beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
[personal profile] beamjockey
Remember when I posted about the 1923 Fleischer animated film explaining special relativity?

According to Richard Godwin, his ever-eclectic company Apogee Books is coming out with an edition of Garrett P. Serviss's The Einstein Theory of Relativity. It comes with a DVD that includes not only the animated relativity movie, but also the Fleischer film Evolution, which stirred up controversy in the 1920s and which features stop-motion dinosaurs by Willis O'Brien.

(The relativity film is really Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Relativitäts-Theorie, directed by Hanns-Walter Kornblum, repackaged by Max Fleischer for the U.S. market. I think he may have added some footage to the German movie.)

Fifteen bucks gets you the Serviss book and both movies. Wow.

(I don't know whether the films are the seven-reel classroom versions or the four-reel, 40-minute theatrical cuts; I suspect the latter. Will have to ask Richard.)

Yes, this is the same Garrett P. Serviss, a tireless popularizer of science, who penned an unauthorized sequel to War of the Worlds, namely Edison's Conquest of Mars. Which you can also buy from Apogee! Two-fisted adventurers Tom Edison and Lord Kelvin reverse-engineer the alien spacecraft and death-rays, build their own fleet, and take vengeance back to the Martians, while rescuing pretty girls in the process.

Edited to Add: I'll embed a Youtube clip, only 20 minutes long. Disappointingly, this version ignores the most interesting parts of Einstein's relativity.

Date: 2006-04-07 06:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] serge-lj.livejournal.com
Are Edison & Kelvin the spiritual ancestors of the Heterodyne Boys?

Date: 2006-04-07 07:54 pm (UTC)
ext_63737: Posing at Zeusaphone concert, 2008 (Default)
From: [identity profile] beamjockey.livejournal.com
Very much so; well, Edison is, anyway. There were huge numbers of boy-inventor dime novels influenced by the Edison myth; a generation later, the trope was still sturdy when Stratemeyer's gang trotted out Tom Swift. The Heterodyne Boys were directly inspired by a large collection of forgotten also-ran competitors of Tom Swift on the shelves of a bookstore in Kalamazoo: The Motorboat Boys, the Wireless Boys, the Young Aviators, the Motion Picture Chums...

I think it was John Clute who coined the term "Edisonade" for this kind of story. Build your gadget, head out to the wilderness, have adventures. Repeat for next volume in series.

Date: 2006-04-07 09:41 pm (UTC)
ext_63737: Posing at Zeusaphone concert, 2008 (Default)
From: [identity profile] beamjockey.livejournal.com
Oops. Now fixed. Thanks!

Date: 2006-04-08 06:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gypsy1969.livejournal.com
To buy it for work, or for home, that is the question.

Fleischer

Date: 2006-05-20 06:49 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Has this book been released yet? I'm an obsessive fan of Max Fleischer.

On Ones
www.darlingdimples.com

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beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
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