52 Remarkable Items Left Out of Mars in the Movies: A History by Thomas Kent Miller

Déjà Vu Alert: 

Some of these images may seem familiar. That's because

I've posted some of them before in different contexts,

notably and originally on Rod Lott's http://www.flickattack.com

A printed book is a most finite object. It has a beginning, middle, and end not only in terms of it size, content, and page count. It also has strict limitations in time; books have production schedules with merciless restrictions of all sorts, especially deadlines. Another is graphic resolution. I turned in 69 graphics with my manuscript; 43 truly amazing images were used. Plus there is always those that wishful thinking hopes for but practicality dismisses. Those that “didn’t make the cut” were rejected mainly due to resolution issues. Others I never bothered to submit but nonetheless hold dear. The 52 images below are pretty amazing in my mind.

1. & 2. It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) opens with a detailed diorama Mars-scape. The first thing the audience sees is a wide well-crafted black and white model Mars-scape with a destroyed spaceship in the middle foreground. The sky is full of stars, including a spiral galaxy. While it is impossible to see such a sight from Mars, it is still a charming image. Then the title races out from the center of the screen in mock 3D, and the credits roll over this Mars-scape. But as soon as “Directed by Edward L. Cahn” fades from sight, the camera pans right and finally we see a second and brand new spacecraft also in the foreground. So I have snapped images of the opening Mars-scape (before the titles roll) and the closing Mars-scape (after the titles finish) and digitally stitched them together to create a widescreen photo of the whole Mars diorama (bottom) that does not exist in the picture. Frankly, I find the image pretty breathtaking. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

3. In a Fantascene article, Academy Award winning visual special-effects expert Robert Skotak describes this astonishing other-worldly image from Rocketship X-M (1950): “[Jack] Rabin combined a hard-line matte of the foreground pinnacle with live-action scenes of the spacemen filmed at Palm Springs. He blended [Irving] Block’s painting of nuclear blasted buildings with the actual real-life terrain by means of a softline type matte.” Courtesy wade williams distribution.

  
4. & 5. Eagle-Lion’s publicity department did a grand job of promoting 1950’s Destination Moon in general family magazines. Life magazine ran a high-profile multi-page feature article about the making of Destination Moon. Naturally this amped up public awareness and anticipation considerably. It was this successful promotion (which reached numerous other popular, high-profile magazines, such as those shown below, as well) that grabbed Robert Lippert’s attention, prompting him to make the ultra-cheap, 18-day “quickie” Rocketship X-M that beat Destination Moon to the theaters by a month.  Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.
 

From the movie trailer, these magazines are slapped down one by one.

6.  This is the beautiful song sheet of a tune tremendously popular in 1901; clearly part of the Mars-mania that circled the globe at the time! I could not include it in the book because it is not a movie!

7. In Flight to Mars (1951), Marguerite Chapman plays Martian scientist Alita. When the film was released, many kids were sorely disappointed that the Martians were just humans in Destination Moon spacesuits. Yet, accepting the Martians as humans on faith really does provide rewards that are boundless. Without that notion of humanness firmly in place it would have been impossible to justify the numerous dazzlingly gorgeous young women with perfect posture purposely gliding around the halls of the underground cities in high heels and micro-mini skirts (so short that they make Anne Francis’ skirt in Forbidden Planet seem like an evening gown). But here I must give credit where credit is due. Despite her revealing costume and Jim Barker’s double-take and confusion when meeting his new (female) assistant for the first time, Chapman’s Alita is never condescended to and from the start works as an equal partner with her Martian colleagues and the earth’s male crew members. This is in vast contrast to Virginia Huston’s Carol Stafford who comes across as the poster child for America’s cultural view that women are over-emotional second-class citizens, fit only for cooking meals and serving coffee. Courtesy wade williams distribution.  

8. Also from Flight to Mars (1951), this is the damaged earth ship undergoing repairs on Mars. The entire image is a magnificent matte painting by Irving Block, except at the very bottom where there are several live-action people soft-matted into the painting. Courtesy wade williams distribution.

