Word: orphaning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idea in Simon: five brilliant but loony scientists at the "Institute for Advanced Concepts" decide that the American public is ready to meet a full-fledged alien in its already alienated society. They search for a middle-aged male orphan whose memory they plan to deprogram, and then convince him that his mother was a spaceship who dropped him on earth from an advanced civilization where humans are made the way we make toasters. One Simon Mendelssohn becomes their victim, an untenured professor of psychology who is slightly off the deep end already...
Premise No. 2: An overly ambitious assistant professor of psychology (Alan Arkin) is afflicted with intellectual pretentiousness and a messianic complex. He is also an orphan, which means that it might be possible to convince him and everyone else that he was produced "like a toaster" on some other planet and brought to earth in a spaceship. The mad scientists put the hero in a water tank for days to take him back beyond the womb. They induce false but highly persuasive memories of his origins and, incidentally, provide Arkin with a tour de force mime sequence in which...
...different realm from The Saga of Jenny of Lady in the Dark with lyrics by Ira Gershwin ("Jenny made her mind up when she was three/ She, herself, was going to trim the Christmas tree./ Christmas Eve she lit the candles -tossed the taper away./ Little Jenny was an orphan on Christmas...