Look! Up on the screen! It’s the first Superman movie, Superman and the Mole Men. (©1951 by National Comics Publications, Inc.)
Another semi–hollow earth movie from around the same time, also featuring misunderstood little fellows, was the 1956 subterranean epic, The Mole People, which still turns up occasionally on late-late television shows of the Insomniac Stoned Teen Theater variety. This one starred chiseled wooden John Agar, with supporting turns from Hugh Beaumont, later to become Ward Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, and Alan Napier, best remembered as Alfred the butler on television’s Batman series in the 1960s.
Agar and his colleagues are archaeologists excavating a site in a remote mountainous part of Asia. They stumble into a hole and find the lost city of Sumeria, ruled by unfriendly albino descendants of ancient Sumer who’ve been living underground since an earthquake relocated their city downward five thousand years earlier. When a tremor clogs their hole with boulders, the archaeologists become trapped and discover that the Sumerians have enslaved an abject and ugly troglodyte-like subterranean race of Mole People, who can dig their way around with a certain ease. The Sumerians, who sacrifice beautiful women to practice birth control and are otherwise downright nasty, have one weakness—they’re pathologically afraid of light. So a single flashlight becomes the archaeologists’ most powerful weapon, until the batteries give out. Elinu, the head Sumerian villain, is about to kill them all. But by then they’ve befriended a few of the Mole People and beautiful Adad, a Sumerian princess. Fortuitously, the Mole People, after suffering thousands of years of oppression, decide right then to stage a slave rebellion. During the chaos, Adad, now in love with Agar, leads the archaeologists to the surface and safety but is killed when a rock pillar falls on her. This, incidentally, was an alternate ending. In the first one they shot, she leaves her underground world hand in hand with Agar; but the studio execs (and this is really 1956-think) decided that having such a racially mixed couple—both of them white, technically, but she was a little too white, I guess—live happily ever after was too controversial, so they killed her off instead. Amazing but true. The story has absolutely no socially redeeming value, or intellectual resonance, except maybe to say that slavery isn’t nice.
The tiny, subterranean Mole People. (©1956 by Universal Pictures, Inc.)
Perhaps most memorable about The Mole People is the five-minute introduction, featuring Dr. Frank Baxter. Those of a certain age will remember him as the young people’s television intellectual during the 1950s, genially expounding on matters of presumed scientific interest to kids. That the Dr. before his name came from a Ph.D. in English didn’t seem to matter. Here we find him standing behind a desk in a generic book-lined “academic” office, frequently fondling a globe on the desk in an oddly sensual way, like he’s stroking his girlfriend’s hair, and, yes, delivering a short lecture on the history of the hollow earth—the idea, of course, being to validate and make more believable what’s to come in the movie. He starts with the Sumerians, talks about beliefs regarding subterranean worlds in cultures worldwide, mentions Halley’s theory, and even tells us about John Cleves Symmes and Symmes’ Holes—definitely a movie first, and pretty funny.
Even more so, though, was the 1959 movie version of A Journey to the Center of the Earth. The movie stars James Mason as the Professor, and throughout he looks like playing in such a campy production is giving him a migraine headache. Possibly in part because his costar, as his eager young assistant, is Pat Boone.
Pat Boone was very big with the teen audience in 1959—the squarer portion of it, at any rate—so casting him, even though he could hardly act, made a certain amount of box office sense. But it would be wasting him if he couldn’t sing, so several songs were interspersed into the story. The movie opens, in fact, with Mason being knighted, and a choir of academics, led by Boone, saluting him by singing “Here’s to the Professor of g-e-o-l-o-g-y …” The setting has been moved from Germany to Edinburgh. After two world wars, better to have them be Scotsmen than Germans—though it means having Pat Boone wrestling with a Scottish accent throughout.