9. & 10.  Appearing uncredited, Paul Frees, the prolific voice actor of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, plays scientist Dr. Vorhees in The Thing from Another World (1951). It is he who speaks two iconic lines. Top: Vorhees tries to file material from the spacecraft’s airfoil and announces that it is like nothing he has ever seen before. Bottom: When the team spreads out to determine the size and shape of the craft, it is Frees who exclaims “It’s round!” thereby being the first to articulate that the unknown craft was indeed a flying saucer. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

 

11. &12. Like The Day the Earth Stood Still  (1951), according to screenwriter Edmund H. North, provides a protagonist clearly analogous to Jesus Christ, it may be that one or more of the makers of Devil Girl From Mars (1954), consciously or not, made the Martian woman Nyah the polar opposite of the Virgin Mary. Nearly every image of Mary shows her wearing a scarf covering her head, but Nyah wears a shiny black skullcap. Mary is kind, soft and modest. Nyah is cruel, hard and flamboyant. Where Mary promotes faith, love and compassion, Nyah prefers disintegrating poor specimens, kidnapping, and the destruction of the innocent. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller. Nyah image courtesy wade williams distribution.

13. From the 1918 Danish film A Trip to Mars (Das Himmelskibet), this is the spaceship Excelsior in which adventurer Avanti Planetarios and his crew spend six months cruising to the Red Planet. As far as I can tell, this is the first Mars “rocketship” in the cinema.

14 & 15. The Day that Mars Invaded Earth (1963) is amazingly prescient in regard to its concept of a tiny Mars rover. The rover of the movie (left) was filmed and included in the movie in 1962 or 1963. Yet in 1988, the Mars rovers the author saw being tested were the size of Chevy Suburbans. The small rover in the film actually became a reality of a sort with Mars Pathfinder on July 4, 1997, when the small Sojourner rover (right) rolled onto the Martian surface. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

16. This German poster for the Soviet Union’s Mechte Navstrechu (1963) (refashioned in the U.S. as Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blood [1966]) focuses on the strength, courage, and selflessness of a Soviet astronaut who is risking his life saving the life of an alien woman. Creative license places the planet Mars behind him when he is in fact steadfastly struggling through a whirling red sandstorm on the surface of Mars.

17. Battle Beyond the Sun (1963) began life as a sophisticated space movie titled Nebo Zovyot (The Heavens Call) (1959) made by the USSR. Legendary B movie producer and director Roger Corman bought U.S. rights to the film for a song, and handed it over to the novice filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola with instructions to reedit it to make it palatable for American audiences. This shot is glimpsed in both versions, and it is for me the single most beautiful and evocative image of the planet Mars in all Mars cinema.

18. The Universal Pictures logo that graces the first few frames of DOOM (2005) is a genuine work of art. Typically, the word “Universal” enters the screen from the right and begins to encircle what the camera pulling back reveals to be the planet earth. In this case, however, the planet revealed is Mars! How cool is that?

19. 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.

20. From the U.S.S.R.’s lavish Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924), 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!

21. 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.” 

22. 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 troop112111s 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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23. The monster scenes in The X from Outer Space (1967) are of the standard man-in-a-suit creature-on-the-loose-demolishing-buildings sort. That said, the film is chockfull of interesting space vehicles blasting through space, and there is an elaborate Moon-based spaceport model that is a joy to behold. Besides, I an unabashed Japanese monster fan! That the space expedition never did get to Mars seems a small point. 

24. 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. 

25. A John Carter (2012) Imax 3D poster. The 3D experience of this film is special. (Copyright © Walt Disney Pictures)

(Copyright © Walt Disney Pictures)

  .
26. 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.”  

(Copyright © Warner Bros. Pictures)

 27. 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. 

28. 29. & 30. 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.

In a way, The Angry Red Planet

and The Three Stooges in Orbit

are kissing cousins, sharing

efforts to bring Cinemagic

to life.

31. 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). 

