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Reviews
Gunsmoke: How to Cure a Friend (1956)
Beautifully Written and Acting and a Unique Surprise Ending
I have to strongly disagree with the other reviewers. So far. This was one of the best episodes. There is not much "action," but I loved the interaction of the main characters with each other and the guess star Andrew Duggan.
Kitty and Chester worry about rumors when a fast-gun gambler come to town. They question Matt throughout the episode, but Matt reassures them that he's a good guy.
This episode shows the respect and love Kitty and Chester have for Matt and does it without them really speaking it out loud.
I agree that it is slow, but it is entirely enjoyable and beautifully directed by Ted Post. Nice to see the wonderful actors Andrew Duggan ("Bourbon Street Beat")and Simon Oakland ("Psycho," "The Night Stalker")
.
It is unique episodes like this that made "Gunsmoke" the most beloved Western on television. Don't miss it.
Gunsmoke: The Guitar (1956)
The Direction was Poor and the Script Needed a ReWrite
This was the only episode that Harry Horner directed. He seems to have been an excellent production designer with two academy awards and one other nomination in the category, but his experience directing was very limited. He did just 19 movies and T. V. shows in his career.
This explains why the actors, especially the regulars on the show, do perhaps the worst acting of any 1st season episode. They recite their lines without much conviction. Worse, they don't behave like the characters we come to know in the first season. They are bumbling and bewildered instead of the heroic and strong characters we came to love.
I appreciate the surprise ending that Sam Peckinpah gives us, but I don't think the series would have lasted lasted 20 weeks, let along 20 years, if the lead characters had acted this silly and inconsistently in other episodes.
Funny Money (2006)
Starts Out Okay, But Hits One or Two Note Farce Pretty Quickly
Chevy Chase's best series of movies "Vacation" and "Fletch" traveled to lots of different interesting places and kept at least a semblance of believably with very likeable characters. This one starts out well, but after twenty minutes it becomes stage bound in two dull locations and it seems to become closer to a stage play than a movie.
Chase plays a thief, but not a smart or likeable one. Everybody else is greedy and dis-likeable too, with the exception of Penelope Ann Miller who plays Chases' wife. She, at least, can be excused for her bad/stupid behavior as she gets drunk after 20 minutes and remains so for most of the rest of the movie.
If your premise is that psychopathic bad guy killers are coming to get the hero and his wife, you really have to have your hero and his wife try and escape. You can't spend the rest of the movie having them hanging around at home for three quarters of the movie, joking around with a dozen minor characters. It is irritating rather than funny, even if you call it a farce.
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949)
One of Preston Sturges' Best Movies Released At the Wrong Time
If you look at Preston Sturges' "Miracle at Morgan's Creek," 1943, staring Betty Hutton as Judy Kockenlocker, you will see how incredibly perverse it was considering the moral standards in the movie industry at the time. You have a movie suggesting that a woman getting drunk and sleeping with a soldier and becoming pregnant without even remembering his name was a hilarious situation. Sturges took delight in repeating her name over and over again, obviously finding it hilarious that it sounded like the painful situation of a "cock-in-locker."
This movie is just as hilarious with its outrageous humor, having multiple and deliberate jokes about a judge who gets shot in his buttocks.
Unfortunately, this film came out in 1949, the year that produced the most film noirs and a year where Congressional investigations into Hollywood political transgressions were taking a horribly serious turn.
One can see this film and Preston Sturges as being the victim of the new politics of the time.
Betty Grable looks sexy in every scene and often adjusts her clothes (taking them on or off) to look even more sexy. Her blatant sexuality comes through in the metaphor of her being able to handle a gun better than any of the men in the picture. Never has the penis/gun equation been more straight forward.
If this movie had come out in 1944 or 1954, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece, but in 1949, the U. S. was preparing for a new world war which was expected to be a lot worse than the last one. The last thing the government (issuing daily warnings about impending world war wanted was an outrageous sex comedy filled with double and triple entendres like this film.
