The will to planetvernichten
I noticed this image while riffling through an excellent report about the Mars Attacks trading cards of 1962:
As a neo-quasi-post-Jungian, it seems to me that there is a strong sense of human destiny around this image (so good Lucas used it twice), a strong shared sense of urgency around the idea that at some point we will need to attack a planet-sized thing, deliver a payload from manned craft, and get out of Dodge before it blows into bazillion pieces. And that the future of our species will depend upon success.
I wonder what that's all about.
posted by The Other Front at 10:22 PM
3 Comments:
Dunno, man. They'd only had airplanes for 50 years when they made those.
The other thought is collective memory, the power of this exclamation point...
Bronowski spends some time contrasting Auschwitz and Hiroshima here (36:50), along with some lighter topics.
Or perhaps there is a conflation of the big boom with the heroic deliverance at Midway.
In 1962 this stuff was still reasonably fresh in memory...1962 was closer to Midway than today is to (for example) Too Legit to Quit.
But I can't think of an historical example that has all the elements:
- Planes deliver big bang and get away
- Result is destruction on massive scale
- This fully reverses the fortune of war
Note that the Kamikazes were based on the same fantasy image, except for the getting away part.
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