I
turned in 69 graphics to potentially use in my book Mars in the Movies: A History. The publisher used 43. My previous equivalent
list shared 13 that sadly didn’t make that cut, mainly due to resolution
concerns. Here are eleven more, kicked back mainly for the same reason.
However, unlike the last batch, it is probably just as well that these were not
used, as nearly all are not as clearly focused on Mars as the ones that did get
printed in the book.
1. Universal Pictures used matte paintings extensively in its low-budget sci-fi films of the 1950s. This matte painting from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) of the picture’s rocket on its launching pad gives the film a feel far more expensive than it really was. In fact, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars was graced with several handsome matte paintings.
2. From the U.S.S.R.’s lavish Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924), again, unavoidably blurry. Shown with its inventor, these triangles comprise a Martian telescope that Aelita uses to focus on earthman Lor, with whom she falls in love. I am enamored of the idea of using plastic triangles to create a working telescope!
3. Regarding the one-and-only Mars talkie released between 1924 and 1938, Just Imagine (1930) American musical authority Miles Kreuger reports in The Movie Musical from Vitaphone to 42nd Street: “[Just Imagine’s] massive, distinctive Art Deco cityscape was built in a former Army balloon hangar by a team of 205 technicians over a five-month period. The giant miniature cost $168,000 to build and was wired with 15,000 miniature lightbulbs.”
4. The Oct. 30, 1938, CBS Mercury Theater on the Air Radio-Play stirred things up a bit. This was just days after Nazi Germany marched into the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia (that would be like Canada sending armed troops and tanks into Washington state and Oregon, and claiming them as part of Canada!). As a result of elevated tensions all around the globe, when much of America turned on their radios and heard cleverly produced pseudo-news announcements claiming that Mars was invading earth, combined with the sounds of battle and panic, thousands panicked. Already fraught with submerged anxiety as they watched “in real time” Europe collapse, listeners assumed that the invasion from Mars was all too real, frantically warning family and friends. It was a phenomenon of mass delusion that lasted perhaps 90 minutes or two hours at the most. The panic was the result of a pre-Citizen Kane Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air performing on CBS radio their re-imagined version of a classic piece of literature just as they did every week. In fact, just the week before they’d presented Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and the week before that Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Immortal Sherlock Holmes. On this night, the night before Halloween 1938, they performed H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in an updated format that imitated intense news bulletins coming from Grovers Mill, New Jersey. In fact, much of the show’s audience had actually switched over from a boring segment on the more popular program The Chase and Sanborn Hour featuring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, thereby missing the show’s opening titles and disclaimer. Howard Koch, who wrote The War of the Worlds radio script for the broadcast, says in his book, The Panic Broadcast, that the show “caused the submerged anxieties of tens of thousands of Americans to surface and coalesce in a flood of terror that swept the country.”
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6. The conceit of Peter Hyam’s Capricorn One (1978) is that in the near future NASA fakes a manned Mars landing by using Hollywood’s tricks of the trade, sets and special effects, but when things really go south, the agency tries to kill the three astronauts.
7. A John Carter (2012) Imax 3D poster. The 3D experience of this film is special. (Copyright © Walt Disney Pictures)
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| (Copyright © Walt Disney Pictures) |
8. Only five years after his debut, Marvin the Martian costarred with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century (1953). George Lucas loved this cartoon so much that he specified that it should be shown with the 1977 Star Wars whenever possible. Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones remembers in an interview published on cartoonresearch.com, “Lucas said that he saw ‘Duck Dodgers’ the year it came out, when he was eight years old and he said that it impressed him so much that he decided he wanted to make movies.”
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| (Copyright © Warner Bros. Pictures) |
9. From the 1918 Danish film A Trip to Mars (Das Himmelskibet). Unavoidably blurry, once the spaceship Excelsior lands on Mars (see my previous list of 13 rejects) and the crew emerges, they are fêted by throngs of happy Martians. The costuming and production design are impressive.
10.
In my book Mars in the Movies, there
is a discussion of The Angry Red Planet
(1959) and of the Cinemagic process in which much of the picture was filmed.
Cinemagic was the brainchild of Norman Maurer. In fact, the results that
appeared in the finished movie on the big screen were not what Maurer had
intended. In order to realize his vision, he would have needed to work with
film lab technicians through trial and error to correct the images. But the
production ran out of time and money, and there was no choice but to release
the picture in a compromised state. Later in The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), which he produced, Maurer was
able to successfully show, albeit in a very abbreviated version and in black
and white, what he had hoped to achieve with Cinemagic. The clear potential is
very interesting. The actors in both movies needed to be filmed in high-contrast,
so their costumes and makeup could only be black and white. Here we see the
Stooges on set in makeup (left) and the final processed Cinemagic image (right)
with a cartoon effect. The sequence in the film was only a couple of minutes
long and was shown on a TV set. Nonetheless, this had been the original concept
for The Angry Red Planet, though
within a bright red setting.
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In a way, The Angry
Red Planet
and The Three Stooges
in Orbit
are kissing cousins, sharing
efforts to bring Cinemagic
to life.
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11. When director Byron Haskin gathered his team in Death Valley to begin filming Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), he made a supremely clever discovery. The pure brilliant blue skies visible over the mountains and desert were a perfect natural blue screen, and he used this fortuitous discovery to insert the film’s red skies, one of the high points of the movie. Here is a scene around dusk; we see the fading red sky and the growing night, not to mention three alien craft borrowed incongruously from Haskin’s earlier film The War of the Worlds (1953).