32. & 33.  Visual effects expert Robert Skotak, says, “Some theaters in L.A. and New York projected The War of the Worlds at 1.85:1 with the proper 1.85:1 mask. The ads in newspapers featured the words ‘in widescreen’ [or ‘in panoramic screen’].” This was during the era of CinemaScope and the like. Top: A print newspaper ad for the original engagement of The War of the Worlds at the Mayfair theater in Times Square, New York City. Bottom: The Mayfair theater itself wrapped up like a Christmas present!  They don’t do movie promotions like they used to!

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Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

34. 35. 36. & 37. In the groundbreaking 1950 film Destination Moon, there is a scene early on showing a roomful of potential corporate sponsors gathered to hear a sales pitch as to why they should bankroll sending a rocket to the moon. Jim Barnes, who’s betting his reputation on the expedition, shows a colorful short Woody Woodpecker cartoon that helps seal the deal. I am venturing an intelligent guess that Chuck Jones’ space-based Marvin the Martian sprung from the space-based antics of the charming and delightful cameo appearance by Walter Lantz’ Woody Woodpecker in the film. Some things that tend to back up my supposition are the uncanny (or perhaps not so uncanny if my thesis holds water) resemblances between the two animated films. The story arc of the moon-bound rocket within each cartoon; the manner in which the rockets are first “revealed”; the look/design of the two rockets; the appearance of the two rockets in flight through space, and so forth (all illustrated by the two rocket screen-grabs below from the two shorts. For a detailed expansion on this theory, see my book Mars in the Movies: A History or my blog Mars in the Movies: A History … Now with Endless Possibilities and specifically the blog post about the 1948 introduction of Marvin the Martian in the short Haredevil Hare:

https://marsinthemoviesinteractive.blogspot.com/2017/08/haredevil-hare-1948-and-marvin-martian.html

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

38. & 39. Speaking of Marvin the Martian, he was given the honor of being the official NASA launch patch for Spirit, one of the two hugely successful Mars Exploration Rovers that landed on the Red Planet in 2004. How cool is that?

         Mars Exploration Rover (NASA)

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

40.  Walt Disney's John Carter of Mars, as Andrew Stanton’s film was called early on, would have had some nice poster art—with a special graphic logo designed for branding purposes that would have been plastered far and wide if the film had been given a chance, but the $250,000,000 movie was deliberately flushed down the toilet by the executives of its own company, according to Michael D. Sellers in his comprehensive John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood (Universal Media, 2012). Further, Disney had second thoughts about including “Mars” in the title because it had recently released a succession of movies with “Mars” in the title, none of which were especially successful, with one, Mars Needs Moms, being amongst the biggest money losers of all time, Thus, the movie was titled John Carter.

41.  Science-fiction novelist and Star Trek veteran David Gerrold’s path intersected with the life of a bright little boy whose existence within the foster care system left something to be desired, so much so that the boy began to believe that he was a Martian, requiring umbrellas, sun glasses, and all sorts of other aids to survive on this harsh planet earth. Gerrold decided that he must adopt the child, which he succeeded in doing, overcoming many challenges. He wrote a book about the experience titled Martian Child and it became a bio-movie with John Cusack (as Gerrold) and Amanda Peet.  I would have liked to have written about the movie for my book, but since it didn’t include the planet Mars in any active way … I just plain ran out of time when my deadline loomed. I’ll include my thoughts on this most pleasant film at some point in my blog Mars in the Movies: A History … Now with Endless Possibilities.

42. & 43. Nebo Zovot (The Heavens Call) was a wonderful 1959 science fiction movie made in the then-Soviet Union. Apparently one point of its existence was to prove to the West that the USSR could make a movie every bit as good as the best of Hollywood’s output. Ironically, after the B-movie king-pin Roger Corman bought it and handed it over to the novice filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola with instructions to turn it into a movie for American teenagers, Coppola’s version, Battle Beyond the Sun (1963), did not hold a candle to the original. Left: an original Soviet one-sheet. Right: The German 2009 re-release poster. I find these simple but intense and colorful posters a delight. In fact, as I was writing the book, I used the Soviet poster on the left as my mock-up cover, it so touches on or reflects my hopes for my book.

