Customer Reviews

The Boy in the Plastic Bubble/The Harrad Experiment

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

When I first viewed the film "Harrad Experiment" it was on VHS, the not censored version. This is kind of an underground film, typical of the 70s.

But beware, that version is cut. The film is most notoriously known for its nude scenes of actors now quite known (Don Johnson and Gregory Harrison, among others). That version contains absolutely NO nude scenes.

I just purchased this DVD set and expected the original uncut version of the 1973 Harrad Experiment. It is not what you get. It is more like the R-rated version, 90 minutes long, and no frontal nudity. I have the original uncut version on VHS tape from Wizard Video and it is 95 minutes. About the only thing that was uncensored about this tape is the language.

Disregard the guy who claims there is no nudity. He got an older version accidently as I did. I contacted Marengo via e-mail and they sent me the NEW UPDATED DVD. They told me that some OLDER units were still in the marketplace... and it was like herding cats to get them recalled. They gladly REPLACED my older version for free and told me they would do that for everyone who accidently gets an older verison. There IS nudity in the NEW version so beware!

I found the Boy in the Plastic Bubble to be a very good movie which I admit surprised me. It has that 70's feel... the look and music which took me back to a different era mentally which was fun... Travolta does a great job and it is interesting to see him at this very early stage in his career.

Harrad has always been a favorite film of mine and it was good to see someone bring it out in its original version. Reminded me of college... or the college I which I had gone to... Free love, goofy experiments in sexuality and the SELF-IMPORTANCE of ALL that NONSENSE... IT WAS so GROOVY to watch... yes people did hug trees...I GUESS... Wow how times have changed! Both prints are very good... and IF YOU want to go back in time this is great fun... I consider the DVD a bargain.

I can't remeber when I first saw the Boy in the Plastic Bubble, but it had been a WHILE. The dvd quality isn't fantastic, but it was fine considering it's a TV-movie from 1976. Regardless, I really enjoyed the film and especially the lead performances by Travolta and the lovely Glynnis O'Connor(one of those great 70s actresses who doesn't work as much today, but she's so good in the movies she's in). Sure it's a cheesy story, but I just got so sucked into it. Familiar faces pop up, like that of Robert Reed, Ralph Bellamy and John Friedrich(great in THE WANDERERS). I was listening to an interview with Vincent Gallo recently, and he named this as one of his favorite films(I think that's pretty cool, but whatever he likes is cool because BUFFALO '66 is a near-masterpiece). I am sad to read that the Harrad Experiment(also on this dvd) is cut, but I still thought it was pretty funny-especially Bruno Kirby!

i really got this because of the boy in the plastic bubble. it was a little cheesy and the picture definition was terrible but john travolta made up for all the bad things of movie!

Despite the claims by Marango Films that they have restored this movie and now provide the unedited version, there is still no nudity in this version. I bought the DVD and it has "unedited version" on the cover. This version is easily PG and contains no nudity.

Marengo Films wishes to apologize to our customers. We released this version of Harrad thinking it had not been edited - this is our second try.

We had no idea how extensively the film had been cut... and we had NO INTENTION of misinforming the public... or doing some silly thing such as bait and switch.

Our current DVD does have some brief nudity. We sell mostly classic films for the family thus the warning.

All of that being said... If you like the 70's these two films will take you on a magic carpet ride... back to the days of bell bottoms, free love, and long hair... We worked hard to create this DVD for your enjoyment...

The films are 30 years old... both have the 70's look and feel... which we... find rather "groovy"... and know you will too!

WE APPREICATE YOUR BUSINESS... BEST REGARDS, MARENGO FILMS

I realise that the idea may seem peculiar, but I decided to watch the film, "The Harrad Experiment", as a treat, alone at home, for Christmas Eve (my sixty-sixth Christmas in as many consecutive years of life, so why NOT something different?). I go back a long ways with the book on which the film is based, that's for sure, even if it has taken me so many decades to get around to viewing the movie!

I read the novel of the same title by the New England author, Robert H. Rimmer, which had become hugely successful in the latter half of 1960s, while I was an undergraduate student. I had gone back to studies after a lull of about three years between sophomore year of junior college in Southern California, at Long Beach City College, and my junior year at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The novel, which so caught the feeling and the trends of those exhuberent years of the mid- to late-1960s and early 1970s, was first published in 1966. I read the 20th printing of the Bantam Books paperback edition. That was not all so long after 1966 as one might suppose from such a large number of printings! The novel was so hugely popular, controversial with parents, but adored by us college kids, that it galloped through one printing after another in very short time, before I would have read the novel in 1968 or 1969.

