Friday, May 19, 2017 — It’s 1:23 a.m. and I should have the cans strapped to my head copying some Russian OM’s wavery over-the-pole CW sigs at this hour (though admittedly I haven’t tracked 20 meter propagation much since the waning days of Cycle 23). But no, I’m here pecking away at my keyboard with yet another classic horror movie playing on Turner Classic Movies. I’m not paying much attention, this one is a British film, “The Giant Behemoth,” which is apparently the 1959 version of a movie title along the lines of “Big Ass Spider!” (a real movie too. My son roared laughing … me (with my fear of spiders), well, not so much!).
But the movie I did watch earlier was called “Them!”, which was the first in a series of classic-but-little-known Warner Bros. Pronoun monster movies. The sequels (predictably) were “He!”, “She!”, “It!”, “You!” and others with minor variations and combinations.
Sorry to be a spoiler if you haven’t seen this movie, but “Them!”is a movie about mutant ants. Thank heavens for atomic bomb tests, or we would be lacking about 1/3 of our superheroes and 2/3 of our classic monster film creatures.
Getting to the point … there’s a scene where some ants hatch aboard a ship at sea; they attack the crew. The ship’s on-duty Sparks gets out a distress call using what at first looks like a Vibroplex Original. But wait — there’s a couple of close shots of the key, and it doesn’t quite look right to be a Vibroplex. For your benefit, I have the rather grainy photo posted here, and a video clip of that scene in the move.
The pivot frame looks to me like an Improved Vibroplex frame; I say that judging by the rounded ends of the horizontal “arms” on the frame. The frame looks somewhat smaller (shorter) than a Vibroplex frame, though having never actually measured them, I’m going on my gut on this one. The terminal screws on the base look closer together than the spacing used on most other bugs. Some of the early A-to-Z Improved Vibroplex keys I’ve seen had terminals with closer spacing similar to this key.
But I’m not quite ready to suggest it IS an Improved Vibroplex yet — check out the damper. It could be the lights reflecting off the damper arm, but the damper looks more rounded than the A-to-Z damper; it resembles (to me) a post-1940s Vibroplex damper.
Of course, you may want to just shake your head and wonder how my XYL tolerates my pursuit of such movie minutiae. Am I the only one who scans the backgrounds of classic movies for a familiar Hallicrafters, Collins, RCA or Hammarlund receiver or transmitter lurking there? Or chuckles to see an actor in military regalia bellow commands into a microphone plugged into a receiver’s headphone jack? I don’t know for certain, but I doubt I’m alone.
You can find the movie “Them” split into three parts on the Daily Motion website, with the first section here if you care to give the film a look.
73 es GN, de KY4Z SK …. dit dit …