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!

 .

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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