Comments

  1. René says

    Now I wonder PZ, did you get into Evilution as a boob man or as a leg man?
    A beautiful Neanderthal, that. I’d gladly share my genes with it.

  2. hemidactylus says

    Raquel Welch just passed away? Ughh! Yes RIP!

    Hmmm…she’s got competition from Sophia Loren IMO. Sophia is still with us!

    Both were of my parents’ age cohort.

    Weirdly I have been watching reruns of Young Sheldon (because the ease of rabbit ears) and took notice of Annie Potts and did an IMDB to realize she was in Corvette Summer with Mark Hamill back when I was in elementary school. I don’t know if I ever saw that movie, but it has that 70s car freak vibe. She’s about a generation younger than Welch and Loren. Time sucks.

  3. says

    “a publicity photo emphasizing her physical charms”
    “a marvelous breathing monument to womankind”

    All these evasive references to big breasts, which are never mentioned short of the title of her own memoir, “Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.”

    Will our culture ever grow up?

  4. kaleberg says

    Even as a kid, I was impressed. She played that role with a straight face. She was an underrated actress.

  5. brightmoon says

    I first remember her as a scientist in Fantastic Voyage. So she didn’t always register as a brainless sex object to me . But I’m a cis woman who liked science even as a child so I appreciated that.

  6. robro says

    According to the Source of Knowledge, she had three lines in One Million Years BC…three lines and a deer skin bikini. This may indicate something about the power of images over words…in movies and movie posters at least. I don’t remember anything about the movie, just the image in the poster.

  7. rietpluim says

    Sorry PZ, it seems you’re not the target audience.

    Ray Harryhausen, who animated all of the dinosaur attacks using stop-motion animation techniques, commented on the U.S. King Kong DVD that he did not make One Million Years B.C. for “professors…who probably don’t go to see these kinds of movies anyway.”

  8. birgerjohansson says

    As I pondered the strong pang of grief i felt, I considered the rather flat emotional response I had for the news of the earthquake disaster that has claimed around 50,000 or even the storm surge in East Pakistan 1970 that claimed 600.000 lives in just a few hours- those disasters felt quite abstract.
    The brain protects itself from being overwhelmed, making the really big disasters feel abstract.

    Amy Winehouse died a week after the Norwegian asshole murdered several dozen children, and in my mind the events triggered uneven responses- I have never been a Winehouse fan, but the “manageable scale” and the fact that I had heard of Winehouse before made her death feel more personal.

    To quote Douglas Adams, we are apes with overlarge brains. There is nothing “optimal” with how our minds are wired.

  9. Steve Morrison says

    @13: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic”
    —Erich Maria Remarque (probably)

  10. wsierichs says

    Aha! Proof that creationism is true!

    First, there’s a photograph of a man fighting a dinosaur in the background! Case closed.

    Secondly, proof that humans (well, women at least) were fully developed 1,000,000 years ago.

    You can take all that Darwinian stuff and buy it in the cemeteries of mixed human, dinosaur fossils.

    Yes, bad movie, but classy woman. RIP.

  11. imback says

    Fantastic Voyage was the first movie I went to on my own, walking to the theater with friends when I was about 12. It made an impression. I hadn’t seen it since until I found it today on HBO. It’s still an enjoyable movie taking 100 minutes for a 100 minute story. Raquel Welch was good as a scientist, showing her range before playing an Australopithicene in her next film.

  12. pacal says

    One Million B.C. was a hoot. Who would have guessed that mascara, rouge, lip gloss wtc., was available then,

    As for Raquel. I agree underrated actress who just didn’t, ussually, get the roles she deserved because people, (Men), were blinded by her boobs.
    I will admit that even this Gay dude found her very beautiful. The world is now a bit less awesome.

  13. magistramarla says

    My husband is now enamored with Zoe Saldana. She is in so many science fiction movies that he loves.
    She managed to rope him into watching (and enjoying!) a romantic series on Netflix.
    He was browsing and found that she starred in something called “From Scratch”, and assumed correctly that it might feature cooking and might appeal to me. We were both mesmerized for all eight episodes.
    I agree with him that Zoe Saldana is a beautiful, talented actress and I’m respectful of her apparent fluency in the Italian language!