Why Forbidden Planet Changed Sci-Fi Forever

. The 1950s and science fiction cinema was really the birthplace of our modern sci-fi. Following in the footsteps of such classics as Things to Come, there was a string of memorable films like The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds that stood out in the glut of cheaper imitations.

Forbidden Planet is a beacon in shining a light in science fiction. In this edition, we’ll look at the story.

The cast The production The impact And legacy. The story in the 23rd century, cruiser C57D is on a routine mission to check on survivors of the Belarionn expedition that landed on Altair 4. It’s led by Doctor Morbius, who warns the C-57’s Captain JJ Adams not to land.

After a change of mind, the doctor shows his hospitality to Adams, the ship’s Doctor Ostro, and his first officer foreman, and also the wonders of a long dead civilization, the Correll, starting with an amazing robot named Robbie. The crow were on the verge of a great discovery when they mysteriously disappeared. To complicate matters, the doctor’s daughter Altera is introduced to human males for the first time in her young life.

The cast featured former leading man from Canada, Walter Pidgeon as Doctor Edward Morbius. Anne Francis was Altier Alta Morbius.

Eventually she would have her own television series in Honey West. Leslie Nielsen is Commander JJ Adams.

Of course, he is known more these days for his comedic roles in Airplane and the Naked Gun series. Warren Stevens is Doctor Doc Ostroro, an actor in the Star Trek episode by any other name.

The Star Trek connection we’ll delve into a little later. Jack Kelly is Lieutenant Jerry Farman, who was of course in the classic Western maverick.

And Richard Anderson is Chief Quinn, the communications officer known to us as Oscar Goldman in the $6 Million Man and Bionic Woman. Earl Holloman is Cookie.

The Cook, a great career in westerns, and of course he was in Twilight Zone’s debut episode Where Is Everybody. Speaking of Westerns, James Drury is cruwman strong.

Then of course he went on to be in the Virginian. Robbie the robot was himself. Now Frankie Darrow and Frankie Carpenter played Robbie the robot inside of him, of course.

Marvin Miller was the iconic voice of Robbie the robot. The narrator was Le Germaine, veteran actor who appeared in War of the Worlds as General Man.

And James Best is a crewman, and he went on to have a career in westerns and also the Twilight Zone. The production. The story was originally written by Alan Adler and Irving Block in 1952 called Fatal Planet.

Cyril Hume wrote the finished screenplay and renamed it Forbidden Planet. Some interesting differences from the Adler block script, including the location.

The planet was actually Mercury and the time 1976. Morbius was Doctor Adams and his daughter Dori Anne. The captain of the cruiser was John Grant.

A huge change was there is no crell or monster from the inn. Instead, the creature was a native to Mercury. Hume fleshed out the story we all know now.

The film was directed by Fred M. Wilcox. There were comparisons to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

There are similarities which have labeled the film a loose adaptation. The sets were built on MGM’s Culver City Lot with production designed by Cedric Gibbins and Arthur Larnigan. Lonergan built larger than expected sets that were half done.

When the budget department discovered the high cost, full-size mockup of the roughly 3 quarters of the starship C57D was built to suggest the full width 170 ft. It was filmed on the same stage as the Wizard of Oz.

The set of Valtaire’s garden is a reuse of the Munchkin village set. Of note, the starship was surrounded by a huge painted cyclorama by George Gibson. It features the desert landscape of Valtaire 4.

This one set took up all the available space in one of the Culver City sound stages. Principal photography took place from April 18th to late May of 1955.

One of the most expensive characters to build was Robby the robot, which cost $125,000 which tapped 7% of the film’s budget of $1.9 million. He was designed by Robert Kinoshita, who was eventually art director for Lost in Space.

Robby even appeared on Lost, facing off the Lost in Space robot. Rumor has it that Kinoshita also designed the tricorders for Star Trek. Frankie Darrow was originally in the Robbie suit but was fired after falling down drunk after a 5 martini lunch.

The Ed Monster’s animation was created by Josh Meader, who was on loan from the Disney studios. He started his career on Snow White, then Pinocchio, and then the Fabulous Fantasia, supervising several segments in that film, including the Climatic Night on Bald Mountain.

Although it looks like it, the Ed monster was not created by traditional animation. Instead, Meter sketched it with a black pencil on an animation stand on translucent vellum paper, shooting it at high contrast, so the major details remained visible.

The process was then shot in negative, and the white lines that were drawn in were tinted red for the final effect we now enjoy. Besides the monster, he also did the laser pistol beams, the four shield, and not to mention the disintegrations.

Forbidden Planet had its world premiere at the Southeastern Science Fiction Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina on March 3rd and 4th, 1956. Then the film opened in more than 100 cities on March 23rd in cinemascope and Eastman color, and in some of the theaters even stereophonic sound, either by magnetic or prospective processes. More of Tony’s look at Forbidden Planet in a moment.

This is interesting. Surprisingly, the work print for Forbidden Planet was discovered in 1977.

Most work prints were destroyed. It showed differences in characterization, dialogue, and scenes.