Verne’s plot was fairly bare-bones, too much so for Hollywood, so several entirely new complications were added—starting with a rival professor who will spare no dastardly deed, including attempted murder, to beat the Professor to the center of the earth. And there has to be a love interest, of course. But in Verne’s novel it was an all-male expedition. Easily fixed. The rival professor is killed off early on, but his sweet wife, played by Arlene Dahl, insists on going along in return for donating all her dead husband’s equipment to the enterprise. She flounces through all the adventures in fancy Victorian dresses, perfect makeup, and carefully coiffed hair. She and Mason hate each other at first, but guess what happens by the end? Taciturn Hans is given a beloved pet duck named Gertrude as a companion, which also cutely quacks her way through the center of the earth with them—until she’s snatched and eaten by minions of the dead evil professor who’ve continued dogging them.
During their trip, they wander into visually splendid additions to Verne’s story—a shining crystal grotto, another that’s phosphorescent, and a remnant of Atlantis replete with fallen pillars and broken temples. Instead of encountering a dinosaur or two, they face herds of them. They escape on a great alabaster bowl left over from Atlantis, which they ride up a lava flow until plop! they’re on the surface again. Pat Boone seems to be missing—no, there he is, clothes in tatters, surrounded by a bunch of giggling nuns! Mason observes, “This I know: the spirit of man cannot be stopped.”
The changes are a perfect example of how the hollow earth idea has been repeatedly adapted to suit the needs of the time—in this case, adding elements to make the story conform to movie conventions of the day.
Edgar Rice Burroughs fared even worse. At the Earth’s Core seems like Pulitzer Prize material compared to the movie version made in 1976, starring Doug McClure as David Innes and Peter Cushing as Abner Perry. At least A Journey to the Center of the Earth had good production values. But the scenery and so-called special effects in At the Earth’s Core are so lame they’re almost painful to watch. And Doug McClure has a bonked-on-the-head quality as an actor, generally looking like he’s just coming out of a daze and wondering where he might be, that’s also unfortunate—as are his very 70s hair and sideburns. The story line remains fairly true to the novel—I think. I confess that I was unable to sit through the whole movie.
And 1991 saw the release of the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the Earth’s Core, which is probably enough said about that one. The dated feel of the title alone is a reminder of how quickly kid culture fads come and go.
In the past fifteen years or so there’s been a minor resurgence in hollow earth novels. As a literary device it lands entirely in the realm of fantasy adventure—the utopian hollow earth novel is apparently a thing of the past. The most notable of these recent entries are Circumpolar (1984) by Richard A. Lupoff, The Hollow Earth (1990) by Rudy Rucker, and Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth (1997) by Max McCoy. All three pay conscious homage to accumulated literary conventions regarding the hollow earth—two of them are deliberately old-fashioned pulp-style adventure stories. Only Rucker’s The Hollow Earth is particularly memorable, and it is one of the best ever.
Circumpolar is set in the 1930s and deliberately imitates the pulp science fiction stories of the period, tossing most of the hollow earth conventions into the pot and stirring once. It’s about a high-stakes airplane race around the poles (ultimately the race leads through them) featuring on one team Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, and Howard Hughes; they are up against the unscrupulous von Richtofen brothers, those German flying aces from World War I, and aloof Princess Lvova, a cousin to the late tsar of Russia. All the elements are thrown in—Symmes’ Holes, an underground civilization descended from the progenitors of Norse mythology, prehistoric creatures, ray guns, the works. Clearly meant to be a light-hearted romp, a send-up of the form, Circumpolar mainly shows th
at by now the idea has become degenerate. Not in any moral sense, but rather artistic. It’s pretty much worn out, reality has too far intruded, and it’s now the stuff of parody—and in this case, not an especially successful one.
