looking straight at THEM! UNDERSTANDING THE BIG BUG MOVIES OF THE 1950S

Environmental History, Apr 2007 by Tsutsui, William M

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Michael Baskett and Gregory Cushman for their assistance with this essay, and audiences at the conference "Eisenhower's Nuclear Policies and Their Legacies" (sponsored by Kansas State University and the Elsenhower Presidential Center) and the Kansas History Teachers Association annual meeting for their comments on earlier versions of this work.

1. Quoted in Joyce A. Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 103. See also David J. Skal, Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (New York: Norton, 1998), 185.

2. There is no exhaustive listing of giant insect films available, but admirable attempts can be found in James W. Mertins, "Arthropods on the Screen," Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America 32 (Summer 1986): 87-89; and May R. Berenbaum and Richard J. Leskosky, "Insects in Movies," in Encyclopedia of Insects, ed. Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 759.

3. With Peter Graves starring in Beginning of the End and James Arness headlining Them!, the real-life brothers surely qualify as the first family of big bug cinema.

4. Entomologists have noted the scientific limitations of the monikers "big bug" and "giant insect" for the films under discussion. Taxonomically speaking, most of the creatures of "big bug" movies were not "bugs," a term that specifically refers to members of the order Hemiptera (or more narrowly the suborder Heteroptera). Spiders, meanwhile, are neither bugs nor insects (class Insecta), but belong to the class Arachnida. The phylum Arthropoda includes bugs, insects, and spiders, as well as crustaceans, scorpions, and centipedes, making "giant arthropod" movies more scientifically correct, if less appealing stylistically, as a nickname for the genre. See Berenbaum and Leskosky, "Insects in Movies," 756; and Richard J. Leskosky, "Size Matters: Big Bugs on the Big Screen," in Insect Poetics, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 320. James Mertins notes that arachnids are the arthropods most favored by filmmakers, followed by Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera, while "the relative rarity of beetles in films is notable in light of the great number of species." Mertins, "Arthropods," 89.

5. On Mothra, see Yoshikuni Igarashi, "Mothra's Gigantic Egg: Consuming the South Pacific in 19605 Japan," in In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global State, ed. William Tsutsui and Michiko Ito (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 83-102; Leskosky, "Size Matters," 336; and William Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4748. Numerous authors have suggested that Mothra is a silkworm moth, which is presumed to give her special relevance to Japanese audiences due to the longstanding importance of the silk industry in Japan. Mothra does not, however, resemble the domesticated Japanese silkworm (Bombyx mori), though at least one entomologist suggests that she might be a member of the family Saturniidae, the wild giant silk moths. May Berenbaum, personal e-mail communication, December 9, 2006.