So, one of my favorite podcasts, Slice of SciFi, recently kicked off a discussion thread where people call in and recount their first exposure to the genre, as in “The moment you turned into a card-carrying fanboy” (or fangirl … or fan-adjacent lifeform).

Until now, I always remembered and recounted the story of the lethal one-two punch of Adam West’s Batman, specifically the episode “Catwoman Goes to College” when I was four (which, as I’ve said before, also introduced me to this curious DLC called “heterosexuality”). The follow-up was the Star Trek classic “Catspaw” around age six. However, some discussion on the show jogged another, repressed trauma that, when I slot it on the timeline, lands squarely in between those two. Which means it was probably my second brush with genre TV, and my first taste of speculative fiction.

Submitted for your approval: A young Darrin, age five. That puts us in 1974–75, for those doing the math (and yes, I’m impressed). My mom and I are at the Knoxville, Tennessee, airport waiting to pick up my dad. His plane is late, of course; flight delays have been around as long as gravity. I’m five, there’s nothing to do, so I plop in front of the big TV with the rest of the bored humans. What unfolded on that screen for the next hour, during what was probably the ABC Sunday Night Movie or something, was the most horrific sci-fi tale my tiny brain had ever processed. I remember it gave me the willies for months afterward until I finally convinced myself it had never happened.

In this movie, lab-coated scientists hold an unsuspecting innocent without explaining why, at least not that I could understand. Their motives and desires are entirely beyond me. A lot of big words are involved, and five-year-old me only spoke fluent PBJ. Eventually, the captive man comes to the attention of human automatons —killer robots with china-doll faces that can be removed. Downright creepy, they must have been early prototypes for Terminators. Eventually, he escapes by painting his face white, thus disguising himself as one of them. In the end, he is “helped” by a mysterious woman who not only keeps a vast, growing man-eating blob-like creature in her secret lair, but also, in a traitorous turn, promptly puts him under some mind control spell using a crystal ball of some sort. Fortunately, he escapes again. I do not, however. I’m now hiding behind my mother because, clearly, the robots, blobs, and mind control witches can see through TVs, and airports are lousy with corners.

Look, at five, I don’t know what science fiction is. I didn’t know what actors and movie studios were. I barely know what breakfast is. I don’t have a concept of “future tales” or “allegory.” I have an idea of creepy robots, goo monsters, zombies, and the sudden awareness that mannequins look like these robots and are probably just biding their time. There was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. Surely those were real people and real places, since they talked to me, ergo those robots were real and that mean lady wants to turn me into a zombie and feed me to her goo monster too.

I spent the next several years being afraid of department-store mannequins. (Apologies to Sears. It wasn’t personal. It was survival.)

Fast-forward to my sci-fi-addicted teen years in the ’80s. I go back and watch, and laugh, at everything I was afraid of as a child. Still, I live in video rental stores like a mall cryptid, hunting for this movie I can’t quite name but am sure is an obscure, long-lost arthouse masterpiece. All I remember are jittery images of those unsettling robots. I compile suspects:

Was it some old Six Million Dollar Man versus Maskatron episode?  

Westworld, possibly?  

Maybe Logan’s Run?  

Could it be that I caught an early television replay of THX 1138?  

Each time I think I’ve got it, the movie still turns out to be the wrong one. The mannequins remain out there, somewhere.

Now jump ahead fifteen years. I’m coming home from a late night at the lab in college. My roommate was watching, or maybe had rented, some sci-fi flick on TV. By this point, I’ve seen every bad genre film known to Blockbuster, so imagine my shock when I see that guy, face painted white, being chased by those same creepy china-doll robots. My inner five-year-old pops out like a jack-in-the-box.

“Dude, what are you watching?! I was traumatized by this movie as a kid!”

Yes. Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” (1973). The slapstick future comedy with banana peels, orbs, and robots that look like they were designed by a toaster with performance anxiety. Turns out my primal terror wasn’t sparked by a grim dystopia or a Kubrickian meditation on humanity. It was a screwball farce..

Which, honestly, tracks. Comedy is just horror with better timing.

Moral of the story: your “origin myth” as a sci-fi fan might not be a grand, cerebral epic. Sometimes it’s a guy in a white suit getting chased by budget robots while you discover airports are full of televisions and life is full of plot twists. Sometimes the thing that scared you into loving the genre isn’t Westworld or THX 1138. Sometimes, it’s a joke you were too young to get.

Also, mannequins: still suspicious.

Update 2024

The modernized trailer is out, and it’s closer to my original memory of the movie. Perhaps I’m not the only one.