(Pronounced: “The Leever, The Leever!!!!!”)
Yes, remember not to pull that le(e)ver, or you’ll blow us
all to atoms (!).
(For those who don’t know, at the climax of the movie Bride
of Frankenstein {Warning: Spoiler Alert!},
the monster is rejected by his potential mate {women, especially ones freshly
made from corpses, are so fickle…}, he gets mad and starts rampaging around,
and he happens to back into some really big lever, about the size of a baseball
bat, that’s sticking out from the wall next to some electrical equipment. Well,
the mad doctors warn him not to pull that lever lest they all get blown “to
atoms”. {Hmm, they invented the telephone for this movie, and now I guess they
invented the atomic bomb as well?} And so being a natural contrarian {No wonder
nobody likes him! Yes, they say whenever you can’t find the reason nobody likes
you, it’s probably time to look in the mirror…}, the monster pulls the lever
anyway, and blows everyone to atoms {except Henry and Mrs. Frankenstein:
they’re needed for the sequels, I guess; although they never ended up showing
up in them.}. And that’s why they call him a “monster”. Blowing up that fine
piece of real estate with all that cutting edge scientific equipment: what a
waste!)
Some people wonder why anyone would take the trouble to put
a lever in a laboratory that would blow you all to atoms. And you know, some
people have pointed out how silly this whole idea is. Oh, but it wasn’t their idea to put the “blow us all to atoms lever” (that’s
what it’s called, by the way) in their lab! No, it’s a government regulation
that every science lab must by law have a “blow us all to atoms lever”
installed right about where a rampaging monster (or lab assistant) might back
into it and accidentally/on purpose pull it and blow everyone to atoms.
Some people might claim this is a silly and perhaps even
irresponsible regulation for the government to require of scientific
laboratories, but that is simply not so. For, as this movie, Bride of
Frankenstein, indicates, if you’re working
on dangerous things like monsters made from freshly r-r-r-r-rifled
gr-r-r-r-raves (Sorry, that’s how Lor-r-r-rd Byr-r-r-ron says it in the
introduction part of the movie, which they should have called: “Rolling Thunder
and Rollings Rs”), or weaponized viruses, or zombie serum that has to be blown
up by an atomic bomb so that it can permeate the clouds and rain on a cemetery,
creating armies of brain-hungry zombies à la Return of the Living
Dead, you might have to blow everything up
quickly to avoid and/or create a horrifying nightmare scenario. And that’s why
the government really knows what it’s doing when it comes to creating
strictures with regard to “blow us all to atoms levers” in research laboratories.
