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Turtles in Movies |
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The Beginning or the End (1947) |
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Spoiler Alert !
Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
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This is a docudrama about the research, development, and deployment of the atomic bomb and the bombing of Hiroshima. Fun stuff.
After the bomb has been tested in New Mexico for the first time, we see a group of scientists walking in the desert near where the bomb was exploded. Three of them walk together and one of them picks up a tortoise, then starts talking. He asks the tortoise how it survived:
"How did you survive the day little one?" "Did you wear dark glasses and put your feet towards the blast?"
Then he talks to his companions while still holding the tortoise:
"You know, at first I thought the bomb might be terrible enough to make man choose between peace and destruction.
Now I've seen it, I wish we hadn't made it."
(So do most of us....)
There are Desert Tortoises that live in the desert at the Nevada test site, but they're not found at the Trinity site in New Mexico where the first bomb was exploded, and there are no other species of tortoise there. There Desert Box Turtles there, but they're smaller, so it looks like they used a species of a tortoise for the scene. I'm just going to pretend he was talking to a box turtle.
Interestingly, the Bolson Tortoise is being re-introduced to the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. It used to live there long ago, and it might have lived at the test site, but they were no longer there in the 1940s.
You can watch the movie at TheSilverScream.com. |
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