"I suppose we all loved those kind of sci-fi movies where terrible things came out of swamps and came to Mars. And there's usually some poor girl. All the guys are trying to desperately handle levers and saying, go to something or other"
About this Quote
Affection, in Neil Innes's hands, always comes with a smirk. He remembers old sci-fi not as visionary art but as a lovable machine: swamps, Mars, rubber monsters, and one obligatory "poor girl" stationed there like a prop that proves the stakes are Serious. The joke lands because he's not mocking fans from a distance; he's including himself in the "we" and then immediately puncturing the genre's self-importance with the blunt mechanics of it all.
The line about "guys... desperately handle levers" is doing quiet cultural work. It's comedy, sure, but it's also a miniature theory of mid-century masculinity: competence performed through frantic activity, authority expressed by barking half-coherent commands ("go to something or other"). Innes turns the cockpit into a stage where expertise is less real knowledge than confident noise. That casual vagueness is the point; the films relied on the rhythm of urgency more than the logic of science.
Context matters because Innes came out of a British tradition that treated popular culture as raw material for affectionate sabotage - from The Goons to Monty Python to The Rutles. He's describing a shared media upbringing, then revealing its seams: the recycled plots, the gendered casting, the theatrical labor of "serious" men pushing buttons to keep chaos at bay. The nostalgia stays intact, but it's been rewired into a critique: the past was fun, and also a little ridiculous in exactly the ways we stopped noticing while we were enjoying it.
The line about "guys... desperately handle levers" is doing quiet cultural work. It's comedy, sure, but it's also a miniature theory of mid-century masculinity: competence performed through frantic activity, authority expressed by barking half-coherent commands ("go to something or other"). Innes turns the cockpit into a stage where expertise is less real knowledge than confident noise. That casual vagueness is the point; the films relied on the rhythm of urgency more than the logic of science.
Context matters because Innes came out of a British tradition that treated popular culture as raw material for affectionate sabotage - from The Goons to Monty Python to The Rutles. He's describing a shared media upbringing, then revealing its seams: the recycled plots, the gendered casting, the theatrical labor of "serious" men pushing buttons to keep chaos at bay. The nostalgia stays intact, but it's been rewired into a critique: the past was fun, and also a little ridiculous in exactly the ways we stopped noticing while we were enjoying it.
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