Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 3: today we are going to be talking about the nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty six American science fiction adventure Forbidden Planet, starring Walter
Speaker 3: Pigeon and Francis and Leslie Nielsen. Yes, that Leslie Nielsen.
Speaker 3: You know, before he went full irony mode with movies
Speaker 3: like Airplane and The Naked Gun, he was a stern,
Speaker 3: square jawed ham from outer space. And this movie makes
Speaker 3: the best and the worst use of him.
Speaker 2: Yes, this movie is full of male actors, just like that.
Speaker 3: I had such a good time rewatching Forbidden Planet. This
Speaker 3: wasn't the first time I'd seen it, but the first
Speaker 3: time in a while. And it's one of those classic
Speaker 3: films that both holds up so well and doesn't and
Speaker 3: and both ways are good. Like it is at once gorgeous,
Speaker 3: thoughtful and clever and also dated, corny and numb skullish,
Speaker 3: and like both aspects make for a very good time.
Speaker 2: I will say that, at least in my viewing of
Speaker 2: the film, it never felt completely offensive, and it never was,
Speaker 2: but it was never boring. I guess it is a
Speaker 2: film that has a well earned place in sci fi
Speaker 2: cinema legend, and if it's easy to go into Forbidden
Speaker 2: Planet expecting it to like wholly and completely live up
Speaker 2: to that legend. But this is a film that is
Speaker 2: clearly trying to do multiple things at the same time
Speaker 2: in essence to justify its budget. I imagine, you know,
Speaker 2: it needs to be a film with a brilliant sci
Speaker 2: fi vision. It also needs to have laughs, It needs
Speaker 2: to have some you know, some winky sex appeal. It
Speaker 2: needs to deliver on all of these things, and you know,
Speaker 2: ultimately it does and does so in a way that
Speaker 2: is not completely shameful decades later. So I think I
Speaker 2: have to tip my hat to it in that regard.
Speaker 3: You know, I had completely forgotten about the sixty gallons
Speaker 3: of whiskey scene. That really adds a whole other dimension
Speaker 3: to the Forbidden Planet experience. You did not think this
Speaker 3: movie would be so much about men stranded in space
Speaker 3: who are horny and want booze.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a huge element of mad men in space,
Speaker 2: with a bunch of Don Draper esque male characters essentially
Speaker 2: hitting on relentlessly, hitting on the one female in their vicinity.
Speaker 2: Only instead of a like a secretary and in like
Speaker 2: a New York office space, it is the daughter of
Speaker 2: a brilliant scientist on a distant world.
Speaker 3: The one true extraterrestrial we get to meet in the movie.
Speaker 3: Though she is a human, but she's from another planet.
Speaker 2: Now, Joe, you fished up one of the posters for
Speaker 2: Forbidden Planet, and oh it's so beautiful. It of course
Speaker 2: features a non human entity carrying an unconscious, beautiful woman.
Speaker 2: I can't recall. Does Robbie the Robot ever carry Ann
Speaker 2: Francis in this picture?
Speaker 3: I don't remember if he does. He does carry the
Speaker 3: doctor Doc Austro, remember that.
Speaker 2: I wonder that that should have been on the poster.
Speaker 3: Close enough, Yeah, it should have been like a uniformed
Speaker 3: guy who just got his brains apped by an alien computer.
Speaker 3: But no, he's carrying a blonde lady here. And she
Speaker 3: doesn't look that much like Anne Francis, Like her hair's
Speaker 3: really long, But you know, it's close enough. This was
Speaker 3: the format at the time they tore Johnson to Robbie
Speaker 3: the Robot.
Speaker 2: I love it. Well, Yeah, this film is gonna be
Speaker 2: a lot of fun to talk about I believe this
Speaker 2: is the third time we've covered a movie that's referenced
Speaker 2: in the lyrics of science fiction double feature from the
Speaker 2: Rocky Horror Picture Show. Because we've done Doctor X, and
Speaker 2: we've done Tarantula, and now we've done Forbidden Planet. Of course,
Speaker 2: in the chorus we get to hear we are reminded
Speaker 2: several times that Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet.
Speaker 3: Ah, because planet runs with Janet. Yeah, yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 2: In addition to the film score, I will I won't
Speaker 2: say that I have the film score to Forbidden Planet
Speaker 2: stuck in my head. It's not really an earworming score
Speaker 2: in the traditional sense, but I've certainly had science fiction
Speaker 2: double feature in my head all week ever since I
Speaker 2: watched Forbidden Planet.
Speaker 3: You know, one thing that I think really sets Forbidden
Speaker 3: Planet apart from most of the science fiction of the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties is that it is an extreme example of
Speaker 3: our show category of a rub the fur movie. It
Speaker 3: is an overwhelming experience of pleasing visual and sonic textures.