I would love to see that as a special feature on DVD. There was some conflict in the electronic score by Lewis and BB Barron. The musicians unit did not approve, so it had to be called electronic tonalities instead.

Harry Parch was to contribute conventional music but left the project opening the door for the Barons. Now, the Barons approached MGM producer Dory Sherry at a club in New York City and asked him if he would like to hear the electronic music.

He blew them off by assuring them that they could have an appointment. But the couple was undaunted and showed up in Hollywood, where producer Nicholas Nafak and Johnny Green of MGN Music liked what they heard and hired him. They were pioneers in electronic music ahead of analog synthesizers.

The couples used from the book cybernetics or control and communications in the animal and the machine as an inspiration. Louis Barron made his own electronic circuits used to generate all the sounds we now associate with the movie.

He used reverb, delay, and filters, manipulating sounds in Greenwich Village studio. Sadly, since they were not in the musicians’ union, their work was not considered for an Academy Award. What was interesting was that David Rose published a single, the main title in 1956.

But good news, the Barons did finally release their soundtrack in 1976 as an LP album for the film’s 20th anniversary on their own Small Planet record label with a distribution deal with GNP Crescendo Records. The couple got recognition, signing copies of the album at WorldCon as it was released on CD. The costumes worn by Anne Francis were designed by Helen Rose.

Their miniskirts caused that Forbidden Planet was banned in Spain. That is until 1967.

Other costumes were designed by Walter Plunkett. Those spacesuits got a lot of wear in the twilight zone. The impact of the film.

It was the first film to show humans traveling in a human-made faster than light starship. Robbie the robot was a milestone for robotics on film.

He had a personality and fit the plot nicely, even the forerunner of Isaac Asimov’s three rules of robotics. Neat coincidence of it, a Star Trek reference you might say, the clock on C57D. Refers to 1701 at one point. Rotten Tomatoes has forbidden Planet at 94% based on 51 reviews.

New York Times’s Bosley Crowther called it. If you’ve got an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you’ll have a barrel of fun too.

Variety dubbed it imaginative gadgets galore, plus plenty of suspense and thrills make the Nicholas Kniffa production a top offering in the space travel category. Harrison Reports called it weird but fascinating and exciting with highly imaginative production.

The LA Times said it was more than a science fiction movie with the emphasis on fiction. It is a genuinely thought through concept of the future. The box office had made initially $1,530,000 in the US and Canada and another $1,235,000 elsewhere, resulting in a profit of $210,000.

I can only imagine what it did on home video and eventually DVD release. Not to mention now on streaming.

Forbidden Planet was re-released to film theaters in 1972 as one of MGM’s Kitty matinee features with cuts made to keep a G rating. However, Home Video restored the scenes and kept that G rating. The American Film Institute nominated the film as one of the top 10 science fiction films.

The score was nominated for AFI’s 100 Years of Film scores. A novelization hardcover appeared after the film’s release. What’s interesting is that each chapter was in the character’s own voice, featuring Doctor Ostro, Commander JJ Adams, and Doctor Morbius.

The novel took a deeper dive into the mysteries of the vanished Krell and Morbius’s relationship to them. Other observations included that the novel’s comparison to Alteria’s ability to tame the tiger until her sexual awakening would commander Adams to the medieval myth of a unicorn, being tamable only by a virgin. The novel also includes some elements never included in the film.

For one, Adams, Farman and Ostro clandestinely observed Morby’s house overnight one evening, but see or hear nothing. When they leave, they accidentally kill one of Alteria’s pet monkeys.

When Doctor Ostro later dissects the dead animal, he discovers that its internal structure precludes it from having been alive in the normal biological sense. The tiger, deer, and monkeys are all conscious creations by Doctor Morbius as companion pets for his daughter and only outwardly resemble their Earth counterparts. The novel also differs somewhat from the film that it does not directly establish the great machine as the progenitor of the animals or monster.

Instead, it attributes them to Morbius’s elevated mental power. The crowd’s self-destruction can be interpreted by the reader as a cosmic punishment for misappropriating the life-creating power of God. This is why in the film’s ending Commander JJ Adams says in his speech to Algeria, we are after all not God.

The novelization ends with a postscript making a similar observation. As I mentioned earlier, many costumes and prop items were reused and several different episodes of the Twilight Zone. And were usually filmed by Cayuga Productions on the MGM studio lot in Culver City.

Robbie the robot made an appearance, including various models of the C57D. The full scale mockup of the ship was used in to serve men, and on Thursday we leave for home. The blaster pistols, rifles, and those crew uniforms and special effects shots also made their debut.

Profiles in history in 2015 sold several Forbidden Planet items, including Walter Pigeon’s Morbius costume. An illuminating blaster rifle, blaster pistol, a force field generator post, and the original Sasha Bratzov steel prehistoric fish, the sculptures seen outside Morbius’s home.

