[Ads-l] Further Antedating of "Mad Scientist"

[Jonathan Lighter]

The story in "Tit-Bits" was reprinted in the U.S in the Weekly Kansas Chief
(May 21, 1896) [N].  Absolutely a Mad Scientist. But I find no early
newspaper characterizations of Wells's Dr. Moreau as a "mad scientist."
This suggests to me that the phrase and concept were not yet a cliche.

The phrase, however, is suddenly and frequently attached to Viktor
Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau in reviews of the 1931 "Frankenstein" and the
1933  "Island of Lost Souls."

I'll go out on a limb and assert that these movies, their reviewers, and
their successors were initially responsible for the spread of the Mad
Scientist as a cliche-cum-cultural meme.

A lady who saw lots of movies as a teenager in the '40s assures me that by
1945 the  Mad Scientist was a familiar cultural concept, and there were
lots of them.  Besides Frankenstein and Moreau, she instanced Dr. Jekyll,
as well as John Carradine manufacturing zombies for the Nazis in the
Louisiana swamps and using science to turn a dangerous gorilla into a
sultry sex goddess. Somebody else put the hero's human brain into a
gorilla's body.

I'll let S. J. Perelman to speak for me (New Yorker, Jan. 20, 1940):

"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a
beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee,
and I care not who writes the nation's laws."

JL

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