Don't miss it, especially if you are a Preston Sturges or Betty Grable fans. Fans of 1930s and 40s comedies will be happy to see at least half a dozen minor comedy stars, like Hugh Herbert, El Brendel, Sterling Holloway, and Porter Hall, plying their trade with obvious skill and joy,
Thunder in the Pines (1948)
Better Than Expected. Reeves and Byrd Make a Good Team
I wasn't expecting much given the synopsis and one hour running time. I watched to see Reeves in a pre/non "Adventures of Superman" film. I loved that television show since I was a kid of four years old and was traumatized by his reported suicide death when I was six. Reeves plays a strong, manly hero role here, with a nice smile and sense of humor very much like his Clark Kent/ Superman character that he played from 1952-1958.
The surprise I found in the movie was Ralph Byrd, who plays his similarly heroic buddy here, although he's slightly duller and less handsome. Byrd apparently was a bigger star at this time having played the comic strip hero Dick Tracy in a number of serials and movies starting in 1937.
There's some nice chemistry between Reeves and Byrd and some good action footage of Tree cutting that makes the film quite interesting.
Sadly, Bird died tragically young just four years after this film at age 42. Reeves died at age 45, 11 years after this film. Knowing this about their real lives adds a lot of poignancy to this film where they are obviously having a great time enjoying being young, popular and being movie stars.
Rifkin's Festival (2020)
Reminded Me of Allen's Great Stardust Memories
In "Stardust Memories," Woody Allen's tenth feature, made in 1980, he played a filmmaker attending a retrospective of his own films. In it, he made fun of his films and his fans and declared that he wanted to make serious films or at least films that would be taken seriously.
In Rifkin's Festival, the lead character is a film teacher attending a film festival. And Allen has him making fun of the great art films of the great directors whom Allen told us he admired in the 1960s from Orson Welles to Jean Luc Godard to Louis Bunuel to Ingmar Bergman. These scenes, all which are dreams that the lead character Rifkin has, are hilarious and represent Allen at his comical best.
The complex relationships of all the characters are nicely introduced and explored.
I'm afraid that the only thing that keeps this movie from being one of Allen's best is the lead actor playing Rifkin -Shawn Wallace. Wallace is a great character actor, but he can't really carry a movie as the lead. This is especially true at the age 75 when he made this film. He comes off as much too helpless and pathetic.
There were a lot of great light romantic comedians around in 2020 in their 60s and 70s who could have been brilliant in the lead - These include James Spader, David Spade, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Hugh Laurie, Jeff Daniels, John Corbett, Paul Reiser, Judge Reinhold, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Tim Allen, Rick Moranis, Richard Dreyfus, Kevin Kline. Jim Belushi. And Albert Brooks.
Except for this one casting mistake, I totally enjoyed the movie. That makes about #45 out of Allen's 50 films that I would put in the Must-See category.
Beautiful But Broke (1944)
For Die Hard Joan Davis Fans Only
There were three reviews giving this movie a 7 and two reviews giving this movie a 5. I think all the reviews were right, so I'm giving it a 6.
Joan Davis was a brilliant comedian and great in Abbott and Costello movies and the early T. V. sit-com "I Married Joan." However this 1944 movie is showing the extreme war-weariness that Danny Kaye's "Up In Arms" also suffered from. As the war had been dragging on for three years, it was hard to continue the honest gong-ho patriotic feelings that made bearable the first two years of the horrible disruptions and deprivations World War II brought to normal life. People just wanted the nightmare to end as quickly as possible by 1944. At least Kaye's movie had some brilliant musical numbers going for it. This one has some spirited standard songs delivered by minor singers Jane Frazee and Judy Clarke.
The comedy routines by Joan Davis are passable and mildly amusing until we get to the notorious Carpenters Sketch that runs a little over 8 minutes. We have to endure Joan being horribly twisted, kicked, smashed and mangled for this entire scene. One just wants the painful abuse to her body to stop after the first two minutes or three minutes, but it just goes on until you feel incredibly sorry for Joan.
I fell in love with Joan Davis watching "I Married Joan" in reruns when I was five years old, circa 1958, so I love everything I see her in, but if you're not in love with her, this is probably the one you should skip.
Gunsmoke: Home Surgery (1955)
Best of the First Dozen Gunsmoke Episodes and Gloria Talbot Too.
Although I'm a big fan of T. V. Westerns of the 50s and 60s and started watching T. V. around 1957 (age 4). I don't remember watching more than three or four episodes while it was being aired., 1955-1975
I watched the first dozen episodes this week on "Pluto" channel on my Roku T. V. which is running them for free. They are so good, I've decided to watch all 20 seasons in order.
