| 1959: Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired an episode titled Special Delivery, with a very interesting plotline. This one is worth exploring a bit. One of the boys in the neighborhood orders mushroom spores through the mail, to start his own basement business and soon strange things start happening in the neighborhood. The father of the boy, Bill, has a good friend who pulls him aside and asks him to play “psychiatrist” and says “Something strange is going on in the world,” to which Jim responds, “Hasn’t there always been?” The fellow states “Something terrible is going on in the world,” to which Jim replies ”well, Mrs. Goodbuddy was complaining about flying saucers.” … “No, I’m not talking about flying saucers, his pal replies.” The two of them get into a brief philosophical discussion about “intuition.” Then Jim’s friend asks, “Have you noticed that more people are vanishing nowadays than ever before?” After a few more bouts of philosophical ranting, we hear Jim’s pal say, “For the next few days, watch everything, feel everything, taste everything, smell everything. Maybe it’s the way the wind blows through those weeds in that lot over there, maybe it’s the way the sun hums on the telephone wire.” The next thing you know, his good buddy Roger’s wife calls and asks if Jim has seen him. Apparently, Jim tells his wife, after he gets off the phone, “he vanished, disappeared, dropped out of sight.” The mother gets upset because she fears her son’s mushroom experiment might be growing toadstools by accident. Bill then ventures over to the neighbor’s house to ask the woman about what might have happened to Roger, and the scene shows that their boy is growing mushrooms down in the basement as well. The next scene cuts to Jim and his wife in their home and a telegram arrives, from Roger, on the road. He tells them to “refuse all special delivery packages.” Then Jim learns from the police that Roger was stopped driving to New Orleans, but not against his will. The family learns the package sent to them with the mushrooms was also from New Orleans, and Jim calls Roger’s wife. Jim asks Dorothy if their family has received any special delivery packages and Dorothy discloses that “all the boys in the neighborhood are going in on them. There’s nothing wrong with raising mushrooms, is there?” She then repeats the question. Jim asks his wife, “What if Roger is right, and something terrible is happening? Like the earth being invaded by things from other worlds? How could creatures from outer space invade us without us noticing them? I don’t mean like meteors or flying saucers or anything like that, but…. Bacteria comes from outer space to, doesn’t it? Seeds, spores, pollen viruses … by the billions, hitting the atmosphere every second, every hour, for millions of years!” Jim exclaims. “Pouring down on us like an invisible rain. Falling on our cities, our towns, our streets, own lawns! Jim’s wife then asks? “Our lawns?” Jim continues, “And Mrs. Goodbuddy, of course people like her are always spraying poisons and taking mushrooms off her lawn so it |
would be hard for a strange new life for to survive in a city, but if they were in say, Alabama, might they not grow to a fine size?” Then his wife asks him mockingly, “You don’t seriously believe, do you, that the great bayou, or whatever the greenhouse company that sent us this package, is owned and operated by six foot tall mushrooms from another planet?” Jim replies, “There is some connection between Roger, mushrooms, Mrs. Goodbuddy, the whole works. … Think about how insidious this could be? These creatures from another world, establish a greenery, then advertise a mechanical invention, ‘Grow giant mushrooms for profit,’ and a million boys send in their money.” Jim then steps up and faces the camera directly, and asks, “Tonight, this very minute, in how many homes all over the USA, are billions of mushrooms being grown by innocent boys in their cellars?” To paraphrase here, Jim’s wife suggests that mushrooms could not start a mail order company because they don’t have arms and legs. Then, after looking in the refrigerator and wondering how some mushrooms got there, all packaged up nicely, Jim speculates, “Cynthia, there is a way for mushrooms to grow arms and legs. What if a man wandering through the swamp, picked them up and ate them. What’s inside would not the mushroom spread through his blood and take over every cell, and change that man from a man to a … martian. Maybe Roger ate some of the mushrooms given to him by his son and was changed into something else?” Roger then goes into the cellar and has a very interesting “conversation” with his boy. The episode closes with Hitchcock claiming he’s seriously considering a countermovement to persuade the mushrooms to grow people in their basement. Special Delivery must be the most telling episode of a TV program I’ve seen. At this point, we can clearly see that Hollywood scriptwriters knew about mushrooms coming from space, the whole idea about “aliens” being in fact, the mushroom, and not real space aliens invading earth, and also, the potential for the mushroom to “change someone” or “make them disappear.” Plan 9 from Outer Space featured plot in which “extraterrestrials seek to stop humanity from creating a doomsday weapon that could destroy the universe.” (8) (8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space |