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

44. & 45. Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), with 15 chapters, was the middle of three Flash Gordon serials made in the 1930s. Once the serial had run its course, Universal Pictures recut the 300-minute serial down to a 68-minute theatrical feature named Mars Attacks the World. While the poster below for the serial (left) did appear in the book, I would have liked to have included the poster for the cut-down version as well. No time like the present!

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

46 & 47. The Purple Monster Strikes (D–Day on Mars) (1945), with 15 Chapters, was the first Mars-related serial to appear after Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938). In the beginning, we watch a tiny smear of light crossing the screen, the first words intoned are, “Out of the infinite distances beyond the stratosphere, a strange weird object is hurtling through interstellar space towards the earth.” That’s all well and good, but the object is a one-man spaceship from Mars, hardly from “infinite distances” or “interstellar space.” So, right off the bat we know that hyperbole and nonsense science rule this story. Once the serial had run its course, Republic Pictures recut the nearly 3 1⁄2-hour serial down to a 100-minute feature named D–Day on Mars.

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; 

copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller

48. & 49.  Flying Disc Man from Mars (Missile Monsters) (1950), with 12 Chapters, came close to being a remake of The Purple Monster Strikes. Made five years after The Purple Monster Strikes, the opening sequences of Flying Disc Man from Mars are virtually identical with the same stock-shot one-man Mars craft crashing into a field with the same stock-shot Martian wearing the same costume hopping out before the craft explodes, just as a car with an inquisitive professional drives up with the same actor getting out and calmly greeting the Martian in much the same manner. In the previous movie, the Martian kills Dr. Cyrus Layton played by James Craven and takes over his body. This time Martian offers Dr. Bryant, also played by James Craven, an offer he can’t refuse. How would he like to take over the world, just as his hero Adolf Hitler would have if he’d had a better plan? Once Flying Disc Man from Mars had run its course, Republic recut the nearly 140- minute serial down to a 75-minute feature named Missile Monsters. 

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

50. & 51. Zombies of the Stratosphere (Satan’s Satellites) (1952), with 12 Chapters, was the last of the Mars serials. Martians (aka zombies), scientists, and gangsters are in cahoots to use a super H-bomb to blow the earth out of its orbit to be replaced by Mars. Through all twelve chapters, Leonard Nimoy (yes, Mr. Spock himself) plays the Martian named Narab, who is the last Martian standing, so to speak. Once the serial had run its course, Republic Pictures recut the nearly 170-minute serial down to a 70-minute feature named Satan’s Satellites.

Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

52.  Nothing like a gooey, dripping, slimy, oozing disintegrating-before-your-eyes, sickening-green Martian grasshopper to finish this round of coulda/woulda/shoulda’s from my book Mars in the Movies: A History! The big bug is from one of the three Mars movies I consider perfect, Five Million Years to Earth (UK title: Quatermass and the Pit). Not one frame is extraneous. Here is an excellent review: C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Films: From 1897 to the Present said, “Five Million Years to Earth is powerful, exciting, and intelligent ... one of the high-water marks of science fiction.... Its formidably taut script is a masterpiece. There are no slow parts, no dragging scenes. Everything crackles with energy ... one of the purest science fiction films ever made.”

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Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Without CGI, Director Haskin inserted this red sky using the sky as a natural bluescreen.

“When the full measure of Hollywood’s artistic achievements is taken, it may be that all those boring blockbusters ... will be bypassed in favor of the taut B-production action films and the imaginative science fiction features ... Robinson Crusoe on Mars, that true rarity, a ... masterpiece brings these thoughts to mind. A triumph of technique, it has superb special-effects and strong performances by its space age hero, his man Friday and an irresistible monkey name Mona.... The film’s overall design and the careful composition of each scene make it a work of art.”

—Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

While screenwriter and director Ib Melchior (for more about Melchior, please see The Angry Red Planet (1960) and his mini-biography, now in the book and later to be included in this blog) was visiting California’s Death Valley in the early 1960s, he was so impressed with the harsh red desert terrain, towering cliffs, dunes, and salt pinnacles, that he realized that Death Valley was an excellent analogue for the surface of Mars. His idea was to write and direct a “three-and-a-half-hour motion picture with an intermission, a sort of Space Age Ben-Hur, a major production effort,” as he explains in his filmic autobiography, Six Cult Films from the Sixties. 

