I was having a conversation with a friend, and a comment came up involving tiny elephants. I started describing this scene to them, and everyone gave me this weird look. I then tried googling it, and failed miserably. Now everyone thinks I’m imagining things.
I have a distinct memory of a scene, most likely from a movie I saw on TV in passing, showing two men searching through someone’s victorian-ish lab/study/library, looking at various oddities. One of the things on display was a tiny, tea-cup-sized elephant under a glass cloche on an end-table. One of the men in the room was quite taken by the little elephant, and had to be practically dragged away to do whatever it was they were actually in there to accomplish.
Actually, scenes with shrunken elephants occur in several places. (For some reason, elephants, probably because they are so large, seem to be the “natural” choice for shrunken beasts. You don’t see many shrunken hippos, or rhinos, or whales, for some reason). You can see them in:
The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)
a Girl in his Pocket (Un amour de poche), also 1957
The “Jerry was a Man” episode of the TV series Masters of Science Fiction (2007) (based on a Heinlein short story)
There are probably others
If you like tiny literary elephants, you might like “Elephas Frumenti” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, one of the Tales from Gavagan’s Bar in the anthology of the same title.(1954), and readable here:
You know, the more I read this thread, the more I remember a tiny elephant in a jar too, but it wasn’t from Sky Captain.
I think I remember the elephant being small, and trumpeting, but it was a really high pitched trumpet. I want to say it was from a Roger Rabbit-type movie.
Despicable Me has such a scene, the North Korean scientists use a shrink ray on an elephant and once it is mouse sized it runs around and trumpets in a high pitch.
I am almost positive there is a Ray Harryhausen movie with a Tiny Elephant. I know there is a full sized elephant in 20 Million Miles to Earth and a tiny Horse (sort of) in Valley of the Gwangi but I could have sworn there is a tiny Elephant somewhere.