Max McCoy’s Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth belongs to a series of non-movie Indy novels that hearken back to Howard Garis’s efforts for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. It is also set in the 1930s, probably a gambit to make the story more believable. Any parody here seems unintentional. An opening epigraph, the final lines of Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” establishes provenance. Indy is at home in Princeton on a bitter winter night when an old man holding a box shows up at his door, on the verge of death. The box contains his journals and an artifact “from an advanced, ancient civilization” found during his explorations of polar regions. Evil Nazis are out to get him—and the box. Indy asks why. “‘Vril! The vital element of this underground world. Matter itself yields to it. With it, one becomes godlike. All but immortal. Pass through solid rock, heal wounds, build cities in a single day—or destroy them. To possess vril is to be invincible.’” Bulwer-Lytton lives! The Nazis want these journals to locate the lost kingdom and terrorize the world with vril. They manage to wrest them from Indy, and the chase is on. Indy is asked to lead an expedition to beat them to it. In the end the Nazis are dead, and the secret of the lost civilization is buried back where it belongs.
Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth
The Hollow Earth by Rudy Rucker is fresher and more imaginative. Set in the 1830s, it features Edgar Allan Poe as one of the main characters. In the novel he is Eddie, an endearingly disreputable reprobate. Poe’s child bride Virginia appears as well, although she dies early on. Eventually Eddie is discovered to have pulled her teeth as grisly souvenirs, just as Poe’s narrator does in “Berenice.” Rucker clearly did his research and wasn’t afraid of a certain amount of black humor.
The story is told by Mason Reynolds, a Virginia teenager who’s on the lam from the law with his pal Otha, a black youth about his age who’s technically his slave (echoes of Huck Finn). Soon both are working for Eddie at the Southern Literary Messenger, with Mason sometimes handling the writing chores when Eddie’s too stoned or hung over to hit his deadlines. Eddie’s all fired up about the hollow earth, Symmes, and J. N. Reynolds, who shows up with counterfeit paper money plates that they use to print enough bogus cash to finance a polar expedition. They construct a hot-air balloon to descend into the Symmes’ Hole, charter a schooner, and head for the Antarctic. Resemblances to previous hollow earth novels end not long after the southern polar ice cracks and they’re falling toward the inside—except perhaps a distant kinship to John Uri Lloyd’s hallucinogenic Etidorhpa, with the large difference that Rucker’s trippy comedy is deliberate and deft.
They tumble slowly for hours down the center of a vast tunnel through strangely thick air, past yellow-hot cliffs gushing lava, and a curious round metal thing with a “shape something like a fried egg.” On leaving the tunnel they’re becalmed in nearly zero gravity. And still below? “The appearance of the sphere’s very center was as puzzling as before. All lines of sight near the center were warped and distorted, surrounding the center’s blobs of blue with weird halos and mirages. The light there was bright and chaotic and lacked all coherence. Central sun? Perhaps not. I resolved to call it the Central Anomaly. Earth’s interior was illuminated not so much by the Anomaly proper as by the branching pink streamers of light that stretched from the Anomaly to the inner surface of the planetary rind we’d fallen through.” Psychedelic!
Rucker’s Hollow Earth
Spotting a thick green jungle in the distance, they get to it by hitching a ride on one of the many flying creatures inhabiting the pinkish air. In the low gravity, water collects in great pond-size drops, some of which contain fish. Mason swims through one, poking his head up occasionally for air, to spear dinner for them, and then finds he has to build his cooking fire in midair, something of a trick. Making their way to the jungle’s edge, they come upon, floating in space, an enormous sunflower half a mile across, inhabited by spritelike flower people who like to ingest the juice of a seed that takes them higher and higher—lotus-eaters living right on their own giant lotus—and the whimsy goes on from there. Huge flying shrigs—shrimp–pig creatures that move on jet flames of methane produced by what they eat (practically everything) blasting out of their rear ends—a telepathic all-knowing black race living near the Central Anomaly, and the anomaly itself, gateway to a Mirrorworld—it’s all a lot of fun.
By now you’d think the hollow earth would be little more than this—the stuff of science fiction. We all know that the earth isn’t hollow, don’t we?
