Popcorn Crunchers, Reel 111 Trivia Quiz

Answer: fossils

Dr. Carl Maia leads an expedition which discovers the fossilised hand print of a creature which appears to be half-man and half-fish. It dates from the Devonian Period. He returns to his research institute and organizes a trip to search for more of the same sort of fossils.

The original fossil is of a webbed clawed hand. The goal of the expedition is to recover the rest of the "missing link's" fossilised skeleton. Their efforts quickly turn in a different direction when a living creature of this sort appears.

Instead of finding more fossils in limestone, they find the Gill Man. Dr. David Reed, played by Richard Carlson, says, "We didn't come here to fight with monsters. We're not equipped for it. We came here to find fossils."

Answer: The Devil Moon

"Devil Girl from Mars" (1954) is about a mission to Earth to retrieve enough human males to breed with Martian women and thereby save that planet's population. This is the reverse of the situation in "Mars Needs Women" (1967). In "She Devil" (1957), Kyra Zelas is given a serum which cures her tuberculosis but turns her into a homicidal monster who can change her hair colour at will... sort of like the horse in "The Wizard of Oz" (1949) only different. "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" (1959) is a post-apocalyptic movie, somewhat comparable to "The Last Man on Earth" (1964) starring Vincent Price and "I Am Legend" (2007) starring Will Smith.

William M. Carney wrote a novel called "Devil's Moon" in 1988 but it was not made into a movie. There was a truly dreadful film called "The Devil's Moon" which went straight to video in 2004. A collection of short stories by British author Christopher Fowler titled "Old Devil Moon" was published in 2008. That title was the same as that of a popular song title written by Burton Lane and Yip Harburg for the 1947 musical "Finian's Rainbow". M. Brown McNally wrote a nonfiction book about his family called "Devil Moon Over Philadelphia: The Other Philadelphia Story" in 2023. There is no found record of a 1950s science fiction or horror film named "The Devil Moon".

Answer: a large telepathic octopus with one eye

Lt. Commander Holloway enters the UFO with a small boarding party. He finds the single alien in a central chamber. It is an upright, tube-like creature with the arms of an octopus. It has a single large eye in the middle of its head. It has no need to speak as it uses "thought wave communication".

Answer: Cesar Romero

Cesar Romero was a more familiar actor in roles like the suave handsome Victor Prince in "Springtime in the Rockies" (1942). In "Lost Continent" he plays off type as a WWII veteran pilot who leads a mission to the South Pacific to retrieve flight data from an atomic-powered rocket gone astray.

He leads a crew of military personnel and three scientists from the U.S. Government Proving Grounds in White Sands, New Mexico. They not only find the rocket, but the prehistoric dinosaurs which surround it.

Answer: Its speed was too fast to be intelligible.

A UFO buzzes the Marvins' car on a lonely road while Russ is recording his notes on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The recorder picked up the audio of their encounter with the flying saucer. The speed of the message made it sound like noise. Later, when the recorder began to lose power and slowed down, they heard the aliens' message in English.

Answer: True

Director Jim Wynorski remade "The Giant Gila Monster" for television. His film was titled "Gila!" (2012). The effort very closely follows the script of the original. Why does one suppose they needed three credited writers: William Dever, Steve Mitchell, and Jim Nielsen?

Answer: There is an invisible protective dome over them.

Each Martian war machine is protected by an electromagnetic shield. This field allows the Martian weapons to fire out through it but prevents enemy bullets, rockets and bombs from reaching the space ships. Dr. Forrester describes the field as a "protective blister".

The domes are as invisible as they are impenetrable. Sometimes, through the smoke and explosions, the images of the domes can be faintly seen. They look rather like a clear-glass cloche, or the clear jar sometimes placed over a mantle clock, or a clear-glass bell jar.

The special effect was accomplished by using small inexpensive glass domes placed over models of weapons and ships.

Answer: acting

Bruce Bennett (1906-2007) was born Harold Herman Brix but changed his name professionally to disassociate himself from the many films in which he played Tarzan. Bennett was a collegiate and Olympic track-and-field athlete. He did not act in a great many science fiction or horror films but appeared in the following: "The Man with Nine Lives" (1940), "Before I Hang" (1940) with Boris Karloff, "The Cosmic Man" (1959), "The Alligator People" (1959) and "The Clones" (1973).

Answer: Greater Los Angeles, California

The story of "Phantom from Space" begins when a UFO is detected over Point Barrow, Alaska. Follow-up tracks put the vehicle over Fairbanks, Alaska, and Santa Monica, California, before it is lost from radar. The events in the film occur in Huntington Beach and in Greater Los Angeles.

Much of the motion picture was shot at the Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, as were "Tobor the Great" (1954), "War of the Colossal Beast" (1958), "The Cosmic Man" (1959), "The Terminator" (1984), "Back to the Future" (1985), "Earth Girls Are Easy" (1988), "The Rocketeer" (1991), and "House on Haunted Hill" (1999, the remake).

Answer: rocket-powered high-altitude aircraft

The aircraft called Y-12 in "First Man into Space" was a Bell X-1a and the Y-13 was a Bell X-2. Both of these were experimental research aircraft which used rocket power to achieve high speeds and high altitudes. The Bell X-1a was "dropped" from underneath a Boeing B-29 Superfortress and the Bell X-2 was "dropped" from under a Boeing B-50 Superfortress. American ace Chuck Yeager piloted a Bell X-1 aircraft at Mach 1.05 on 14 October 1947.