The Cat From Outer Space
The Cat from Outer Space landed in 1978. This movie follows the exploits of an alien which crash landed on Earth and had to find enough raw material to repair his spacecraft to get back to the mothership.
Most of the props and much of the storyline would appear amateurish by today’s standards but when it was released, it was good entertainment. Today it is still good for an evening’s casual viewing with the kids.
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Written by Ted Key and directed by Norman Tokar for Walt Disney Productions, The Cat from Outer Space opened with a low-profile emergency landing by a UFO carrying an alien, who was called Jake in the movie. Jake looked exactly like a run-of-the-mill cat. Which makes it good for unchaperoned viewing by children considering that it is unlikely to give them nightmares. On the other hand, an alien which looked exactly like any other cat you have ever seen, makes you look twice at that pussy now rubbing against your shin. Could it be … ? I suggest you don’t think too much about that possibility or you might have nightmares.
In the movie, Jake communicated by telepathy via a collar around it’s neck. This high-tech device also looked like something you could probably buy at a stall in a fun-fair. Not too sophisticated by today’s standard, maybe, but it would save a lot of money when the kids who watch this movie want one for their cats, too. Other than telepathy, Jake could also do telekinesis, and demonstrated this ability very loftily in the closing scene, as he levitated the judge who was inducting him into the care and protection of the US government, as a citizen, no less.
Between the opening and the closing scenes, the The Cat From Outer Space movie was filled with the various antics of Jake and the humans who befriended him, as they went along gathering enough raw material to repair the UFO. Said raw material was no more and no less than gold. Nothing too exotic like positron-prepped uranium or tachychronically tailspun titanium. Just good old plain gold.
I think Jake must have been well-appraised of the value of rare metals available on earth before he left from whatever far-away constellation he came from. I would like to think that Jake might have come from the Felicitus constellation. You know, that collection of astral bodies you could sometimes see lurking behind the Pisces constellation. If you looked hard enough.
For me, the best scene was towards the end of the movie, when Jake, in a biplane, was pursued by a helicopter. I had a good time trying to figure out how the script writer could have convinced the director that an airplane, even if it was just a biplane, could not outfly a helicopter. Maybe in 1978, helicopters could actually outfly planes. Maybe, in 1978, Disney thought that kids who watched this kind of movies would not be too up-to-date with the aerodynamic properties of flying objects.
The army tried to thwart Jake and his friends as unsuccessfully as they could and in the end Jake succeeded and the UFO lifted off to join the mothership. Without Jake. Yes, Jake stayed behind as a fully-sworn-in citizen of the good old US of A. Then Jake sired Tom and Tom sired Garfield and now you all know how the fat cat got his ability to mind control Jon.
Find out if I made up that last sentenceby watching the The Cat from Outer Space DVD. After all, what is moviedom if it is not filled with fantasy and spiced with make-believe?
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