Gasoline Pills in Fiction
In the 1949 motion picture Free For All, Robert Cummings starred as a scientist who claimed to have invented a pill that turned water into gasoline.
The 1940s television/radio show People are Funny performed a stunt in which an unsuspecting crowd at Hollywood and Vine were sold "Atom Pills" at a quarter apiece. A "scientist" claimed that one pill could do the work of a hundred gallons of gasoline. When the stunt was revealed, few of the dozens who had fought to buy the pills came up to get their money back.
In the television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, Jethro Bodine claimed to have devised a water to gasoline pill that ran the Clampetts' old truck on water.
In an episode of the 1960s American sitcom The Munsters, The Sleeping Cutie, Grandpa invents a gasoline pill.
In the 1960s American Science Fiction television show, "One Step Beyond", Season 3, Episode 12: Where Are They? Original Air Date—13 December 1960: " In 1917, a stranger calling himself Charles Elton appears to government officials in Washington, D. C. and demonstrates a a pill that costs 2 cents that can turn 10 gallons of water into a fuel that can power an auto engine. After his successful exhibition, the stranger vanishes. The FBI and Secret Service searched for months and could never find him."
In E.L. Doctorow's historical novel Ragtime, Henry Ford must deal with a man claiming to have invented a water-to-gasoline pill; possibly a reference to Louis Enricht.
In episode 254 of The Simpsons, "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes," Homer is trapped on a mysterious island with, among others, a Number 27 who is trapped there because she knows how to turn water into gasoline.
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Famous quotes containing the words gasoline, pills and/or fiction:
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—John Milius, U.S. screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939)
“... the black girls didn’t get these pills because their black ministers were up on the pulpit saying that birth control pills were black genocide. What I’m saying is that black men have exploited black women.... They didn’t want them to have any choice about their reproductive health. And if you can’t control your reproduction, you can’t control your life.”
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“It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)