Remember When: Quicksand and gorillas were so scary

So, there’s the bad guy, stuck in a pit of quicksand, screaming his lungs out and sinking deeper and deeper into the muck.

Finally, with a loud gurgle, he slips below the surface, only his slouch hat remaining on the surface.

Another day, another thriller at the good old Hart Theater.

I was never much of a one for hiking the woodlands, but I’m sure that had I practiced trailblazing in my younger days I’d have been looking around warily for those killer pits of quicksand. They were everywhere, according to Hollywood.

In our more real world, sources of all kinds agree that quicksand has been vastly overrated as a danger. They say it’s more like mud, and yes you can drag yourself out of it. Even that likelihood will seldom arise, because it doesn’t exist much of anywhere outside vintage films.

Ah, me! Here are some other dangers from old movies that are no longer the stuff of my nightmares.

Gorillas: A pretty good number of thrillers from times past involved crazed scientists working on experiments that somehow involved gorillas, who of course would escape and go rampaging around.

These films never explained how Dr. So-and-so managed to get the ape through customs and across the city into his lab, a process that surely would have attracted the attention of authorities and the press.

I laugh at them on TV today, but I set speed records on the way home from the second showing, which even in high summer ended in darkness.

English-speaking space aliens: I was worried enough about flying saucers in those days, and I took the advice of the fellow in “The Thing from Another World” to “keep watching the skies.”

But I found the idea that somebody could inform me in the king’s English that Earth was doomed to be a kind of supreme terror. After all, if some guy named Zargon could learn our mother tongue from across the galaxy, what could he NOT do to us?

I’ll reserve for the moment any discussion of why these alien characters also lived on planets with better air than ours and dressed in some combination of ancient Mesopotamian and court of Louis XIV styles

Cement shoes: Betray your gangster buddies in these old movies and they’d place your feet in buckets of wet cement, wait until it hardens and then dump you off a pier into a fog-shrouded river.

Yeah, that was frightening, especially when the poor traitor would shriek about how he’d been forced to do it because he needed the cash for Granny. Then would come the splash and the “gulp gulp” of the fellow’s last breaths.

Question: why did the miscreants go to the trouble of buying bags of cement, mixing it, driving the victim across town and letting him scream out his last words in public rather than just plugging and burying him? I think I was being played.

Malevolent computers: The earliest computers in movies were wall-size collections of lights and dials, more funny than spooky. But in time they morphed into the murderous Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and the megalomaniac Colossus from “The Forbin Project” (1970). That was enough to make you choke on your Good & Plentys.

When you open your laptop today, though, you probably don’t tremble in fear for your life or for society’s future at the hands of tech – well, unless maybe you see the little message about your anti-virus being out of date. Enlightened age or not, that’s scary.

Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history writer. Reach him at [email protected].