Speaker 3: Like even if the movie had no dialogue or story
Speaker 3: at all, I think it would be a wonderful experience
Speaker 3: just to sit and absorb the sets and the painted backdrops,
Speaker 3: the special effects, the costumes and the props. I'm thinking
Speaker 3: about so many things that are just you know, caramel
Speaker 3: chocolate to the eyes, like you know, the green sky
Speaker 3: and the mountains that we see on Altair four, the
Speaker 3: mid century future chic decor of the Morbius House with
Speaker 3: that pink mod furniture and all the loosight beams and everything,
Speaker 3: the forced perspective shots of the Krell technology where you've
Speaker 3: got these bridges going over the bottomless pits of the
Speaker 3: power generators and whatever those big white globes are that
Speaker 3: are like riding belts up and down the walls into
Speaker 3: the darkness. You've got that great alien garden around the
Speaker 3: Morbius swimming pool. You've got the design of Robbie the robot,
Speaker 3: which is just I don't know, we should come back
Speaker 3: to that, because that alone is unbelievable, those great diamond
Speaker 3: shaped archways. And I love, of course, when we finally
Speaker 3: see the hand animated blood red outline of the beast
Speaker 3: in the movie, the id beast that hunts the astronauts,
Speaker 3: and also not just the visual but the sonic textures
Speaker 3: as well. As you were just alluding to, it might
Speaker 3: not be earworms. But the sounds of the movie are
Speaker 3: so interesting. It's just a corn ucopia of fascinating ambient sound.
Speaker 3: And so I was thinking that while we are today
Speaker 3: quite used to thinking of sci fi movies as rubbed
Speaker 3: the fur events, full of pleasing images and sounds, just
Speaker 3: great textures, having watched a lot of sci fi movies
Speaker 3: from the nineteen fifties for the show, I would argue
Speaker 3: that this was not the norm at the time. A
Speaker 3: ton of sci fi movies from the fifties are not
Speaker 3: full of pleasing visual and sonic textures. They are low
Speaker 3: budget affairs without much exciting to show you other than
Speaker 3: maybe like a monster costume. Even a lot of the
Speaker 3: better ones are usually good because of the premise or
Speaker 3: they're about ideas in some interesting way, and they consist
Speaker 3: primarily of dudes standing around talking in a sparsely decorated set.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I was just looking back at the
Speaker 2: films we've covered from the nineteen fifties, and some of
Speaker 2: them are, you know, definitely lower budget affairs. But yeah,
Speaker 2: they're generally and that's part of it. You know, they're
Speaker 2: making do with less, they're leaning more into the ideas,
Speaker 2: and we're not getting into that rub defer territory that
Speaker 2: we get with Forbidden Planet, which again is just like
Speaker 2: it's not like you can even single out well one
Speaker 2: or two visual elements or sonic elements as well, Like
Speaker 2: they're just so many. It's like it's just a feast
Speaker 2: for the eyes.
Speaker 3: Every scene is full of shots that are just like
Speaker 3: a poster you'd want to hang on your wall. And
Speaker 3: one reason, of course, is an obvious thing. Forbidden Planet
Speaker 3: stands out because it was shot in color. Specifically, the
Speaker 3: color process was Eastman color, and almost all of the
Speaker 3: other sci fi movies from the fifties that I can
Speaker 3: think of were in black and white. And this was funny, actually,
Speaker 3: I was trying to find a list of exceptions. I
Speaker 3: was like, okay, what were the other color sci fi
Speaker 3: movies from the fifties? And when I did a Google search,
Speaker 3: the AI summary at the top of the search results
Speaker 3: kept telling me, insisting that movies like The Thing from
Speaker 3: Another World The Incredible Shrinking Man, both of which we
Speaker 3: watched for the show, were in color. No, they're not,
Speaker 3: it said The Day the Earth Stood Still was in color.
Speaker 3: The original one is not. You know, I've seen these
Speaker 3: movies they're in black and white. But there are some examples.
Speaker 3: I can think of a few that I've seen. One
Speaker 3: is Invaders from Mars from nineteen fifty three, directed by
Speaker 3: William Cameron Menzies. Though this was shot in something called
Speaker 3: super Cinicolor, which is a two color process that doesn't
Speaker 3: quite end up looking like full color. It has an
Speaker 3: interesting color palette, but it's kind of pale and faded, faded,
Speaker 3: kind of greenish gold. And then the same year there
Speaker 3: was a color adaptation of H. G. Wells War of
Speaker 3: the Worlds directed by Byron Haskin that was in technicolor.
