When Stanley Kubrick approached Arthur C. Clarke about adapting his 1950 short story \u201cThe Sentinel,\u201d they had to reckon with its dual timeframes \u2013 1996, when the action takes place on the surface of the moon, and 2016, when the narrator is recalling it. They split the difference, calling the resulting space odyssey 2001<\/em>, but when that year rolled around, many companies featured in it were no longer in business, and neither were there lunar bases with passenger flights to and fro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New World\u2019s Death Race 2000<\/em>, meanwhile, went out of its way to court trouble since the story it\u2019s based on \u2013 Ib Melchior\u2019s \u201cThe Racer,\u201d published in 1956 \u2013 didn\u2019t pin down its setting. Then again, the film refers to \u201cthe World Crash of \u201979,\u201d so the turn of the millennium failing to herald a road race where drivers score points by running down pedestrians didn\u2019t blunt its effectiveness. The same goes for L.Q. Jones\u2019s A Boy and His Dog<\/em>, based on Harlan Ellison\u2019s 1969 novella of the same name. Its poster states, \u201cThe year is 2024\u2026 a future you\u2019ll probably live to see.\u201d Now that we have, it has proven to be remarkably prescient, though probably not in the way its makers intended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Ellison unable to pen the screenplay \u2013 due to writer\u2019s block or a Writer\u2019s Guild strike, depending upon the source \u2013 that fell to producer-director Jones. As an actor, he mostly made war films and westerns, and was a member of Sam Peckinpah\u2019s stock company. In the late \u201960s, he formed a production company that turned out two low-budget horror films, one of which (1971\u2019s The Brotherhood of Satan<\/em>) he also starred in and helped write. In adapting \u201cA Boy and His Dog,\u201d Jones stayed faithful to Ellison\u2019s story, including the year it takes place, which Ellison refers to obliquely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both novella and film are set 17 years after World War IV, which lasted five days. (This is depicted by a barrage of atomic explosions.) The first half plays out in the expected desert wasteland, which 15-year-old \u201csolo\u201d Vic (Don Johnson) and his dog Blood (Tiger from The Brady Bunch<\/em>, voiced by Tim McIntire), with whom he communicates telepathically, traverse in search of food (which Vic procures) and females (which Blood sniffs out). Their dependence on each other is an occasional source of tension \u2013 Blood never lets Vic forget who the brains are \u2013 but their bond is tested when Vic takes a fancy to Quilla June (Suzanne Benton), a girl from \u201cdownunder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While its vision of post-apocalyptic society \u2013 which inspired the likes of Mad Max<\/em> and the Fallout<\/em> video game series \u2013 hasn\u2019t become a reality, A Boy and His Dog<\/em>\u2019s ties to the present moment come to the fore when Vic takes the bait and follows Quilla June into the underground community of Topeka, which has a very specific use for him. Captured, forcibly bathed, and prevented from getting his bearings, Vic winds up at the mercy of The Committee, which metes out death sentences to those who express the \u201cwrong attitude\u201d about life in their retrograde society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Describing the downunders, Ellison wrote (in Vic\u2019s voice) that \u201cthe people who\u2019d settled in them were squares of the worst kind. Southern Baptists, fundamentalists, lawanorder goofs, real middle-class squares with no taste for the wild life.\u201d To convey this, Jones fills Topeka with marching bands and barbershop quartets, and has its residents enthuse about the canning festival presided over by The Committee and its figurehead, played by Jason Robards. As with the rest of Topeka\u2019s sun-deprived populace, the white makeup on Robards makes him look like a clown, but his blas\u00e9 attitude \u2013 especially when passing judgment on any undesirables who come before him \u2013 makes plain that it would be foolish not to take the threat he represents seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These days, it doesn\u2019t take much squinting to spot the parallels between The Committee and the drafters of Project 2025, the goal of which is to roll back social progress and return to a time when subversives were stamped out with impunity and women of child-bearing age were little more than baby factories. The twist in A Boy and His Dog<\/em> is Vic is the one hooked up to a milking machine and expected to produce until he\u2019s wrung dry. After that treatment, joining Blood in his search for the fabled \u201cOver the Hill\u201d doesn\u2019t sound so bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA Boy and His Dog\u201d is available on a variety of <\/em>streaming platforms<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/A-Boy-and-His-Dog2-1024x576.jpg\")
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