In some years (not this one), today is Thanksgiving in the US. This isn’t going to be about Thanksgiving, though. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Thanksgiving isn’t mentioned even once. On a later edit, I guess that should say “I wouldn’t be surprised if Thanksgiving isn’t mentioned more than three times.” Oh, one more editing pass later, I’ll have to change that to “I wouldn’t be surprised if Thanksgiving isn’t mentioned more than four times.” No, wait…well maybe it’s best not to do too much editing.
Editing was pretty important back in 1942, though, when the movie Casablanca opened in theaters on November 26. They skipped some editing and reshooting they’d wanted to do for a couple of reasons. The Allies had invaded North Africa and captured the real Casablanca, and Warner Brothers thought releasing a film set in that part of the world would benefit from extra interest. And probably more importantly, there were thoughts about reshooting a few scenes with Ingrid Bergman, but by that time she’d already cut her hair to prep for her next movie, To Have and Have Not (also costarring Humphrey Bogart).
Casablanca was successful in its first release, but its real fame came later, after it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Everyone then gave it a second look; a process that’s still going on. It also began to attract very close examination. As early as 1943, people suspected that the comedian Jack Benny was briefly visible in one scene. Although nobody involved ever said one way or the other, Roger Ebert eventually concluded that it probably was him. Also the film has been considered to be a political allegory about Franklin Roosevelt. In that interpretation, Rick stands for Roosevelt when he was weighing what to do about entering WWII. “Casablanca” is Spanish for “white house.”
One of the things about Casablanca is that nothing is clearly black and white. Except, of course, the film itself; it was famously colorized in 1984, but everybody hated it and agreed that adding color took something away from the original. It wasn’t entirely out of necessity that the movie was made in black and white, though. By 1942 movies could be filmed in Technicolor — The Wizard of Oz, Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone with the Wind, and Fantasia were all color films released well before Casablanca.
Technicolor itself wasn’t new at the time; the first general-release movie shot using the process was The Toll of the Sea a 1922 silent (but color) film released on — well how about that, it premiered on November 26. The “tech” in Technicolor, by the way, stands for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s where the two developers of the system — Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Comstock — got their degrees in 1904.
MIT students are known for inventive pranks, but they may never have come up with anything quite as good as happened in England on November 26, 1977. A news broadcast on the Southern Television network was proceeding normally when suddenly the picture wobbled and the sound was replaced by a statement from “Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command.” The voice advised the people of Earth to give up all weapons and live together in peace and goodwill. The whole thing was accomplished by setting up a transmitter near the TV broadcaster and jamming the sound signal. Like all good MIT pranks, Vrillon got clean away with it; nobody was ever caught. For that matter, there was never a single suspect identified. So who knows, maybe it wasn’t an MIT prank after all.
Speaking of technology, November 26, 2011 was the day the Mars Science Lab was launched. That’s the one that carried the Curiosity rover. Curiosity was supposed to last two years, but by now Curiosity is still trundling around the surface of Mars for more than a dozen years, sending photos and other data up to its orbiter, which in turn transmits it back to Earth (Vrillon is probably listening too). And some of it will arrive today, so we can be thankful the system is still working. Oh wait, does that constitute another mention of Thanksgiving? Just ignore it, I’m not mentioning Thanksgiving at all. Really.
