DDW Challenge; at the movies. THE BLOB!

Beware of the Blob!
It creeps and leaps and glides and slides
across the floor
Right through the door
and all around the wall ,
A splotch, a blotch ,
Be careful of the Blob!

(Repeat 4 times.)


Decided to go off the list today as an alien invader had landed in the garden and this is too good an opportunity to miss. Meet Pontania proxima aka Willow Redgall Sawfly. Also known as THE BLOB!

In 1958, a film of the same name launched Steve McQueen on the road to stardom (that’s him top left). He plays a teenager (aged 27 - him not his character) who discovers an old man being consumed by a lump of jelly. (I’m sure that makes more sense the other way round.)

The theme song (above) was written by Bacharach and David and recorded by The Five Blobs (actually only one Blob - the singer overdubbed himself - which is just as well.) It became a huge hit the same year.

Dealing with THE BLOB! is something that both Steve McQueen and I give a lot of thought to. (I never thought I’d write that in a sentence). We both, in the end, rely on nature to deal with the menace. The sawfly larvae, when they hatch, are susceptible to the ready appetite of both the Blue Tits and Great Tits that we have in the garden right now.

Steve discovers that THE BLOB! is susceptible to cold. He tells his high-school buddies and they gather all the fire-extinguishers they can find and douse THE BLOB! thereby freezing it. Then they tell their Air Force buddies who fly it to the Arctic where it’s dropped on to the ice by parachute. As it slowly descends, the film ends with a question mark. Quite.

I imagine any number of questions - why did we make it? - will anyone actually come and see it?

Needless to say it did no harm to the leading actor or the songwriters. One writer described it thus; (it was ) "about the creeping horrors of communism" only defeated "by freezing it – the Cold War writ small and literal."

In 2011, THE BLOB! and Son of BLOB were released on DVD. In case you were wondering.