In works of speculative fiction, there’s a danger in specifying when a futuristic story is set. No matter how far into the future it is, the inexorable march of time will eventually catch up, and we’ll either have hoverboards in 2015 (and still use fax machines) or Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale will come up short as prognosticators. Back to the Future Part II is far from the only example of this phenomenon, though.
When Stanley Kubrick approached Arthur C. Clarke about adapting his 1950 short story “The Sentinel,” they had to reckon with its dual timeframes – 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, 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.
New World’s Death Race 2000, meanwhile, went out of its way to court trouble since the story it’s based on – Ib Melchior’s “The Racer,” published in 1956 – didn’t pin down its setting. Then again, the film refers to “the World Crash of ’79,” so the turn of the millennium failing to herald a road race where drivers score points by running down pedestrians didn’t blunt its effectiveness. The same goes for L.Q. Jones’s A Boy and His Dog, based on Harlan Ellison’s 1969 novella of the same name. Its poster states, “The year is 2024… a future you’ll probably live to see.” Now that we have, it has proven to be remarkably prescient, though probably not in the way its makers intended.
With Ellison unable to pen the screenplay – due to writer’s block or a Writer’s Guild strike, depending upon the source – that fell to producer-director Jones. As an actor, he mostly made war films and westerns, and was a member of Sam Peckinpah’s stock company. In the late ’60s, he formed a production company that turned out two low-budget horror films, one of which (1971’s The Brotherhood of Satan) he also starred in and helped write. In adapting “A Boy and His Dog,” Jones stayed faithful to Ellison’s story, including the year it takes place, which Ellison refers to obliquely.
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 “solo” Vic (Don Johnson) and his dog Blood (Tiger from The Brady Bunch, 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 – Blood never lets Vic forget who the brains are – but their bond is tested when Vic takes a fancy to Quilla June (Suzanne Benton), a girl from “downunder.”
While its vision of post-apocalyptic society – which inspired the likes of Mad Max and the Fallout video game series – hasn’t become a reality, A Boy and His Dog’s 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 “wrong attitude” about life in their retrograde society.
Describing the downunders, Ellison wrote (in Vic’s voice) that “the people who’d 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.” 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’s sun-deprived populace, the white makeup on Robards makes him look like a clown, but his blasé attitude – especially when passing judgment on any undesirables who come before him – makes plain that it would be foolish not to take the threat he represents seriously.
These days, it doesn’t 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 is Vic is the one hooked up to a milking machine and expected to produce until he’s wrung dry. After that treatment, joining Blood in his search for the fabled “Over the Hill” doesn’t sound so bad.
“A Boy and His Dog” is available on a variety of streaming platforms.
