About thirtyyears ago, when my family was living in Venezuela or Argentina, I saw something on TV that really stuck in my mind. It was a movie about a scientist who had invented a machine that allowed two minds to merge. While the scientist is merging his mind with someone else, there’s an earthquake, and both of them are knocked unconscious. When they wake up, they have switched bodies.
For some reason, I found this story very memorable, and I particularly remembered some of the (very low-tech) visual effects used to portray the meeting of minds.
A few years ago, I tried to locate the movie by searching on IMDB. No luck.
I asked on a movie trivia bulletin board. No one recognized it.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, in a completely unrelated search, I was trying to find out the title and author of a science fiction short story. (It turned out to be “Brooklyn Project,” by William Tenn.) I asked about that story on an SF author’s bulletin board (The Rumor Mill, “Looking for a story” topic). Someone suggested that it might have been a
But in looking through the Outer Limits episode descriptions, I came across one that sounded like what I remembered from thirty years ago. So I rented that episode, “The Human Factor,” from Netflix, and sure enough, that was it.
Now that I’ve seen it, I’m not sure why it stuck in my memory for so long. I guess it was just an interesting concept. But here are the visuals that stuck in my mind:
Memory’s a weird thing.