It all comes down to Mount Tambora I suppose.
Had it not erupted in 1815 and sealed the world into the long, cold "Year Without a Summer", then Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron would have been out enjoying summer fun of Lake Geneva instead of being stuck indoors when they convened in 1816.
Had it not erupted, there would have been no writing challenge from Byron to "each write a ghost story" to pass the time, and Mary Shelley would probably never had her terrifying "waking dream" of reanimating the dead that led her to write "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus".
So without Mary Shelley and Mount Tambora, world literature might never have invented the rich and durable horror genre of Science Run Amok, which means we would not have had tonight's feature: the 1958 minor classic, "The Colossus of New York".
Look for interesting shifts in photographic styles and point-of-view perspectives, Ross Martin, teletype machines, reel-to-reel computers, 16mm film, the United Nations, smoking (!) and people speculating about the possibility of automation making humans obsolete.
About the plot, let me just say that the scene where the Colossus is finally driven mad by his inability to find a Casual Male XL outlet anywhere on the island of Manhattan is simply...
No. No. I've said too much already.
You'll just have to watch and see.