I thought this was the best of the first dozen episodes I watched, although most of them were quite excellent. This one takes a surprising turn in just about every scene. The story keeps changing and it is constantly throwing you off-balance. This is one of the great strengths of the episodes I've watched, just when you think you know where the story is going, you get thrown a curve ball. You think this one is going to be about Sheriff Matt Dillon and sidekick Chester Good surviving in the wilderness and then it switches to them trying to help a young woman's father survive an illness.
This episode has the added benefit of having one of my favorite 50s/60s actresses, Gloria Talbot, in a guess starring role. Gloria Talbot starred in tons of 50s and early 60s T. V. shows and low budget movies like "I Married a Monster from Outer Space" and was always a highlight whenever she appeared. Somebody in one of the reviews on IMDB called her a "female James Dean" and I think that well describes her.
It was clear that the creators of this episode planned to have her as a future Gunsmoke cast member, but for whatever reason her role from this episode was not continued, although she did make two other appearances as different characters in the 1960s. She was scheduled to become a regular cast member also on the early 1960s "Mr. Novak," T. V. series, but unfortunately she was injured and only appeared in the pilot episode of that show. She also made three effective appearances on three episodes of Steve McQueen's "Wanted Dead or Alive" later in the 1950s.
Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972)
Neil Simon hits a Triple
In the 1970s, Neil Simon and Woody Allen were competing for the title of funniest neurotic, New York Jewish writer. Simon was more successful in his stage plays and Woody Allen was more successful in his movies. Both are wonderful geniuses who are products of the early television age and the late Broadway theater age.
The movie is rather simple with Alan Arkin ("Catch 22," 1970) playing three long scenes seducing Sally Kellerman, Paula Prentiss, and Renee Taylor to come to his mother's apartment for sexual affairs. All three actresses are excellent and hilarious. My favorite is Paula Prentiss who plays a zany actress trying to scam money from Arkin to audition for a musical. Prentiss actually sings quite nicely here, the only time I've heard her singing in a movie. I'm surprised she didn't become a singing star.
The movie captures the anxieties of all the people who were born too late for the sexual and drug revolution of the 1960's, and couldn't catch up with the times. It also wonders about the new age morality, but tries to be liberal and non-judgmental. The movie does suggest that the new morality of the age may not be right for everybody, especially those born in the 1930s depression era.
Moron Than Off (1946)
A Three Stooges Style Movie Without the Stooges, but with Stanley Holloway
I remember Stanley Holloway from his several appearances on "The Adventures of Superman" T. V. series in the 1950s.
He often appears in small comedy roles in many 1930s and 1940s movies, although he occasionally played the sidekick of the lead in some Westerns. His voice is famous from a bunch of animated features he did for Walt Disney in the 1940s-1960s.
He starred in 15 or 20 shorts in the 30s and 40s. Most of them are fairly entertaining. He was a frequent guest star on television series of the 60s and 70s.
This short is not one of his best, but there are a few hilarious moments towards the end when he is chasing a slip of paper from a winning lottery ticket, which keeps escaping from him.
The movie is only worth seeing if you are a Sterling Holloway fan. The style and music reminds one the Three Stooges, probably because Jules White of Three Stooges fame directed it.
Playhouse 90: The Last Tycoon (1957)
Best Jack Palance Performance I've Ever Seen
Jack Palanc gives a truly amazing performance. Live television was hell for actors knowing that one wrong movement or one forgotten line they could ruin the whole show and adversely affect their career. Palance is in nearly every scene and he appears totally natural every moment. He lets other actors like Keenan Wynn and Peter Lorre have their dramatic moments, but he is always quiet calm and reflective.
Two other standouts here are Viveca Lindfors playing the same dear old pal type she played in "The Way We Were," and future "Billy Jack" star Tom Laughlin doing his riff on a Marlin Brandon type method actor.
I saw Robert DeNiro play the role in the 70s movie, and he also gave a non-characteristically subtle performance, but I don't remember it being nearly as laid back and believable as Palance's performance here.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Mrs. Herman and Mrs. Fenimore (1958)
This Episode Is a Hilarious Delight from Beginning to End with Superstar Mary Astor
If you watch Mary Astor in 1926's "Don Juan" with John Barrymore, or 1941's classic "the Maltese Falcon," you know what a great actress she was.
