Today would have been the 103rd birthday of actor Charlton Heston.

This scene that I love comes from one of the few horror films in which Heston appeared.  An adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, 1971’s The Omega Man featured Charlton Heston as Robert Neville.  By night, Neville protects his house against the mutant horde.  By day, he tracks those sleeping mutants down and watches Woodstock over and over again.

“They don’t make them like that anymore,” Neville says.

This scene gets a lot of attention because of the contrast between the conservative Heston and the hippies in the film.  To me, the reason that it works is because Woodstock is a documentary.  Neville isn’t watching an actor pretending to be a character in a film.  He’s watching an actual human being who went to the Woodstock music festival and who is presumably either now a mutant or dead.  Imagine being the hippie interviewed by this scene and seeing yourself in The Omega Man and knowing you didn’t survive the apocalypse.  For that matter, we also have to assume that all of the Woodstock performers have been turned into mutants as well.  Write a song about that, Country Joe.

(I choose to believe that Arlo Guthrie made it to safety.  Sha Na Na, though?  Doomed.)

Neville’s right.  They don’t make them like this anymore.