Apparently not all of us—at least judging from the amount of hollow earth weirdness alive and well on the Internet. The hollow earth even has its own newsletter—The Hollow Earth Insider. Editor Dennis Crenshaw is less of a strict constructionist than I’ve tried to be here—which is to say, looking only at hollow earth ideas chiefly derived from Halley’s original notion and skipping the material about underground civilizations in general—but anything subterranean or UFOlike seems to fit his purview, which gives him plenty to write about.
There’s also the New Agey “2012 Unlimited” website at http://www.eu.spiritweb.org/Spirit/hollow-earth.html, which has a section about Agartha. This is the name certain Buddhists give to the underground world they believe in, but here it refers to a subterranean New Age utopia of the same name. This Agartha has very specific entrances, which include Mammoth Cave, Argentina’s Iguassu Falls, and Mt. Shasta in California—to name a few of “over 100 subterranean cities that form the Agartha Network.” The site gets quite specific about what’s going on under Mt. Shasta. Over a million people living there in Telos, on five different levels. Here’s the rundown from the website:
The dimensions of this domed city are approximately 1.5 miles wide by 2 miles deep. Telos is comprised of 5 levels.
LEVEL 1: This top level is the center of commerce, education and administration. The pyramid-shaped temple is the central structure and has a capacity of 50,000. Surrounding it are government buildings, the equivalent of a courthouse that promotes an enlightened judicial system, halls of records, arts and entertainment facilities, a hotel for visiting foreign emissaries, a palace which houses the “Ra and Rana Mu” (the reigning King and Queen of the royal Lemurian lineage who are Ascended Masters), a communications tower, a spaceport, schools, food and clothing dispatches and most residences.
LEVEL 2: A manufacturing center as well as a residential level. Houses are circular in shape and dust-free because of it. Like surface living, housing for singles, couples and extended families is the norm.
LEVEL 3: Hydroponic gardens. Highly advanced hydroponic technology feeds the entire city, with some to spare for intercity commerce. All crops yield larger and tastier fruits, veggies and soy products that make for a varied and fun diet for Telosians. Now completely vegetarian, the Agartha Cities have taken meat substitutes to new heights.
LEVEL 4: More hydroponic gardens, more manufacturing and some natural park areas.
LEVEL 5: The nature level. Set about a mile beneath surface ground level, this area is a large natural environment. It serves as a habitat for a wide variety of animals, including those many extinct on the surface. All species have been bred in a non-violent atmosphere, and those that might be carnivorous on the surface now enjoy soy steaks and human interaction. Here you can romp with a Saber-Toothed Tiger with wild abandon. Together with the other plant levels, enough oxygen is produced to sustain the biosphere.
Hard to resist quoting just a bit more detail:
COMPUTERS: The Agarthean computer system is amino acid-based and serves a vast array of functions. All of the sub-cities are linked by this highly spiritualized information network. The system monitors inter-city and galactic communication, while, simultaneously, serving the needs of the individual at home. It can, for instance, report your body’s vitamin or mi
neral deficiencies or, when necessary, convey pertinent information from the akashic records for personal growth.
MONEY: Non-existent. All inhabitants’ basic needs are taken care of. Luxuries are exchanged via a sophisticated barter system.
TRANSPORTATION: Moving sidewalks, inter-level elevators and electromagnetic sleds resembling our snow mobiles within the city. For travel between cities, residents take “the Tube,” an electromagnetic subway system capable of speeds up to 3,000 m.p.h. Yes, Agartheans are well versed in intergalactic etiquette and are members of the Confederation of Planets. Space travel has been perfected, as has the ability for interdimensional shifts that render these ships undetectable.
ENTERTAINMENT: Theatre, concerts and a wide variety of the arts. Also, for you Trekkies, the Holodecks. Program your favorite movie or chapter in Earth history and become a part of it!
CHILDBIRTH: A painless three months, not nine. A very sacred process whereby, upon conception, a woman will go to the temple for three days, immediately welcoming the child with beautiful music, thoughts and imagery. Water birthing in the company of both parents is standard.
Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Page 27
