On the wall, across the room from where I’m writing, there’s a poster like this: Attack of the 50ft Pinup – Yvette Vickers.
You could just about say that the woman in the image is doing a highly specialized kind of walking, the kind that crushes cars and freeways.
The poster is designed by George Chastain and mine is signed by Yvette Vickers, and I used to think it was advertising her autobiography, but I don’t know that there was ever such a book. I think it was just a poster she used to sign and sell at collector and memorabilia fairs, which I guess is where mine came from – it was a present.
The poster, of course, is an homage to the 1958 movie Attack of the 50ft Woman and Yvette Vickers was one of the stars, though she wasn’t the one who grew to 50 feet – that’s Alison Hayes – Yvette played the floozy.
Vickers died rather horribly in 2010 or 2011. The reason for the doubt: she’d become a recluse, and her dead body was found in her home in one of the canyons above Beverly Hills - expert opinion thought she might have been dead for as long as a year. Yep, people in the LA canyons keep themselves to themselves.
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was remade in 2020 with Darryl Hannah. You can sort of understand why they thought it was suitable for a remake it, advances in special effects technology, CGI and all that, but I don’t think the movie was very popular.
The idea of some giant, sexy woman walking through the landscape obviously has its appeal and for some men it’s a major fetish – macrophilia - but of course when it comes to movies we know it’s not the woman who’s fifty feet tall, it’s the buildings that are just a couple of feet tall, and the cars are toys.
But personally I think that’s OK. I really like model villages. You walk around and you feel like a giant or maybe Godzilla or one of those other Japanese monsters, as though you could just stomp the world into submission, but you don’t because it’s not the real world, and because they’d call the cops.
And it appears that out own dear queen was also something of a fan, or at least had to do a walkabout around Bekonscot when on a royal engagement – she actually looks pretty miserable
And here’s a picture I took earlier, at the model village in Great Yarmouth.
