Word: capra
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Cosmic Rays: For his third show in the Bell System's science series (Our Mr. Sun, Hemo the Magnificent), Producer-Director Frank Capra again trotted out entertainment as the handmaiden of education. Before a panel of Dostoevsky, Dickens and Poe, played by Bil Baird puppets, Dr. Research (Dr. Frank Baxter) and Actor Richard Carlson submitted their scientific candidate for a detective-story prize. Between fancy patter with the panel, the pair used film, animated cartoons and laboratory models to show how the sleuths of science discovered, clue by clue, what little is known about the cosmic rays that bombard...
...amassed the biggest schedule of one-shot shows in its history: 25 specials for the nighttime slate, at least 48 news and documentary specials for Sunday afternoons. The CBS schedule is so tight that the four Frank Capra-produced Bell Telephone science shows had to move over to NBC. Splashiest of all will probably be The Du Pont Show of the Month, offering ten 90-minute spectaculars: Paul Gregory's Crescendo, a mishmash of American music with Ethel Merman, Rex Harrison, Louis Armstrong, Carol Channing and Peggy Lee; Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper; a musical...
...Science Foundation, the M.I.T. program is the most ambitious ever undertaken to modernize high-school physical science courses. Its steering committee includes such names as Nobel Prizewinners Edward Purcell and I. I. (for Isidor Isaac) Rabi, M.I.T.'s President James Killian, Atomic Scientist Vannevar Bush and Moviemaker Frank Capra; its working staff already numbers more than 100. Under Director Jerrold Zacharias, head of M.I.T.'s nuclear science laboratory, the staff will work at least five years on the project, after that may turn its attention to high-school chemistry...
Hemo the Magnificent, presented by the Bell Telephone System on CBS, was a costly monument to the low opinion that some broadcasters hold of the U.S. viewer's intelligence. Written and directed by Frank Capra as the second in a special science series (the first: Our Mr. Sun), the film told the story of the blood and how it gets around. It was doubly condescending in assuming that 1) viewers must be approached at the grade-school level to woo their interest in science, and 2) the circulatory system is so intrinsically dull that it takes...
...patronizing vulgarity with which Capra jazzed up the lesson threw a blight on scientific footage that, in itself, was as good as anything of its kind ever televised. Especially effective in color, these sequences showed a pounding human heart, the hearts of a turtle, a rabbit and a bird, and the passage of blood, a corpuscle at a time, through the microphoto-graphed capillaries of live animals. But as the price of admission, the audience had to face a tasteless jangle of gimmicks: a Superman-like "Hemo" to personify blood, dialect comedy, crude mechanical cartoon analogies of circulatory functions ("groceries...