucked beneath the ‘mantle’ of the earth, whatever that is, another word tossed around with some abandon, and sent merrily on its way downward.

In any event, as conveyed by the poster, not only is the Center of the Earth not a heaving mass of molten rock as so-called ‘science’ would have us believe, it actually turns out to be a pretty nice place.

It’s a bit like hearing all your life how bad it is to visit Branson or Las Vegas or one of these popular tourist places and finding out once you get there that it’s not so bad after all.

No Center of the Earth story is complete without a primitive tribe of people who dwell there.

These people are, at first impression, very warlike. No one could say that their initial attitude in greeting the explorers is welcoming. To the contrary, just the opposite. But their ways are worthy of study, and regarding the anthropologist who accompanies the explorers, he is more or less in hog heaven.

As to dress, it can be said that furs loom large on the fashion landscape. The girls of the tribe were certainly cute right out of the box, and even cuter when dressed so invitingly and sometimes sparingly in animal pelts of one sort or another. We cannot fault them for this ‘spraringness’ thing. They didn’t know that explorers were going to drop in from the sky today! So they had meant to put on the full body tiger skin outfit and had instead pulled out the muskrat wrap from the closet. What of it? They make the best of it.

Primitive or not, these young women had advanced into the Age of Makeup.

The cast of characters from one movie to another shared certain similarities, and it can be said that if two Center of the Earth movies were being filmed at the same time and two assistants on the movie lot, each associated with the other movie, were running full tilt past one another carrying the script of each in a loose-leaf fashion, and they collided and the papers went flying, and in complete and unthinking haste they assembled two new scripts of approximately the right length at random from the sheaves and then went sprinting on their way…well, no one would really notice.

There is always:

• The head of the expedition, Dr. Frotherington, we shall call him, who has spent the most productive years of his life in the lab and in the academy pursuing a theory of, you guessed it, civilization at the Center of the Earth.

  For this he has paid dearly in academic repute and social standing, turning him into a bit of a nut. This is all he thinks about! Well, it has paid off, after all, here is that very civilization he has posited, but it comes at a cost, expressed mainly by absent-mindedness and a certain woolyheadeness, particularly as regards immediate dangers.

  There may or there may not be pterodactyls in each of these movies, cinema experts go back and forth on this, but there is always a Dr. Frotherington, and if the beasts exist, Dr. F. is always wandering into their nest.

• There is an expedition leader of sorts, the guy doing the heavy lifting, putting Dr. F’s woolly schemes into actuality, who dresses for some reason exactly as you would imagine the tour guide of an African safari might dress. His name is Ben or Race or Stanton or Sky or Hardwick or Barton. Any of these or the like will do.

  He is an attractive sort, just short of brawny, but with a sensitive side. His job mainly in every segment of the movie is to shout “I tell you, it can’t be done!”

  He does this so often that you come to expect the phrase to come out of his mouth when someone asks him to pass the saltines. “I tell you, it can’t be done!”

  He and the young bucks of the ancient tribe can’t be said really to get along, and there is certain amount of bumping and shoving such as you might get in a boy’s high school locker room. He may get a blowgun dart in the side of his neck at some point.

• Elisa Frotherington, daughter of the good doctor.

  She has been the one that has kept the old fool on track all these years, and has attended to his papers and various research projects.

  Let us just say that she is an attractive girl and leave it at that, and looks particularly fetching when, due to a confusing scenario which involved kidnapping, the threat of being eaten alive, and our old friends the pterodactyls, we soon enough see her in native garb, that being these pelts of animal skins I speak of.

• Members of the primitive tribe, who are mostly interchangeable save for the chief, who is just as pigheaded as Dr. F, and a robust warrior type or two to serve as counterbalance to the expedition’s leader, who look distinctly like they’d like to marry Elisa.

• The pterodactyls.

• Other members of the exploration party, whom we never get to know all that well, which is just as well considering that they are there mainly to be eaten by the pterodactyls.

Oh, I’m leaving all sorts of people out, as well as species that never existed at the same time on earth or never existed at all, but which survive down here due to its remote nature and freedom from cellphones and other pollutants of modern life, but you get that in an epic like this, painted on this sprawling canvas. Like I say, these pictures at the end of the day are scientific in nature.

The lessons to be drawn from these movies by the young person are several.

• No matter how had things are going in your life, at least you are not being eaten alive by pterodactyls. This provides context and puts things into perspective.

• To judge by the way that all these boys are looking at Elisa like they would really, really like to marry her; the value of that institution is thereby inscribed on the young male viewer’s brain, steering him to behaviors that will make him a worthy partner someday.

• In the matter of big theories and the way that they take over your life, all in all, better not. All in all, it is best to have a little more variety in your mental and emotional life. I mean look at Dr. Featheringstone, he’s nearly out of his mind. I mean Frotherington.

 Well, of course the entire back half of the movie has to do with devising what almost anyone would call an over-complicated scheme to get the explorers back to the surface, inclusive of balloons stitched together — for some reason — from dinosaur skin of all things and droplets of poison from the blowgun darts that will put them into a state of suspended animation for the time it takes to travel through the heat of the volcano, but the real action has to do with whether Alysia will stay behind with the one noble warrior type and, conversely, if the cutest of the girls in the animal skins, who ironically is daughter to the chief of the tribe, just as Elisa is daughter to Dr. F, finds a way to sneak on board and escape with the explorers, having developed a crush on the safari leader type, Ben or Race or Stanton or Sky or Hardwick or Barton, or whatever his name is. She looks at him in a way that suggests that she too would like to get married.

In the course of carefully viewing perhaps a dozen or eighteen of these movies in the theaters, aside from girls who dutifulness to their dates was on full display but who otherwise looked as though they would be happier looking at an abandoned industrial parking lot with cracks spreading through the pavement and aged yellowed newspapers blowing against the rusty chain link fence, itself collapsing, I don’t believe I saw a single female or group of females at these movies.

There’s no accounting for tastes and though women are generally accorded superior aesthetic appreciation, the rule doesn’t always hold true.

I mean look at Center of the Earth movies.

As you see, all in all, a fruitful topic of study for the young male mind, offering examples of the benefits of scientific inquiry, persistence, teamwork, a healthy dose of competitive spirit, and the importance of good footwork in all endeavors, most especially in the important matter of dodging pterodactyls.