MOVIES: Duck and Cover All Over Again

  Almost everyone who cares has seen “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the
 Crystal Skull” by now, so it’s not much of a spoiler to point out the real history behind
one of the most amusing scenes in the movie: Jones’ refrigerator-ride escape from an atomic blast.
  Our hero flees Russian baddies to stumble upon an oddly located subdivision in the Nevada desert. Entertainment Weekly reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum describes it as “a lovingly re-created suburban tract straight out of E.T. (which) turns out to be a Potemkin village of mannequins awaiting vaporization during an atom-bomb test.”
   The “Doom Towns” at the Nevada Test Site were real. They have been chronicled by the likes of UNLV professor (and Congressional candidate) Dina Titus, who mentions them in her book “Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics” (University of Nevada Press, 1986).
   And it’s not the first movie for the Village of the Doomed. For a more current-day and therefore a more chillingly cavalier take on the Test Site, hunt down “The Atomic Kid,” a relatively obscure Mickey Rooney comedy from 1954. The inept hero similarly stumbles upon the tract home owned by the Mannequin family, accidentally knocking the head off one of the family members before he’s caught up in the big ka-boom and given superpowers.