I even met, briefly, the author as I was reclining lazily on the grassy slope between Boston University and the Charles River, with my Harvard University brainy and cutely sexy gay boyfriend of the time. One of the mutual friends in our sun-loving party of students recognised and greeted Rimmer, which is how that encounter came to pass there. The friend then told us, as the author resumed strolling onwards with his female paramour of the moment, what a sexually ravenous libertine Rimmer was with the much younger females whom he dated (or, at least, picked up) in great numbers and quick succession one after the other, now that the author had attained such celebrity and wealth due to the wide sales of, and the royalties from, his most famous book. Our group knew (or so we thought, from the reports circulating in the Boston-Cambridge rumour-mill) that "Harrad" College stood for Harvard University. Having seen, at last, the film, the ivy-encrusted, antiquely posh campus of Harrad does resemble Harvard in a generic (and smaller-scale) sort of way, but so, too, for that matter, does "Harrad" look rather like that "Harvard of the Southwest", Baylor University, and a lot more unlikely!

A couple of years after those pleasant years at U. Mass. Boston, as a graduate student at Kent State University, I was sitting in a lounge for K.S.U. graduate students sometime in 1971, when a group of us master's degree aspirants began to have a discussion about "top hit" mass-marketed novels which we variously had read. I brought up "The Harrad Experiment" and one of the girls chimed in that she had read the novel too. (This was not a particularly amazing coincidence, given the ongoing popularity of Rimmer's novel.) When I said that I had met Robert H. Rimmer, its author, this young woman became even more enthusiastic. She only recently had "lost her virginity", no doubt helped by the sort of licentious attitudes that this novel could inculcate into our student generation. Anyway, she asked me back to her apartment and we got down to discussing further, and more frankly, some of the sex scenes (several of which are quite kooky!) in the novel. She asked me, and I accepted, to try out some of the sexual technics which Rimmer describes in the book, which we did, one after the other, all the time with the paperback book at on her nightstand by the bed to consult between our peaks of carnal passion. Being young (in my mid-20s) and, lustily, more than a little multi-orgasmic, I stayed locked together inside her, never withdrawing or losing my erection between ejaculations, for four or five hours in bed, so I had the time to give her more (shared) orgasms in those few hours -- not bad for an essentially gay dude his first time having sex with a girl, eh? -- than she had ever had during her entire relationship with that uncomplicatedly heterosexual prior boyfriend at K.S.U. who had "deflowered" her (and for whom one lone orgasm was his limit on any outing). Fun! Whoopie! We kept on trying out Harrad sexual turns and stunts with each other, but we went "free-style" in our own way within a week or two of that. "Thank you, Robert Rimmer, wherever you may be" (six-feet under the soil, or ashes in an urn, since 2001)! The two of us lovebirds (and I had boyfriends "on the side" at K.S.U., as well) were parted at graduation -- in case someone is curious about that (which probably ain't the case: who would I be trying to kid?) and I went on eventually to another female lover the next year, and lots of boyfriends then and later, back in Boston, whither I had returned to assume the duties of my first professional position.

Ah, that magical "sweet bird of youth!" The novel and the film based on it, too, are quite dated now, as so many trendy excuses for fornication and promiscuity, of whatever period, eventually come to seem. However, "The Harrad Experiment" was path-breaking in its own way back in those days of such psychobabbling literature that was so "hip" (and which sold so well) during those times, and, in only moderately culturally-evolved ways, still is (and does), for that matter. One realises the cutting edge of "The Harrad Experiment", even with most of its best nude shots edited out, when one watches something merely plesant like "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (starring John Travolta, who according to one veteran female entertainer was "the cutest denizen of the Planet of the Apes"), with which "Harrad" is coupled in this release. Get this DVD for the movie adaptation of Rimmer's novel!

