DIMENSION X - No Contact (George Lefferts)

DIMENSION X
No Contact
April 29, 1950

George Lefferts and Ernest Kinoy, both working for NBC at the time, came up with the idea for No Contact together. George Lefferts wrote the script and is usually credited with the story, but he himself credited Kinoy as his co-creator. It was written for Dimension X and first aired on April 29, 1950. Then it was produced again for Dimension X, October 28, 1950. Later the story found its way onto The Chase, December 28, 1952, and then X Minus One April 24, 1955.
In this story the US space program has set their sights on colonization of a distant planet, Volta. But all the ships that have attempted the journey disappeared at a point in space that is called 'The Galactic Barrier'. Will the ship Star Cloud be able to breach this barrier and discover what has happened to the missing ships?

HISTORICAL GLOSSARY

Captain Thorson is happy to hear Charlie will be working ground communication and says, "Well, Charlie, it's good to hear ya. You can read us the funny papers on Sunday morning." In the 1950s, instead of going on the internet to your favorite news site to see what is going on in the world, you would receive delivery of daily newspapers. In addition to the latest world and local news, sports scores, stock prices, and a classified ad section, there were comics. This page of comics was called the "funny papers". The Sunday edition of the newspaper was five times as thick as the daily paper and unlike the daily paper it had sections printed in color. One of the color sections was the comics, that is the "funny papers", and if Charlie read them to the crew they might be less homesick. This is equating with families sending the funny papers to their sons in the military over seas to make them less homesick. Recall that after the Second World War troops occupied Germany and Japan, under the Marshall Plan, aiding in rebuilding those defeated nations and thus making allies out of former enemies. So at the time this show was broadcast many Americans had family in the military away from home, and it was a well known trope that you saved the comics from the Sunday paper to send to your son/brother/fiancé in the military.

Regarding this exchange:
DOCTOR SMITHSON: I don't know. But young Collier has a bad case [of space blues]. I think it's tension from overwork.
CAPTAIN THORSON: Maybe he needs some vitamins.
DOCTOR SMITHSON: Lewis, when will you realize that vitamins are not the panacea for all the troubles of mankind?
It is odd to think of it today, but there was a time in the early 20th Century that no one knew about vitamins. Googling it I learn that between 1913 and 1948 the various vitamins were discovered. My grandfather (born in 1900 so he would have been 50 when this was broadcast) did not believe in vitamins. He thought they were silly scientific mumbo jumbo, not real, fake news. My grandmother on the other hand (born in 1901 so she was 49 when this show aired) thought vitamins were the secret to good health, long life, and mental well being. She took handfuls of vitamins three times a day and no matter what you said your problem was, from a scraped knee to a broken heart, she had a vitamin that would make it better. So this exchange between Smithson and Thorson is very current to the day, when there was controversy over the reality of invisible vitamins in foods.

Captain Thorson addresses Lieutenant Collier's space blues with the comment, "Your lips are as blue as Minnetonka." Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota was well known for its beautiful deep blue color. The author, George Lefferts, was not just a Hollywood script writer, he was a literary man, having studied poetry with WH Auden. There is a poem by Hanford Lennox Gordon, who was popular at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries, titled "Minnetonka" that refers to the lake as a sapphire (deep blue gemstone) set in emerald green (the trees around the lake). I can only imagine this reference in the story is an allusion to that poem, as the theme of the poem, besides presenting a vivid picture of the lake, infers that colonizers replaced the natives and the monuments and memories of those native inhabitants faded and were replaced. Hmmm, who is colonizing who in this story? If a listener were a literate as Lefferts would the reference to Minnetonka be a foreshadowing?

The story concludes with Colonel Harrison telling Charlie to go out and get some coffee because he looks "a little blue around the gills." A popular idiom of the time that was used to describe a person who looked unwell, usually nauseous, was "green around the gills". It is said to have originated with sailors and fishermen to indicate seasickness by comparing the sick person to a fish that had parasites around its gills, and was thus no good and had to be discarded. By substituting "blue" for "green" in this popular idiom, Lefferts has communicated a paragraph of exposition into a line, confirming Charlie's true identity.