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On this day in 1956 (in the U.S.), Science Fiction Theatre aired "Three Minute Mile." Officially, this served as the twenty-seventh episode of the program's second season. According to our friends at IMDB.com, here's the plot summary:
"Since becoming Dr. Kendall assistant, college student Britt has gained incredible strength, and can run a mile in about three minutes. A nosy reporter, along with Britt's fiance, begin snooping to find out what kind of "Frankenstein"-type experiments the doctor is conducting."
-- EZ
From Google.com:
Here are the three most fascinating pieces of trivia about "Three Minute Mile," the 27th episode of Season 2 of the classic 1950s anthology series Science Fiction Theatre:
1. Inspired by Roger Bannister's Real-Life Historic Run
The concept of the episode was heavily inspired by contemporary, real-world athletic history. Just two years before the episode aired in November 1956, English runner Roger Bannister made global headlines by shattering the "impossible" barrier to run the first recorded sub-four-minute mile (3:59.4) in 1954. The episode took this massive public fascination with human endurance limits and pushed it to a sci-fi extreme—imagining an experiment that could force a human body to run a mile in just three minutes.
2. Features a Young, Baby-Faced Martin Milner
Long before he became an iconic fixture of classic television, a young, remarkably baby-faced Martin Milner starred as the main test subject, Britt. Milner is widely recognized by television history buffs for his iconic later roles as Tod Stiles in Route 66 (1960–1964) and Officer Pete Malloy in Adam-12 (1968–1975).
3. A Rare Deviation from the Show's "Generic" Campus Rule
Science Fiction Theatre was well-known for using highly ambiguous, universal settings, routinely placing stories at a "small Midwestern college" or a "generic research facility" to emphasize the science over the setting. "Three Minute Mile" broke this habit by explicitly naming the setting as Haverly College, a rare instance of a specific, named fictional institution in the show's run.