An Australian radio adaptation used the original electronic music and noted local actors broadcasted in June of 1959 on the Caltex Radio Theater. In the Tommy Knockers, the Stephen King miniseries, Altair 4 is frequently referenced as the home planet of the alien presence. And in the authorized biography of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, biographer David Alexander noted that Forbidden Planet was certainly an inspiration for Star Trek and even included quotes from a memo by Roddenberry which he explicitly avoids copying the mechanics of Forbidden Planet’s spaceship.

But hopes for it to stimulate her own thinking in regards to the production of the still in the development Star Trek series. There’s no question in my mind that JJ Adams could easily be Captain Kirk, and Doctor Ostro is certainly a model for Doctor McCoy.

And he had a first officer too, but certainly not Mr. Spock.

In other Star Trek references in Star Trek 3, the Search for Spock, Doctor McCoy visits a bar and orders Alter water. Even Doctor Who, Planet of Evil, were consciously based on Forbidden Planet. And Terry Pratchett’s strata, the main characters are stranded on the Discworld, which is completely driven by underground machinery.

Close to the end, a reference is made. Didn’t you ever see Forbidden Planet?

Human movie. They remade it 5 or 6 times. Forbidden Planet and one of its stars Anne Francis are named alongside 10 other science fiction films in the opening song Science Fiction Double Feature in the stage musical Rocky Horror Picture Show, and also in the film too.

There was even a British musical, Returned the Forbidden Planet, inspired by and loosely based on the film, and it won Olivier Award for Best Musical of 1989-190. Even Babylon 5 got into it.

On the set of Epsilon’s 3 great Maine Bridge strongly resembles the Krell machine. While this is not intent of the show’s producer, the special effects crew who were charged in creating the imagery said the Krell’s machine was a definite influence in their Epsilon 3 designs.

In addition, season 2, episode 5, The Long Dark features an invisible creature that when shot is made visible by similar effects from the invisible creature from Forbidden Planet. And Time Tunnel’s pilot featured a match shot of a huge underground buildings and people running across a walkway above a giant power generator in homage to Krell’s underground complex. Even the outer limits episode, the man with the power revisits the premise of a person’s subconscious manifesting as a destructive, murderous entity.

In 2006 for the film’s 50th anniversary, DAW Books released an original mass market paperback anthology of new science fiction short stories Forbidden Planets, all inspired by the movie, and the song Out of the Silent Planet on Iron Maiden’s Brand New World album is based on Forbidden Planet. Fallout Las Vegas’s DLC O World Blues uses multiple references, including Doctor Morbius as a references to Morbius in the film, The protractorons being modeled after Robbie the robot and the Forbidden Dome based on the film’s title, even the mass effect game.

While examining the planets in the gagoan system of the Armstrong Nebula, specifically on the planet June Thor’s survey feed, a reference is made to monsters from the end. Author George RR Martin cites Forbidden Planet has his favorite science fiction film.

He even has a full-size Robbie the robot replica. In the Firefly film Serenity, one of the vehicles they examine on the planet Miranda, has C57D stenciled on its side.

Even the Colombo TV series, a robot called MM7 is featured. The top half is all Robbie the robot.

Differences in the hands, chest panel, and a metal skirt replacing the legs, suggesting not the original prop. Even Castle, Law and murder episode Forbidden Planet is playing at the Angelica Film Center.

Castle is a fan of the film and invites his daughter to go see it, but she made other plans. At the end of the episode, Becket’s tells Castle she’s going to see it by feigning ignorance.

Forbidden Planet, is that the one with the robot Castle succeeds in getting Beckett to treat him to see the film. And Robbie made a lot of cameo appearances in TV and film.

Perry Como Show, Hazel, The Man loves of Doby Gillis, The Banana Splits, Mork and Mindy, Wonder Woman, The Man from Uncle, Arkwo, Lost in Space, of course, Space Academy, Project UFO, and The Love Boat. Also in films Cherry 2000, Gremlins, The Invisible Boy, Invasion of the Neptune Men, Hollywood Boulevard, and Dunari Kurataran Adam.

He also appeared on magazine covers, record sleeves, and TV commercials. Remakes are always being pitched. New Line developed one with James Cameron at different times. DreamWorks had one with David Tuoy to direct.

Warner Brothers reacquired the rights with J. Michael Strezinski to write it, and lately, Brian K. Vaughan announced he was writing a screenplay. No word on that joining the others in development hell.

I say leave the original alone. If anything, a sequel might work told in a retro style established in the original.

That’s just my thoughts. The legacy.

Imagine a society that advanced as the crowd. That had devised creation without instrumentation only by thought itself.

As Doctor Morbius has realized all too late, the Krell had their mindless primitive like we do. Imagine a whole planet of monsters from the end. Unfortunately, Morbius’s hubris and disdain for our human imperfections could not save him from his own.

Not recognizing his own base primitive drives and limitations was his downfall, as it had been for the extinct krill, and that was the basis of a deleted scene included as an extra in the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray release.As our technology grows where AI getting to be a bigger part of our lives, for example. Do we also have the wisdom to use technology properly as advancements increase? It seems that with every advance, the temptation to use them for selfish means is just too great.The film is a beacon as a cautionary tale from the 1950s that still shines today.