Ib Melchior is a superstar in my book. He co-wrote The Angry Red Planet and directed it. He conceived Robinson Crusoe on Mars and co-wrote it. His mind was at the heart of both these seminal Mars pictures. Top: This rare The Angry Red Planet (1959) poster emphasize the mysterious three-eyed Martian. Bottom: The Robinson Crusoe on Mars one-sheet poster the ray gun is a bit of creative license (from the author’s collection).

 

At the END of this blog post I include a fun story about how my wife and I met Ib and his wife and of the special lunch we enjoyed at Walt Disney's table!

But after the film company Schenk-Zabel purchased the script and entered into a production deal with Paramount Pictures, the script was pruned down from its original three-and-a-half- hours to a standard length. Melchior obviously wanted to be involved with the rewrite, but he was immersed in the production of The Time Travelers, the film he considered his personal best. John C. Higgins, a writer of genre films from 1935, was hired to do the script cutting.  It was then that legendary director Byron Haskin came on board as the director; his film would be a scientifically plausible Mars. Haskin had once been head of the Warner Bros special effects department and had since directed two other classic and spectacular Mars movies, both with producer George Pal, 1953’s The War of the Worlds and 1955’s Conquest of Space.

Up until the development of photo-realistic computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the early 1990s Robinson Crusoe on Mars was without doubt the very best adventure movie set on Mars—not only as a successful drama, but specifically in its representation of Mars. In 1976, twelve years after this movie was released, the two Viking laboratories landed on the planet and beamed back photos eerily similar to Robinson Crusoe on Mars, in particular with regard to the color of the sky. In his earlier Mars film Conquest of Space Haskin followed the lead of space artist and production designer Chesley Bonestell and provided a blue sky. In this new movie, however, he chose to make the sky reds and pinks, which is in fact the color of the Martian sky. And it is with regard to the sky in Robinson Crusoe on Mars that a small miracle happened, at least in my mind.

 

One of several half-sheet poster designs.

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The entire decade of the 1970s, I worked at a network affiliate TV station in San Francisco. Part of the ambiance of the station, and something I picked up by pure osmosis was the whole idea of blue screen technology. The very first scenes in Groundhog Day show this technology in action in which Bill Murray is seen pushing around the clouds and arrows that make up his TV weather report. In truth, he is standing in front of a blue screen, and all the blue is replaced optically with the separately created animation of weather patterns. This is a technique long used by Hollywood. (Today the blue screens have mainly been replaced with green screens.) When Haskin and his team gathered in Death Valley to begin filming, 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.

Genius matte artist Albert Whitlock (uncredited) turned sound stages into glorious Mars-scapes. Here are two of many.

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Haskin told his interviewer, Joe Adamson, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars was so obviously a director’s tour de force, that there was nobody to interfere and tell me how to shoot.... I can’t think of any other film I’ve made, unless it was The War of the Worlds, where I had such complete autonomy ... that I had as much genuine pleasure and fulfillment from as Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It was as fulfilling as cinematography had ever been. Every- thing I set out to do, I accomplished as well as one possibly could.

“We made exploratory trips into Death Valley, and I conceived a key to credible verisimilitude.... I would abandon shots from the valleys, make them from up on the ridges. Death Valley had been seen in hundreds of westerns, but they were all shot from the bottoms of the canyons, because that’s where horses could gallop through. On the top of these weird looking ridges of marshmallow sands, the vista was something else. It looked like another planet—certainly not Death Valley. Additionally, I conceived maing the blue skies red.... It was wintertime, and the skies were deep blue. They formed a perfect traveling matte.”

 

 This widescreen film opens with a wonderful title sequence. The Mars probe whisks by (skip-framed, where only every other frame is printed) the camera, and the camera follows it, revealing the planet Mars hanging in space, where the title Robinson Crusoe on Mars appears superimposed on the planet in red letters accompanied by Nathan Van Cleave’s haunting yet stirring score (his second for a Mars exploration film, the first being Conquest of Space nearly a decade earlier). Following a mishap that kills his fellow astronaut, Kit Draper finds himself alone—stranded on Mars with only a woolly monkey named Mona or companionship. In due course he solves all the various oxygen, food, water, and warmth problems that arise. 

