Now here’s a movie that doesn’t get near enough attention for being the truly horrible film that it is. I’ve never hid the fact that I enjoy movies that fall into the “so bad it’s good” category, but this… I don’t know. Starring James Arness in his pre-Gunsmoke days, the bizarre 1951 release Two Lost Worlds plays like a pirate yarn crossed with a historical newsreel. It contains dialogue that would do Ed Wood Jr. proud, spiced up with pretentious narration that seems to exist solely to transition between disjointed film clips. One just cannot shake the feeling that footage from three aborted movies was edited together, and after about 45 minutes of pirates, romance and dopey attempts at humor, we’ve completely forgotten that the picture was supposed to include some sort of prehistoric shenanigans. but then we find our heroes stranded upon an island populated with dinosaurs. It’s about time! Unfortunately, those dinosaurs are merely lizards and baby alligators with fins glued to their backs, the footage having been borrowed from the 1940 version of One Million B.C. I can just picture a movie theater in the 1950s on a Saturday afternoon, packed with kids that have endured all this drivel only to see the crappiest dinosaur scene ever… in the last 10 minutes of the movie! Riots must have ensued. If this has somehow whet your appetite for more you’re in luck, as the swell folk at Image Entertainment have put Two Lost Worlds
This lithograph from 1898 isn’t just busy, it’s also big, measuring over twenty feet in length. At the time, the festivities shown on this poster looked like a day of fun, but today would surely have liability lawyers sharpening their knives. The original, in the Library of Congress, has been assembled from a number of pieces, which accounts for the grid-like pattern across the scene. I’ve attempted to reduce the largest gaps between the fragments with Photoshop, but to remove them all would be a daunting task.
“The MARIPOSA GROVE is situated in the southern portion of the Yosemite National Park, 35 miles from Yosemite Valley. There are two other groves of big trees in the Park – Tuolumne Grove with about 40 trees, and Merced Grove with about 100. The Mariposa Grove has about 500. The most famous tree in this Grove is the Grizzly Giant, 30 feet in diameter at the base, 93 feet in circumference and 204 feet tall.” Enthusiasts of big trees, particularly fans of big tree postcards, should check out an earlier post on the subject.
Now this is an old postcard. Postmarked in 1905, it shows the Crawford House in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The card was published by The Rotograph Co. of New York, a company that was active from 1904 until 1911.
This unmailed postcard probably dates from the 1920’s. The back includes this description:
NEARING THE SUMIT
PIKES PEAK AUTO HIGHWAY
Colorado Springs – Manitou, Colorado
This new Auto Road to the summit of Pikes Peak is, without question, the Wonder Trip of America.
There were two or three years that our family vacations were dotted with visits to caverns. It seems sort of odd, looking back on it, and I’m not sure what inspired my parents to get in touch with their “inner spelunker”. At any rate, the cavern visits were fun, which I suppose was the idea. I know we went to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, Wonder Cave and Inner Space Caves in Texas, and the one that I recall being the most impressed with, Mammoth Cave, located in north-central Kentucky. A national park since 1941, it is the longest known cave system in the world, with over 365 miles of passageways. This Curt Teich postcard bears a 1940 postmark, and the back reads:
Echo River is the largest body of water yet discovered in Mammoth Cave and a boat ride on this river, down on the lowest level, is an unforgettable experience. Here, 360 feet underground, is found several species of eyeless fish.
