THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON (1940), which Welles provided opening narration for, sounded like the sort of thing which, in Hollywood’s hands, might be persuaded to incorporate a rapacious sea beast, but when I eventually got a copy of the long-unavailable flick (I suspect Disney suppressed it to make room for their later Hayley John Mills version), there wasn’t a sucker in sight, unless you count Freddie Bartholomew. A few titles looked promising, but as the films were often unavailable, I couldn’t be sure. My research wasn’t insanely extensive, but I did look at the list of RKO movies made between the late 1930s and 1941. Somewhere out there, I knew, must be a movie in which Steve gave his original performance. The octopus, who I’m going to call Steve, seemed a particularly interesting example, since he’s clearly not from a piece of news footage. But I’m not aware of anybody having traced the stock footage (I could well be wrong, though). I first started looking into the stock music in KANE after being startled to hear the News on the March theme played in NURSE EDITH CAVELL, but then I discovered that enterprising researchers had traced all the music used in that sequence. In the CITIZEN KANE News on the March fake newsreel sequence, as William Alland narrates “the FISH of the SEA, the FOWL of the AIR” in that booming manner of his, we briefly cut to a rubber cephalopod mollusc bouncing towards us on concealed wires. You see, I hadn’t even realized it was fake, which makes its inclusion in a newsreel hilarious – After a conversation with ace animator and effects artist Randy Cook, I got intrigued about the CITIZEN KANE octopus.
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