Attack of the Killer Carrots

Damn it, I did it again!  I allowed myself to be drawn in by one of those tabloid story headlines and ended up underwhelmed!  In this case it was a Daily Star story on an aggregator site, entitled 'Brit Scientist Killed by Carrots After Horror Experiment Went Very Wrong'.  I mean, how could I resist?  It immediately conjured up visions of a crazed botanist in a lab full of bubbling test tubes, hell bent on creating a new race of ambulatory, intelligent carrots through genetic modification.  Doubtless, despite his plans to create a carrot army for world conquest, his creations turned on him - probably boiling him hot water in revenge for humanity's treatment of their vegetable cousins.  Of course, it turned out to be far less exciting than this: the story turned out to be about a nutritionist who had to try and prove the efficacy of 'healthy eating' by going on an insane diet of carrot juice and vitamin A supplements.  The inevitable overdose of vitamin A destroyed his liver with fatal consequences.  Yeah, I preferred the walking carrots as well.  Moreover, it turns out that all of this happened in 1974!  Hardly current news, I'd say.  Clearly, the Daily Star's writers' ability to make up vaguely plausible shit woven around the bare bones of a contemporary story, is flagging and they are having to go back to the archives to create filler.  Frankly, in this case, they'd have been better off just making up a story along the lines of my imaginings.  

The idea of intelligent killer carrots does, of course, have some precedent.  In 1951's The Thing From Another World, of course, the title creature is the thawed out pilot of a flying saucer crashed in the arctic ice, who turns out to be a plant-based lifeform: 'an intellectual carrot!' as one character declares.  Not that he looked like a carrot of course.  He was distinctly humanoid and played by James Arness, long before he became Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke.  But TV did give us a genuine malignant intelligent carrot, in an especially ludicrous episode of Lost in Space in the sixties.  Played by Stanley Adams in a truly crappy costume, he got very het up about Dr Smith picking a flower, turning Smith into a tree and Penny into a flowerbed, (I kid you not - I'd like to think that young Angela Cartwright, previously a promising child actress, was onto her agent after being forced to portray a floral border, after all, she'd been one of the Von Trapp kids in The Sound of Music only a few years earlier!).  Notoriously, the episode was so bad that several cast members couldn't keep straight faces and ended up being suspended, (Professor and Mrs Robinson are absent from a couple of subsequent episodes).  So, getting back to the point, such as it is, the Daily Star really had no excuse for teasing with a such headline, then failing to deliver any true killer carrots - they had plenty of precedents to rip-off, after all.