The surprise here is that Doro Merande, who I've seen/remembered from "Our Town" (1940) and "the Honeymooners" from the early 1950s is just as good as Astor.
D
The episode, directed by Arthur Hiller (Love Story, 1970) is a delight from first moment to last, as the two develop a strange friendship at the expense of Russell Collins, another fine actor who started off working with famed Greek director Elia Kazan when Kazan started off as an actor in 1935. However, Collins is best known from his nearly 100 guest stars on all the great TV shows from 1950-1965.
Besides the great acting on display here, the script is pert and witty throughout and has the perfect double-cross ending.
The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950)
Confusing
The Colgate Comedy Hour seems to have run from 1950-1955 with a multitude of hosts and guest stars. This seems to be a collection of just the episodes that Martin and Lewis hosted. This would have been fine, but they seem to have edited out almost all the guess stars and left in the five-ten minutes of commercials.
So all that we're getting is a smattering of bits from an unknown number of episodes. Nobody in 1950-1955 actually watched the material this way. We are not getting the actual shows, but only badly edited excerpts from some of them.
I watched this on the Roku Channel and was quite disappointed.
Merrily We Live (1938)
Contender for Best Classic Hollywood Screwball Comedy
There are many talented actors and actresses here who make this film a delight. Unlike most films that depend on four or five stars, this film has ten stars each making solid contributions. Billie Burke (Academy Award nominated for the film) Constance Bennett, Brian Ahern, Bonita Granville, Alan Mowbray, Clarence Kolb (whom I remember as Banker George Honeywell from the great 1950's Charles Farrell-Gail Storm sitcom, "My Little Margie"), Tom Brown, Patsy Kelly, Ann Dvorak, and Willie Best all making nice contributions.
The movie has a great opening scene with the wealthy family discovering that a recently hired servant has stolen their silverware. Billie Burke seems to be the main screwball character here with the other characters being more or less normal. For a few minutes after this the film seems to drift, with all the characters saying strangely bizarre or absurd things, but slowly you realize that even the allegedly sane members of the household, including the servants, are equally wacky as Burke, but in their own different ways.
Brian Aherne's character remains a mystery throughout the piece, but his bizarre actions are nicely explained at the ending.
Laugh for laugh this matches any of Preston Sturges' or Frank Capra's movies.
Director Norman Z. McLeod also matches his own great comedies - "Monkey Business," "Horse Feathers," "It's a Gift," "Topper," and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."
Movieland (1926)
Lupino Lane Does Wonderful Clown-Circus Bits With His Brother Walter
I was was surprised to see that this short was made in 1926. It seemed to be closer in spirit to the roughhouse slapstick of films made 8 or 9 years earlier. The plot is thin with Lupino Lane trying to get into a movie studio to meet an actress he loves. Katherine Grayson plays the actress. She is best remembered as Buster Keaton's love interest in "Sherlock Jr" and "The Navigator."
Much of the movie is about Lupino being mistaken for a dummy or dummies. In fact, it is hard to tell sometimes when it is the dummy or Lupino onscreen. Hopefully it was the dummy undergoing the horrific abuse in most scenes. Still, Lupino's physical skills are terrific and his timing is excellent.
Well worth the time for those who love the superb physical slapstick that the great comedians developed so well in the silent era.
My Living Doll: Pool Shark (1965)
The Humorous Side of Robots
I remember watching every episode of this series in 1964/65 when I was 11 years old. I was extremely disappointed when the series went off the air after only one year.
I rewatched this episode 59 years later on Tubi and I was just as delighted by it as I was when I first saw it.
In this episode, regular zany character, Peter Robinson (Jack Mullaney) has gotten into debt ($500) with a pool shark and doesn't have the money to pay him back. He begs his friend Dr. Robert McDonald to help him out. McDonald teaches his robot, Rhoda (Julie Newmar) to play pool, and being a robot she quickly becomes the greatest pool player in the world. This leads to a bigger problem when she wins $50,000 from another pool shark gangster. McDonald has to create a flaw in her pool playing to keep the second pool
shark from resorting to drastic measure
Today we have real robots and we humans are facing real problems with them outmatching us humans in almost everything. Hopefully, these problems will be as comically simple to solve as this one.
