The Island of Doctor Moreau

Fifty-nine.

The Island of Doctor Moreau: IV.

At the Schooner's Rail: "Whatever you tell me, you may rely upon my keeping to myself, if that's it." Sixty.

Introduction the 'nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short story writer.

The Ancestry of Man among all the apes and monkeys, the only group that have their great toes developed on anything like the same fashion as man are some of the lemurs.

Seventy-seven.

The Island of Doctor Moreau: VIII.

The Crying of the Puma: "The devil you do," said he.

To save its name, MGM disowned the film, and although Browning directed a few more films, his career never recovered.

Paramount tried their luck with Island of Lost Souls, a lurid little shocker based on H.G. Wells' novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, starring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi.

But although it had an impressive pedigree, its themes of man playing God paled against that of Frankenstein, and its subject matter, namely the deformation of the human body, ran a little too closely alongside Tod Browning's Freaks, leading it to be banned in Britain and other countries.

Even H.G. Wells himself spoke out against the film, remarking that Paramount had been too keen to shock.

Chapter twenty-one: The Reversion of the Beast Folk.

In this way, I became one among the beast people in the island of Dr. Moreau.

When I awoke, it was dark about me.

My arm ached in its bandages.

Yeah.

But guys, you know H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds, Time Machine, Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The Shape of Things to Come, uh, The Door in the Wall, and of course, Empire of the Ants.

There we go.

[laughs] Possibly his most famous now.

See store for details.

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells.

The original publication date was 1898.

And the full title is The Island of Dr. Moreau, A Possibility.

1896, excuse me, that's when it was originally published.

And this, if you're watching this on YouTube or one of my other channels, this is the original cover from 100 years ago.

And it seems that a schooner called the Ipec Kiwana with a drunken captain, John Davies, did start from Africa with the puma and certain other animals aboard in January 1887, that the vessel was well known at several ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally disappeared from those seas with a considerable amount of copra aboard, sailing to its unknown fate from Baena in December 1887, a date that tallies entirely with my uncle's story.

Charles Edward Prendick.

Right.

And he called it the Island of Dr. Moreau.

So, well, anyway, in the novel, the division of the human race was the result of the inequality and class divisions of Wells' own time, especially in London, going unchecked for thousands and thousands of years until eventually it gave rise to two separate human species.

Yeah.

To make life would be the, uh, the most basic, obvious one, and that idea has been around for a long time.

And I think the foundational, absolutely rock solid, uh, mad scientist, at least in English, would, would have been, uh, H.G. Wells and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

And I think they even call him the m- the mad doctor or something like that.

Before that, when you talked about a mad doctor, it was a doctor who worked for the insane, or he w- you know, treated the insane.

I watched these powerful movies, many of you did too as a young boy, powerful movies which were science fiction themes.

And even going back further in time, not all that much further, but further in time, you had the, the really heavy duty heavyweights of science fiction and fantasy writing, people like H.G. Wells, who wrote Invaders from Mars, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and so on and so forth.

Then you had C.S. Lewis, a, a fantasy writer.

And then you had, uh...