Gary Panter blog

Miss Merrill

My first grade teacher was a midget. I was taller than her. I was the teacher's pet, even though she had to paddle me for something or other a couple of times. She was very impressed with my Dinosaur obsession and that I knew many names and spellings of dinosaurs, even though I could not read.

I remember her giving me a new kind of drawing implement called a MARKS A LOT that smelled really strong. It was a red one and when I used it to draw the red blood on the gaping wound on the neck of the Tyrannosaurus Rex chopped by the whirling helicopter blades, the red ink went through four pages of my IMAGINARY LINE TABLET.

One day after school, she took me to her farm outside of town to show me her pet alligator which she kept in a bathtub in her backyard by the house. The alligator, or cayman, was about two feet long. I was very impressed, and afraid, of the alligator. I wanted one.

One day Miss Merrill took me and the whole first grade class on a field trip to see her friend, Miss Raven's house. Miss Raven had an alligator, too, and it wasn't a cayman. Miss Raven's alligator was about seven feet long and lived in a big concrete tank beside her house with a chicken wire enclosure so the gator couldn't escape and eat us. The pen looked a whole lot like the pen that they put GORGO in which he escaped from.

Feeding time arrived and miss Raven dumped a bucket of minnows into the water with the alligator. The reptile opened its giant maw and the fishes swam in, just like in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

How doth the little crocodile
improve his shining tail,
and pour the waters of the nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws.

Miss Merrill fell off a Christmas float and broke her hip and had to go around on little crutches after that.

Dinosaurs

By the time I was six I was bonkers for dinosaurs. Something happened to make me obsessed and excited about dinosaurs. I wore out the dinosaur page in our Encyclopedia Brittanica Junior.
One day in 1957 I happened to look through a newspaper and saw an ad for the movie THE LAND UNKNOWN, starring Jock Mahoney and a bunch of guys in bad dinosaur suits. The ad was small, but clearly featured a T Rex menacing a helicopter. I begged and begged until my parents agreed to let George Salise, an employee at my father's store, take my 5 year-old younger sister and my 6 year-old self to the MAJESTIC movie theater in downtown Brownsville, Texas, one evening in 1957.
It was the '50s and looked like the '50s. Cars were nicely rounded. Used carlots had flags, spinners and vinyl streamers the same as today. Insects clouded the streetlights. Tattered Lucha Libra posters peeled off telephone poles and rattled in the breeze. Mexican music and rock and roll escaped the windows of passing cars or blared from radio repair shops. Brownsville is on the border with Mexico and the influence of Mexico is everywhere.

As we approached the lightbulb-festooned entrance, we passed lurid posters of monster movies, westerns and romances. I stopped in front of the poster for THE LAND UNKNOWN, a giant color version of the ad I'd seen a few days before in the newspaper.
It was a double feature with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN featuring young Christopher Lee as Frankenstein's monster.

In my memory THE LAND UNKNOWN was in black and white with a few stained sections. The effects were terrible and even at that age I could tell that the movie was not very realistic and also that it didn't matter so much, because it had the mood of being lost in a foggy swamp with a bunch of prehistoric terrors; like the lemur and pretty girl eating plant; a paper mache Plesiosaurus; a lame T Rex, but with it's neck being chopped by the helicopter blades and bleeding red blood. As phony as it was, it made a visceral impression that has stayed with me until now.

Also I had successfully tracked DINOSAURS from a little image in the newspaper to a theater that showed dinosaurs in the dark the size of a house. I was greatly satisfied with the experience.
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in screaming full color was a sickening horrifying nightmare for me and my five year-old sister and twenty four year old George Salise. We left about half way through—mentally shattered.