Monday, October 21, 2013

Anthropolgy (for Anthropology)

In what is assuredly one of the campiest films ever made, a 1970 "sci-fi monster movie of sorts" called Trog, Joan Crawford (both motherly and matronly, but not yet "Mommie Dearest" to the moviegoing public) plays house with a troglodyte. Crawford is Dr. Brockton, a British anthropologist who discovers, photographs, and eventually subdues with a dart gun, an ancient, recently thawed-out humanoid with a "Planet of the Apes"-type face and long flowing hair. Apart from the lone-surviving, Ice-Age relic living in a cave angle, Trog bears a remarkable similarity to Bigfoot: he's hairy and simian, eats small prey like fish and lizards, throws rocks when required to, and uses complex language to communicate. In one especially odd scene, Dr. Brockton and her daughter teach the creature how to express love as well as ideas by means of a walking baby doll. Issues like whether the "monster" is actually an undergraduate hoax, or alternately, should be hunted down and killed, are also reminiscent of current cultural debates around this topic. Anthropology has much to say about mankind's past, present, and future, and all of the many stages and "links" along the way. You can help improve bibliographical access to anthropological works by making sure that typos for this word (and all of its variant forms) are spelled correctly in your catalog. We found 16 cases of Anthropolgy in OhioLINK, and 226 in WorldCat.

(TV screenshot from Trog, taken by the author.)

Carol Reid

No comments: