1970s Predictive Programming, lowering expectations

1956, The Mountain starring Spenser Tracey and Robert Wagner.  In this movie, Spencer Tracy's character falls to his death due to a younger man's error.         

1966, Last Train to Clarksville, The Monkees.  This is an alternate version of the original music video.  Again, the content is totally unrelated to the message and meaning of the song.  This is ANOTHER version.  Has footage of a locomotive but it doesn't crash; nor is there any plane that crashes or scenes of the Monkees monkeying around on the beach.

Here are the lyrics to the song.

It's amazing how many disaster movies or were or that I saw growing up it's it started with the Monkees' music video The Last Train to Clarksville and in that music video there's plenty of imagery where a train is crashing or a train is running off the tracks and falling off a bridge there is another image where there's a plane crashing so you have all these objects in the music video that represent Mobility and they're crashing and some might say that the video or the song is an indictment of young men going off to war in Vietnam but and and dying in Vietnam but it's it's really about young people's choices and you know what they decide to do they have to be wary of crashing.

This version of The Last Train to Clarksville has all the macabre and disaster imagery that no young man should ever see.  The video opens with 3 people looking to their left, to our right, standing behind a large crow, that is more scavenger than it is a bird of prey.  They do prey on smaller animals, like toads, mice, insects, etc.  That's the opening scene.  I don't know what movie the scene is taken from.  

At the 00:05 mark, a locomotive appears, referencing the Last Train to Clarksville, so we're at least in the ballpark in terms of the visual matching the content of the song and its lyrics.

At 00:09, the Monkees are seen riding horses on a carousel while playing their song.  What's the carousel mean?  Why the carousel?  Their lives seem to be going round and round, no direction?  A critique of middle-class suburban lifestyles?  

At the 00:19 mark, a self-made glider made of cardboard it appears is flying off the train bridge passing over a body of water.  The plane crashes into the sink.  So that's our first destructive image.  It's not a hang glider.  It's not a glider.  It's not a commercial plane or a bi-plane, but a craft made of cardboard that doesn't take flight except to descend into the abyss.  

At 00:25, Davey Jones is seen talking to a young woman, a scene that reflects the lyrics, 

'Cause I'm leavin' in the morning
And I must see you again
We'll have one more night together
'Til the morning brings my train

Then it's back to the carousel, then back to the locomotive crossing on the trellis, spewing black smoke.  

At the 00:30 mark, a cliff is shown.  The camera pans down the cliff to show its height and depth.  Then a glider falls off the cliff.  So the planes and flying objects are in different stages of development, of first attempts at flying or fleeing from the nest, from parents, an experience already fraught with anxiety and excitement.  And yet here the video traumatizes that prospect by presenting images of doom. 

00:34  Falling off that cliff is a glider.  It's empty which serves more of a symbol than anything else.  No one is in it.  We see no one push it off the cliff.  Just the glider dropping onto the rocks below.  

At 00:46, we see a man wearing ice skates in the snow with a jetpack on his back.  And the jet pack has been lit and he is in the middle of being propelled.  But the rocket on his back misfires.  Then it does fire, and he loses his balance and drops onto the ice.  

At 1:03, we have the Monkees riding a dune buggy on the beach, directly in front of the waves.  

At 1:08, the Monkees are seen riding in a souped-up V-8 purple monster car that looks like the 1970s HotRod Monster Purple People Eater.

1:16  Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork are riding unicycles next to each other, Peter holding the receiver to his ear and Mike holding the phone, riding parallel with each other.  The unicycles have training wheels as you can see in the next scene.  Meaning?  They're starting out solo.  And it's a red phone, like a hotline to someone important.

1:20  All four Monkees are seen riding unicycles with training wheels all in a line.  So they're on their own but with each other. 

1:32  We find the Monkees riding motorcycles, something a little more powerful than a unicycle.  So they're developing, picking up speed, and independence.

1:37  It's back to the carousel.

1:39  The first Umbrella Helicopter from 1920 made its bow.  But the machine doesn't take flight.  It simply goes up and down, bouncing up and down, but going nowhere.  See the 00:46 mark in the video below.  The narrator in the video calls it an undergrown carousel.  So they're looking for any machine that can give them safe flight to their future.

 

1:40  The next image is of a flying machine made of a blimp combined with a bike called a Peddle-Powered Blimp that never gets off the ground.  Wasn't able to find that earlier model, but was able to find a modern analog.  It was called a Flying Sausage.

1:42  Multi-wing airplane with 12 wings being pushed along until it crumbles and collapses Early failed flight invention on January 01, 1915.  The following video is from Google.

1975, The first movie I saw outside of the house that was a disaster was the movie The Other Side of the Mountain.  And I don't even like the title of the movie, which refers to an incident occurring on the other side of the mountain, but because it's on the other side you and no one else can see it though you know what happened.  It's trauma-based psychology.

 the second one that I saw was a movie called Joanie J O N I was in 1979 and again that's about a young girl who dives off of a small pier in a lake and she dives into the shallow and she hits her head and she destroys her spinal column and his crippled.