From Dirk Wickenden: “For Robinson 
Crusoe on Mars, composer Van Cleave 
composed a quest-like theme for haunting 
electronics, strings and slowly 
beaten timpani that makes its appearance 
in the score whenever Chris Draper 
(Paul Mantee) trudges over the dusty, 
rocky surface of Mars.”

He discovers an alien craft and a mine where slaves are being used to excavate minerals. As he secretly watches, one of the slaves escapes. Draper brings the slave to the cave that he calls home. Draper names the man Friday, teaches him English, and they become friends. They are exploring near the planet’s north pole and encounter all kinds of spectacular ice barriers, avalanches, and dangerous cliffs, but the aliens are able to track Friday and begin to shoot death rays toward our two explorers. A meteor slams into the icecap, causing the ice to melt, and finally a rescue mission from Earth arrives.

This film was nowhere to be found on any sort of home video until it was released on Laserdisc in 1994 as part of the Criterion Collection, which made available classic movies as cutting edge restorations in their original aspect ratios. The Criterion Collection was among the first video companies that used the cutting edge technology available in the Laserdisc format to provide a wealth of extras, such as branching, commentaries, articles, and so forth. The release of Robinson Crusoe on Mars in this cutting edge, elaborate format was a very special event, indeed. The liner notes of the disc included this statement:

This is the 1994 Criterion laserdisc release of Robinson 
Crusoe on Mars. Prior to this, the movie sadly only 
lived in the memories of its admirers. This was a 
deluxe release that preserved the movie’s 2.35:1 aspect 
ratio and provided generous special features 
(from the author’s collection).

“Saul J. Turell, President of Janus Films, particularly wanted to see three wonderful underappreciated films in the Criterion Collection: Scaramouche, Hear Comes Mr. Jordan, and Robinson Crusoe and Mars. The first two have long been part of the collection so it is with great pleasure that we now present Robinson Crusoe on Mars for the first time on laserdisc in an exclusive digital transfer in its original widescreen format with a supplement that explores the making of the movie.”

The Mars that was presented in the film, though pushing the logical envelope in several places, was much closer to the real deal (as mentioned with respect to the 1976 Viking landers above) as we discovered through so many successful Mars probes, beginning with Mariner 4 in 1965.

 
I have never seen it mentioned that the all-important editor of Robinson Crusoe on Mars was Terry Morse, the same Terry Morse who was tasked by Joseph E. Levine a decade earlier to transform Toho’s Japanese Gojira into a picture suitable for American audiences. By using clever angles and carefully matched clothing and backgrounds, Morse shot new footage that expertly surrounded American actor Raymond Burr with Asian-American character actors and crowds of extras so that the new shots could be seamlessly edited into the corresponding Japanese scenes, launching upon the world Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

 

Ib Melchior (1917–2015)

 

The year was 2013, and my wife and I were attending the wedding in Los Angeles of one of my wife’s friends and business associates. The reception afterward was extremely loud with the band playing and all the cocktail chatter combining to make me uncomfortable. We sought out an untenanted corner and I sat on a chair and rested. Before long, I saw an older man in a wheelchair being pushed in our direction by an equally older woman. In a couple of minutes, the couple had joined us but conversation was utterly impossible because of the volume of the ambient noise. In a few minutes the man leaned over in his wheelchair and indicated he wanted to talk to me. I placed my right ear next to his mouth and his words were inaudible, I mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”

 

He tried again, and this time I heard the word “Melchior.” Hearing these three syllables was a joy to me just then because I was in the middle of writing a novel dealing with the three wise men and the Star of Bethlehem, and Melchior was the traditional name of one of the wise men. (The joy came from some sense of serendipity that I was on the right track.) He indicated he wanted to speak again, and this time I heard “Ib Melchior.” At first the addition of the prefix meant nothing to me, but suddenly it hit me (like a brick) that Ib Melchior was the man’s name and his name was one I was very familiar with. I yelled back, “The Angry Red Planet.... Robinson Crusoe on Mars!” He smiled and nodded. I was amazed; here I was minding my own business at this wedding and the next thing I knew I was conversing with the director of The Angry Red Planet and the co-writer of both The Angry Red Planet and Robinson Crusoe on Mars, two of my favorite Mars movies! Real conversation was impossible just then and the two wives quickly put their heads together and hatched a plan for us to get together.

