With all the tributes to the late great Walter Cronkite in the last couple of days, you'd almost be excused for thinking he was, you know, a movie star or something. Okay, I'm being ironic here, obviously, but in fact I checked, and Uncle Walter's film work was negligible; his movie credits are pretty much confined to a character voice in the 1993 animated We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, produced by Stephen Spielberg and directed by Simon Wells, great-grandson of the author of The Time Machine (and auteur behind the disastrous 2002 film adaptation).

That said, Cronkite does have an -- admittedly obscure -- film connection, and one that had an enormous impact on me, so forgive a final -- admittedly indulgent -- tribute of my own.

The short version: Cronkite served as a narrator for a fabulous CBS weekly documentary show, The Twentieth Century, which ran Sunday nights between 1957 and 1966. Its subject was summed up in the title, and why The History Channel isn't re-running it is beyond me, as it was far better than anything they've come up with in years.

In any case, one episode -- which originally aired in 1960, if memory serves -- had to do with Germany in the 20s, and naturally at some point it dealt with the explosion of creativity in the German cinema of the day. And the film clip they used to illustrate the point was...you guessed it, the Moloch sequence from Fritz Lang's sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis. Specifically, the bit where the power generator suddenly turns into a malevolent monster and exotically garbed guards start feeding living workers into its maw.

I was a nice suburban 13 year old at the time, and I had never seen anything remotely like this; I recall sitting in front of our 17 inch black and white TV set feeling as if I had been hit in the stomach with a 2 by 4. In all seriousness, that little clip with a Cronkite voiceover opened up an entire new world for me, a world of imagination and ideas that I had never suspected, and it literally changed my life. It is not at all an exagerration to say that I probably wouldn't have been writing this column for the last year if it hadn't been for that one formative moment.

So, belatedly -- thank you, Walter Cronkite. You influenced more people than you knew. Hopefully for the better.

Oh, and despite the title, I feel constrained at this point to mention that in his final years, Uncle Walt was hooking up (as the kids say) with none other than Joanna Simon, sister of Carly, and a major babe in her own right. Amazing.