The movie of the same title is as much a relic, but an endearing one, of its era as the novel itself is. Of the actors, the pair who enact the roles of the film's principal leading Harrad student couple, highly convincingly, make for two very good-looking 1970s college kids of late teens or early twenties in age. The boy actor is a still quite young Don Johnson (playing the part of the film's ever-libidinous Stanley Cole), a young male of all of the sensuous (and even rather androgynous) winsomeness that one could ask for, ruby-lipped and with long, silkily wavy hair, delectably slender and lithe, more sleek and smooth, really, than muscularly-developed! (With young guys this gorgeous, and there still are some of them around all these decades later, why do any guys ever end up "straight"? Well, surely there just are not enough youths quite in Don Johnson's exquisitely beauteous league to satisfy the demand!) For her part, Laurie Walters (as Sheila Grove) is not what one would call stunningly beautiful, but the doe-like, shy and delicate charm that Walters projects is very beguiling, as is her demure loveliness, dressed or buck-naked. What a pair these two young actors make! Their physical allure is all the more reason to regret that in becoming available yet again on DVD, the film still has continued to suffer, from what has been reported about it, the artistic indignity of having so much of the full frontal nudity (although some remains) edited out or toned down. It was the lush abundance of such nakedness in the film which largely had made it seem so daring to its original cinema theatre audiences. The other sexually coupled characters, and the actors who play them, are well suited, dressed or buck-naked, to their respective roles. Regarding that irksome matter, of moments of nakedness having been excised from almost all of the commercial VHS and DVD editions of "The Harrad Experiment", which prevents the home viewer from seeing Don Johnson and the other actors in the most graphic full frontal nudity in the film, the Internet Movie Database (as accessed on 29.XII.2009) states that "[t]he late-1980s Wizard Video version contains the film completely uncut and unedited. This is the only version like this known to exist on video." Just try finding nowadays that elusive videotape (if you would like to undertake an exercise in frustration), on that label which so long ago went out-of-business!

The novel and the film alike are far from being any kind of literary or cinematic masterpieces, but I would venture to state here that the novel probably makes for a "fun read" even today (and even, at that, for today's high school and college youngsters). As for the movie, it is rather sweet, in its own 1970s lavender-scented way, as the novel itself is. The lines which the two married professors and the college kids in the film mouth, not unlike a lot of what Rimmer puts upon their lips in the novel, seem close to straight-out-of-the-book from various and sundry sex manuals and other literature on the subjects of sex therapy and sexual technics, inter-personal relationships, and similar pop self-absorptively muddle-headed stuff of the time, which also has remained essentially the same kind of thing since then.

So, concerning "Harrad Experiment" film lore, now it is time to pass on to the sequel, paired as it is with the orignal film in another edition's DVD releases, to more appropriate affect than coupling "The Harrad Experiment" with "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (which stars John Travolta, whom one ageing but witty actress described as "the cutest denizen of "The Planet of the Apes"). Of lesser cinematic quality than the 1973 movie version of "The Harrad Experiment", its sequel, variously entitled "Harrad Summer" or "Love All Summer", has mostly a different cast for the roles which correspond to those in the 1973 film. The acting in the sequel is rather wooden and the cast members themselves are endowed with less memorably good looks compared to what the viewer finds in the original film and which have helped in no small measure to make it so treasurable. The sequel holds interest chiefly for those who remain sentimentally attached to all that "The Harrad Experiment" itself more famously embodied and represented, for better and for worse, of the "free love" and polyamoury for which youth of the 1960s and 1970s longed and strove. The results of those yearnings and of yielding to such longings through recklessly fornicating promiscuity, alas, often led to tarnished and barren lives in later adulthood and to loneliness in the subsequent years of advancing age, but the novel, and the two films based on it, retain the glow of the youthful aspirations and of the sensual abandon of the so-called "Sexual Revolution" of those two decades.

To Robert H. Rimmer (again, "wherever your bones or ashes are interred, Bob!"), I guess that I would have to say, "I am much indebted to you, Mr. Rimmer, in more ways than one, for 'The Harrad Experiment frenzy' that you spawned. I had quite a fine and frisky time of my own, thanks in some part to your novel, even if life has seemed all too blighted so many long years now after that!" For all of life's mixed feelings and caveats about this novel, the films, and the experiences of a youth lived during (and in the aftermath of) the "Free Love years", I rather regret that it took me so many decades to get around to seeing the film(s) or, as I intend to do, to read the novel anew!

I wrote Marengo Films as suggested below to exchange my copy. This was their response:
"We decided because we are a family oriented company not to put out the XXX version. If you have the other cover then we will gladly exchange your copy with our current update... which does have SOME very brief nudity."
So there you have it. Still not the uncut version.

Bought this on 18th June 2005, with the idea of getting an uncut version of the Harrad Experiment, but it was cut and has no nudity in it at all...