The show works as both science fiction and comedy.
Trapped in Paradise (1994)
Kind of like a 90s Saturday Night Live Skit that Goes on for an Hour and a Half
The three lead characters are stupid dishonest and dis-likable. They live in a universe (mostly a town called Paradise Pennsylvania (A lame spoof of Frank Capra's Bedford Falls in "Its a Wonderful Life" and prison) where everybody is stupid, so nobody notices that they are out of place.
I assume that all the people giving this a 10 out 10 are big fans of 90s Saturday Night Live. I did enjoy Lovitz and Carvey on the show, but they both have one note characters Jon Lovitz (liar) and Dana Carvey (Kleptomaniac) and there is no development in them at all. Nicolas Cage can be a wonderful actor, but he is also just doing a bare sketch of a comic character here.
There are too many genuinely beautiful Christmas movies to waste time in this exercise in Hollywood cynicism and mockery of decent people.
What the Doctor Ordered (1912)
For Fans of Sennet and Normand
An ill man (Mack Sennett) is advised by his doctor to get some mountain air. He and his friend visit the mountain. The man experiences some dangerous adventures on the mountain and decides he wants to go back to the orange groves of Hollywood.
Shortly after this, Sennett was in charge of Keystone films and known for going to interesting locations and improvising a story with wild slapstick gags. This film is unlike those in that Dell Henderson (actor, soon to be a director) wrote the script and it seems to be a tight script with each scene follows logically.
What I found most interesting is the missed opportunity for "point of view" shots. For example, a man looks though a telescope at a distant scene, but instead of seeing what the man sees from his point of view, the camera cuts to a medium shot obviously not from his far away point of view.
D. W. Griffith apparently used POV in "Birth of a Nation" 1913 and "Intolerance" 1915, Eisenstein used it in "Potemkin" (1921). Harold Lloyd used it in "Safety Last" in 1923, and Buster Keaton used it in "Sherlock Junior" in 1924. Abel Gance used it in his film "Napoleon" in 1927.
Still it is surprising that it was not used more often in silent films.
Possibly it is because we naturally accept everything we see through our own eyes as objective, while we consider something we see through other's eye impossible or a dream.
They Would Elope (1909)
Delicious and Delightful Slapstick Comedy from 1909
Mary Pickford didn't do much slapstick as far as I can tell in her early Biographs with D. W. Griffith. Here she is terrific having car accidents, wheel-barrow accidents and boat accidents as she tries to elope with boyfriend Billy Quirk.
Notice the distinction between the outdoor and indoor scenes. The indoor scenes put you in a front row seat watching a stage play. The viewer is always conscience of watching a play. The outdoor scenes jerks the viewer into a real rural landscape with the cars, wheelbarrows and boat as wonderful props. These outdoor scenes feel more like a dream. These two quite different realities add depth to the action and story.
It is wonderful to see Max Sennett playing his yokel character that he played in so many of his own Keystone comedies starting in around 1912.
This is a must-see for fans of silent film comedy.
Won by a Fish (1912)
Interesting Use of a Box Camera and A Fish
This is a funny tale, about a suitor (Edward Dillon) and his sweetheart (Mary Pickford). Mary's father (Dell Henderson) comes home after a bad day at fishing and throws out the suitor. The rest of the 9 minutes is about how Mary and Edward find a way to get revenge on Dell and get him to approve their marriage.
Director Mack Sennett does a good job of keeping the action moving. Mary, as always, gives a good performance as does Dell Henderson as the father.
It thought the use of a box camera to take photos of a fish with both Dell and Edward was a clever part of the story. Edward and Mary trick Dell into thinking that he caught a giant fish that they bought at a fishing shop. After bragging to all his friends how he caught the giant fish, Dell, to maintain his reputation as a great fisherman, must allow the marriage he had denied previously. But for the fish, and their photography trick, Edward and Mary would not have married. Thus the title "Won by a Fish"
I'm sure at least the fishermen in the audience enjoyed the movie, as well as young men and women looking for tips to trick their parents into giving permission for marriage.
