OneMinuteGallatica (?) | Earth Boys, Beware / 2011

alien species

by Douglas Messerli

 

OneMinuteGallatica ? (screenwriter and director) Earth Boys, Beware / 2011 [3 minutes]

 

Perhaps one of the earliest of the spoofs on Boys Beware, this film lists its own copyright by Nerdy Art Productions as 1951, an impossibility since the original appeared in 1955. Even the writer and director are unknown, although the film was posted under the handle “OneMinuteGallatica,” who lists several other films, evidently made by the same individual. The film was posted to YouTube, so it reports 12 years ago, but from what date that post dates back we have only one clue, February 6, 2011.

      I was particularly intrigued by this short because it uses much of the text of the original, with a voice of the original narrator, while showing clips from Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, featuring only the scenes in which Billy Gray (Bobby Benson) and the extraterrestrial Klaatu spend a day together. Here, as in the original Boys Beware, Billy is called Jimmy and Klaatu, Ralph. I had long planned to write about this scene in connection with the Robert Wise film as a strangely coded message that hints at a bizarre relationship between and the older man and the young boy, which certainly might draw offended attention if used in a film today. I’ll have to see if it was retained in the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves. In the earlier movie Helen’s fiancée Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe) is certainly upset by the relationship between her son and the stranger.

       As in the original, Ralph asks about Jimmy’s baseball playing, with Jimmy becoming quickly convinced that he “is a real nice guy” and a good listener. The narrator goes on to explain that, just as in the 1955 version, that Ralph goes tells several off-color jokes. Indeed, Jimmy hadn’t enjoyed himself so much for a long time, the narrator repeats from the earlier Boys Beware.  

    The same words are used to describe Klaatu as in the original Boys movie: “Jimmy didn’t know that Ralp was sick, a sickness not visible like small pox, but no less dangerous and contagious…You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.” Once more, queers are perceived as alien species.

        In the original Klaatu may be queer, after all he is from another far more developed planet than ours; but there is no evidence that the alien is a homosexual, unless you see his association with Gort, the mechanical man, as being a sexual one. Gort is certainly loyal to Klaatu, but I think sex might be imagined by only the most prurient of viewers.

       Ralph is similarly very generous with Billy, giving him, at one point, priceless diamonds used as money on his planet, and he takes him not only to the Lincoln Memorial, but to view his own spaceship, now cordoned off. Together, they also visit the home of learnéd professor played by Sam Jaffe in the 1951 movie by Wise.

       The juvenile authorities, in this case, consist of an entire division of the US military, who arrest Ralph, saving Jimmy for further harm by returning him to his worried mother.

       A brief trailer promises an upcoming film, “Don’t Go Into the Park After Dark,” again starring Bobby Benson and Jimmy, who if you recall, did wander out into the National Mall, curious about Klaatu and his spaceship, quite late at night. What he witnesses is own mother saving earth by speaking the necessary words, “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto.”

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).