THE BUBBLE!



Remember all the complaining that went on when King published Under The Dome?  It was  compared to The Simpsons. I was doing some research today into Arch Oboler, one of the radio's great scare masters.

One of Oboler's films was titled, "The Bubble."  Guess what it was about!  From Wikipedia:
A young couple, Mark (Cole) and Katherine (Walley) are traveling on a small airplane and are forced to land in a remote town where the people are behaving oddly. They then attempt to escape from the town, but discover that there is a giant glass-like force field bubble around it that prevents anyone from leaving.
TCM gives a fuller synopsis, including these tidbits:
 the visitors discover that the area is covered by a huge, transparent dome and that once a week a resident disappears, presumably to be studied by the aliens who have trapped the community in a "zoo." Mark and Catherine take refuge in an old mill in the countryside while Mark attempts to dig an escape tunnel under the dome.
Unfortunately, the movie gets terrible reviews!  Apparently Oboler's great success in radio did not transfer naturally to the big screen.  Alas, the theater of the mind is best of all.  The poor reviews, bad acting, bad directing, might explain why Oboler chose  not to show viewers any of the film int he preview below!


2 comments:

  1. Oh schnikes.

    I guess it's possible King could have seen this movie and then the submerged memory emerged in the form of these disjointed images because he can't remember them all that well.

    I don't say this is true, though.

    What is true is that Alan Moore based Watchmen on the original 64 Outer Limits episode "The Architects of Fear."

    Moore even acknowledged this. The relevant comments can be found on the Wikipedia comic entry.

    ChrisC

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  2. The headline to this made me think of the character in "Finding Nemo" who always hollers "bubbles!" when bubbles come out of the thing in the aquarium.

    Never heard of the movie, but it doesn't surprise me that there is an older movie that King was inspired by. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, even if it was an outright theft, it's fine by me; replicating a concept like that is only one small part of writing a successful story. Which, in my opinion, "Under the Dome" was.

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