Them! (1954): Sci Fi Trilogy Part 2 - The Birth Of The Big Bug Invasion

Ben and Rob get stepped on this week by 1954's Them!, the black-and-white creature feature that took Cold War nuclear dread and gave it nine feet of legs, mandibles, and a taste for sugar.

Starring Edmund Gwenn (yes, Santa Claus himself) as the entomologist explaining that mankind has opened a door it can't close, alongside James Whitmore and a pre-Gunsmoke James Arness, Them! follows a colony of New Mexico ants mutated by atomic testing into man-eating monsters, working their way from the desert into the storm drains of Los Angeles before the military can stop them.

We'll get into the cultural context that turned giant bugs into box office gold, how a country nervously reading about A-bomb tests in the Southwest turned that anxiety into a monster it could actually shoot at. We'll cover the special effects: full-scale mechanical ant puppets, and a shrieking sound effect that was drove Rob to the brink of BURN IT ALL DOWN. And we'll trace the lasting legacy through the years; how a movie whose budget got slashed days before shooting somehow became Warner's biggest hit of the year and spawned an entire decade of giant-bug knockoffs.

And finally... what does it really mean?!

CONSUUUME to find out all this and much, much more!

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