A Trap for Santa Claus (1909)
A Static Movie from Christmas 1909 as Griffith was still Learning
This movie seems like a tragedy where a family breaks up when the father can't find work. He leaves the family in despair because they are starving.
In the middle of the movie the tragedy suddenly ends and it turns more or less into a comedy. The effect of this shift in tone is just jarring and odd for a modern viewer.
The movie was released at Christmas 1909. It was probably shot within a few weeks of that time. Griffith has nearly every shot the same with the feet of the characters cut off, and too much room above the heads. It appears much more primitive than 1903's "Great Train Robbery." It was apparently sometime in 1910 when Griffith learned to make his movies more interesting by varying the distance of the camera from the actors and allowing more depth for the actors to move from the background to the foreground, instead of just left to right.
It is worth seeing mainly for people interested in the development of cinema.
A Beast at Bay (1912)
Griffith's editing and Bitzer's Camera Work are Outstanding
I've been watching a lot of early Mary Pickford, Biograph movies from 1908-1910. They feature some great naturalistic acting.
There's a definite advance in camera work and editing in this 1912 film. There's much more depth of field also. It is breathtaking to see a racing car and a racing train in the same shot hundreds of feet apart.
The version I watched was an Official Mary Pickford release on YouTube with music by Dan Light. The music was excellent and really added to the excitement of the movie.
This seems to be a 13 minute, 11 second version, but it is identical to a 17 minute, 53 second completely silent version running on the Daily Motion Site. I thought that the 13 minute version might have cut something, but everything is the same and the 13 minute version just seems to run the frames at a faster rate.
Wanted: Dead or Alive: The Inheritance (1960)
One of the Better Episodes, Great Guess Star John Anderson
Nice surprises in this one where a rich father hires Josh to find his long lost son. The catch here is that the father is blind and doesn't have a picture of the son. He only knows that he carries a locket his mother gave him.
Guess star John Anderson was on numerous Westerns of the period, including the Rifleman 11 times and Gunsmoke 12 times. This was his only appearance on
"Wanted." He's used to good effect, playing an unusual and surprising role.
I really liked that the episode shows that Josh isn't as money-hungry as he sometimes appears. He is willing to give all his money back $2,000 when he realizes that he has not done his job properly.
The minimal gun-play and reliance on clever and surprising twists makes this an excellent episode.
All on Account of the Milk (1910)
Nice to See a Non-Griffith Biograph Film Starring Mary Pickford
This film shows the rigidity of upper-class society back in 1910. When a rich daughter (Mary Pickford) takes over the roll of the housemaid (Blanche Sweet) who is sick, confusion and a break-down of class roles ensues. When rich son (Arthur Johnson) takes on the role of a day laborer, it increases the chaos and makes for a likeable social comedy.
There's a whirlwind courtship between Johnson and Pickford that takes place over a few hours in a day as they meet thinking that she is the maid and he is a visiting workingman.
There's a noteworthy appearance by Mack Sennett playing his typical yokel character to add to the comedy.
The beginning feels a bit repetitious as Johnson goes four times to ask Pickford for Milk, but Pickford grows more affectionate each time, until it is clear that she is head over heals in love with him. The speed of the romance makes it unrealistic, but is an interesting plot device.
My Baby (1912)
Offbeat and Delicious Comedy by Anita Loos
Anita Loos ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes") got into movies by writing screenplays for D. W. Griffith in his Biograph period. This is a wonderful one which deals with misunderstandings between a father and daughter. It is both sweet and funny and tells us a lot about the age it was made (circa 1912).
Mary Pickford seems to betray her father by getting married after promising to stick with her father, but Loos is being realistic and a beautiful young woman like Pickford could hardly be expected to keep her promise and remain an unmarried virgin for long.
The father, betrayed, banishes her from his house. A few years later, when he finds she had a baby he is curious to see if she resembles his dead wife. He is mistaken for a thief by Mary's new family when he visits the home to see the baby.
All of this is still funny today and must have been even more hilarious during the time period. I was surprised to see how hysterical Mary and her new family got at the idea of a harmless old man sneaking into a house, but one can still see the situation causing panic today (2023).
Enjoy this wonderfully humanistic comedy from a time when movies were new and the great cinema pioneers were leaving their legacy for the human race.