I remember, as a kid, being very impressed with the 1964 live-action, animated film called "The Incredible Mr. Limpet." The combination of cartoons and real life amazed me (as much as when the 'The Wizard of Oz" turned from black and white to color). I loved the lead character, Henry Limpet - played by Don Knotts; he seemed like a cartoon himself. The movie takes place in World War II - before the Pearl Harbor attack. After attempting to join the U.S. Navy, Henry (a shy bookkeeper with a passion for fish) is rejected, due to his poor eyesight. Thoroughly downtrodden, he takes a walk along the Coney Island pier and accidentally falls into the water - turning into a talking fish. As the story unfolds, Limpet is commissioned by the Navy (complete with advancing rank and salary) to defeat the Nazis in The Battle of the Atlantic - finding Nazi U-boats and disrupting their underwater measurements and weapons with an intense "thrum" noise he is able to emit, now that he is a fish. He falls in love with "Lady Fish" (the complete opposite of his overbearing, human wife Bessie... who now presumes he is dead); being a good guy, Henry continues to send money home to his old biddy of a wife. I'm sure that by today's standards, Henry Limpet would be considered a loser, and the film a total flop, but I loved everything about this movie as a child; I loved that Henry's passion for fish turned into his reality, that "reality" was in cartoon form, and that the meek one became the hero.
* this is an 18"x24" piece I recently painted of "The Incredible Mr. Limpet"
1 comment:
I'm sure I saw that film when young also. Probably when very young, so that I'd appreciate it in many more ways now.
That Munchkinland was in brilliant technicolor was a stroke of genius by the director--whichever one of several made that decision.
And it reminds me how some feelings of mine are stronger in dreams than in waking life.
And how some cultures regard dream life as "real life" and waking life as "dream time."
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