YES, YES, SAY IT! HE VAS MY BOYFRIEND!
No escaping death for me!
Destiny! Destiny!
No tongue!
Oh jeeze, I’ve created a monster…
Forgive me for hijacking your serious thread so thoroughly…
damn, that was fun…
Young Frankenstein (that’s Frankenshteen!) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail appear to be guaranteed thread hijack triggers around here.
IIRC, Stephen King makes a similar point in his book Danse Macabre. In Frankenstein (the book), the creature convinces the doctor to make a female mate for him, but when the doc thinks of the possibility of the two of them reproducing, he destroys her.
King points out that it would child’s play for the doc to have made the mate sterile; in fact it probably would have been very difficult to make her fertile.
And it occurs to me now that even if they did somehow manage to conceive, wouldn’t the child just be a normal child anyway? Genetically it would be the child of whoever “donated” the male creature’s testicles and woman who originally owned the eggs.
“Taffeta, darling.”
“Taffeta to you, too, dear.”
David Skal, in The Monster Show, traces the Monster’s look to a cubist/modernist aesthetic that was “cutting-edge” in the Thirties. The flat head is intended to provide a tension between organic and mechanical.
As are the neck rivets.
Earlier concepts were ape-man-like or even pure robot; from that they seem to have arrived at the organic/mechanical fusion of the final design.
The play (prior to the movie) depicted the monster as a lurching, gauche, oddly colored doppelganger of its creator.
Then, the Borg are the children of Frankenstein.
After I typed that, it seems so obvious…
I don’t know how much Mary Shelley knew about biology. The Russians under Lenin were still using the theory of inheriting acquired characteristics; if you cut of a frog’s legs, his offspring would have no legs.
Was Mary Shelley exhumed by Percy Byshe Shelley or so I have my Shellys confused?
The book was written in the 1800s. What I remember is that Dr. F. was working on an elixar that would either allow transplants to occur without any hitches, or restore life to dead people. The best way to test it was to make a person from human remains from the university’s medical department. IIRC the book was a treatise on the potential horrors of vivisection.
Well, since Mary Shelley outlived Percy B., I doubt he could’ve exhumed her.
Exhumed? I’m not sure of the significance of that term in the context of this discussion.
In any event, I’ve always been under the impression that they were husband and wife.
“My grandfather’s work was doo-doo!”
It was Rossetti.
So much for remembering English Lit.
The Beggar Maid who still stirs us today is dead Elizabeth Siddal, whose body Rossetti once exhumed in order to retrieve the poems he had impetuously buried with her.
Yes, one must certainly allow for the state of medical knowledge for the time.
"LIFE!!! GIVE MY CREATION… LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!!!"