 

One thing led to another and soon my wife and I and Ib and his wife Cleo, a land- scape architect and set designer, were enjoying a great lunch at The Tam O’ Shanter restaurant, which, once upon a time, was Walt Disney’s favorite restaurant in Burbank. It happened to be down the street from the new studio he built with the profits garnered from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In fact, we all sat at “Walt’s table,” as the back corner table is affectionately remembered.

 

Ib and Cleo. I'm not sure of the source of this pix.

Ib entertained us with some anecdotes from his native Denmark and with produc- tion stories of the six “cult” science fiction movies he wrote and/or directed in the six- ties: The Angry Red Planet, The Time Travelers, Reptilicus, Journey to the Seventh Planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and Planet of Vampires—most especially The Time Travelers, which he viewed as his finest film. He helped us understand his rocky relationship with Sid Pink, his creative partner on three of these films. (In 1952, Pink, with radio personality Arch Obler, had made cinematic history by producing the first 3D color feature, Bwana Devil, a true story about a pair of man-eating lions marauding a bridge-construction site in British East Africa at the turn of the 20th Century, the same story that was filmed again 44 years later as The Ghost and the Darkness.) Hearing the highlights and low points of his career in the film industry, we began to understand how frustrating, on one hand, and how rewarding and exhilarating, on the other, such a career amongst Hollywood power brokers could be.

 

In the “frustrating column” can be listed his well-documented contention that the hit Irwin Allen TV series Lost in Space had begun with Ib’s space-age Swiss Family Robinson treatment that had made the rounds in Hollywood, though he was never given any credit nor was he compensated. This Swiss Family Robinson idea had originated from the same respect for the iconic classics from which Robinson Crusoe on Mars had sprung. Ultimately, the producers of the 1998 feature film version of Lost in Space recognized his fundamental contribution and hired him as that film’s Special Advisor.

 

The “exhilarating column” includes his directing and co-writing 1964’s very well- received and thought-provoking special-effects feast The Time Travelers, and also his collaboration with American International Pictures’ co-founder Samuel Z. Arkoff and the great Italian director Mario Bava on Planet of Vampires. A much-prized letter from Arkoff reads in part, “As you will note, Bava’s comments about your abilities are ... laudatory.” As will be mentioned often in this book, Planet of Vampires is one of three classic science fiction movies that heavily influenced the creation of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the other two being Queen of Blood and It! The Terror from Beyond Space.

 

The four of us had a great time. I hauled out my Robinson Crusoe on Mars discs and poster from my bag and asked Ib to sign them. He was 95. Sadly, early in 2015 he passed away at the age of 97, with Cleo preceding him by a few months. THOMAS KENT MILLER

 

 

USA. Paramount Pictures, Devonshire Pictures, Schenck-Zabel Productions. Technicolor. 2.35:1. 110m.

CREW: Director Byron Haskin. Producer Aubrey Schenck. Executive Producer Edwin F. Zabel. Script Ib Melchior, John Higgins. Story Daniel Defoe. Score Nathan Van Cleave. Director of Photography Winton C. Hoch. Editor Terry Morse. Art Directors Arthur Lonergan, Hal Pereira. Production Designer Al Nozaki (uncredited). Assistant Director Arthur Jacobson. Sound Harold Lewis, John Wilkinson. Special Effects Butler-Glouner, Inc. Process Photography Farciot Edouart. Matte Artist Albert Whitlock (uncredited). Technical Advisor Edward V. Ashburn. Technicolor Color Consultant Richard Mueller.

CAST: Cmdr. Christopher Draper Paul Mantee. Friday Victor Lundin. Col. Dan McReady Adam West. Mona The Woolly Monkey.

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