wewentfast.com - 50 Years of Sundays: “On Any Sunday” Will Change Your Life
The Academy got it wrong. In the end, “On Any Sunday” won it all. And it’s still winning. Fifty years after its theatrical release Bruce Brown’s 1971 motorcycle documentary continues to defy time and technology.
If Oscars were handed out based on the potential of societal influence, the Academy may have handed the statue for Best Documentary Film to Brown instead of Walon Green, whose insect world film “The Hellstrom Chronicle” combined elements of science fiction and horror and, in the end, frightened people from weeding their own gardens. A masterpiece in cinematography, Hellstrom became a worthy teaching tool in high school science classes but didn’t create a surge in new entomologists and faded into obscurity over the decades. It has no official hard copy or streaming distribution but thanks to YouTube we can all experience how terrifying Venus flytraps are for small insects (seriously, it’s an edge-of-your-seat scene).