Speaker 3: There was an adapt there was the adaptation of Twenty
Speaker 3: Thousand Leagues. Of course we talked about that just a
Speaker 3: week or two ago, the one with James Mason that
Speaker 3: was in nineteen fifty four. That's in color and it
Speaker 3: looks great. There is, of course This Island Earth in
Speaker 3: fifty five that's in color.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think This Island Earth is indeed probably
Speaker 2: Forbidden Planet's closest peer. You know, it doesn't have a robot,
Speaker 2: but it has a wonderful monster. It has, you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of color and bizazz to it. But the
Speaker 2: thing about about this Island Earth much smaller budget. Forbidden
Speaker 2: Planet costs more than twice as much.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So there are some other examples of great looking
Speaker 3: color sci fi films from the fifties, but not many,
Speaker 3: and it just was not the norm for sci fi
Speaker 3: movies at the time. Frankly, a lot of these movies
Speaker 3: from the fifties, even the relatively good ones, are not
Speaker 3: any more visually exciting than It Conquered the World. You know,
Speaker 3: what makes them good might be good writing or good acting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or maybe how well they shoot the monster costume
Speaker 2: and so forth.
Speaker 3: And as we were just saying, even when you consider the
Speaker 3: other color pictures, I just don't think there is another
Speaker 3: one that even comes close to Forbidden Planet. It's just
Speaker 3: exquisite to look upon this the whole box of crayons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, nine years later you would get Planet
Speaker 2: of the Vampires, which, of course is another film we've
Speaker 2: talked about on the show that is set in space
Speaker 2: and has brilliant use of sets and costumes. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: this is this is a this is this is the forerunner.
Speaker 2: And you could probably make a very strong case that
Speaker 2: a film like Planet of the Vampires wouldn't exist if
Speaker 2: you didn't have Forbidden Planet getting there early and setting
Speaker 2: the trend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Planet of the Vampires has got to
Speaker 3: be at least in part inspired by the look of
Speaker 3: Forbidden Planet. Okay, so we've established it's a ten course
Speaker 3: dinner for the eyes. But another thing I wonder if
Speaker 3: is this a good place to talk about this movie's
Speaker 3: relationship to Shakespeare's The Tempest, because that's the thing. A
Speaker 3: lot of people commenting on this over the years have
Speaker 3: pointed out the plot of Forbidden Planet, and it seems
Speaker 3: like a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. And
Speaker 3: I think that was kind of interesting because I know
Speaker 3: I've heard it said before that compared to most of
Speaker 3: the plays of Shakespeare, The Tempest is rarely put on
Speaker 3: film in anything like its original form. It's just not
Speaker 3: a play that gets a straight adaptation to film very much.
Speaker 3: Adaptations of The Tempest in cinema are almost always very loose.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, I took a few different Shakespeare
Speaker 2: classes in college, and we never directly covered The Tempest,
Speaker 2: as I recall, so maybe in part because we didn't
Speaker 2: have as many adaptations to watch on video to discuss it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this is frequently cited as an adaptation of
Speaker 2: the Tempest. We have the we have a prospero character,
Speaker 2: our Miranda, and I guess we have our Caliban of
Speaker 2: sorts as well, our monstrous creature, not to be confused
Speaker 2: with the Caliban in class for the Titans. Was he
Speaker 2: called Caliban and that I can't recall, but he the
Speaker 2: character in that is very much based on this element
Speaker 2: of the Tempest as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think people have said have pointed out that
Speaker 3: Robbie the robot is kind of aerial from the Tempest. Ah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: and that Adams is the Leslie Nielsen character is sort
Speaker 3: of I forget the name, a bit like one of
Speaker 3: the Italian nobles that gets a lured to the island.
Speaker 2: And who's cook Cook?
Speaker 3: Have a don't know, don't know about cook?
Speaker 2: All right, we'll get back to cook. So yeah, we
Speaker 2: have a groundbreaking sonic and visual science fiction film here,
Speaker 2: shot in color with a health very healthy by budget,
Speaker 2: and it has Shakespearean elements in it's plotting. All right, Joe,
Speaker 2: do you have an elevator pitch for this film?
Speaker 3: I couldn't get it down to one sentence, but here's
Speaker 3: the setup. By the twenty third century, humankind has colonized
Speaker 3: the galaxy with the help of faster than light travel,
Speaker 3: but one mission, a mission to an exo plan in
Speaker 3: it called Altaar four by the explorationship Bellerophon, has gone
Speaker 3: silent after it arrived. Twenty years later, a United Planet's
Speaker 3: starship under Commander JJ Adams is sent to the Altair
Speaker 3: system to investigate the fate of the lost ship and
Speaker 3: its crew. Once there, Adams and his men find that
Speaker 3: the only survivor of the Bellerophon is a language scholar
Speaker 3: named doctor Morbius, as well as his twenty year old
Speaker 3: daughter Altara, who was born on the planet. What happened
Speaker 3: to the rest of the crew? How have Morbius and
Speaker 3: Altara survived all this time? And where can a guy
Speaker 3: find bourbon and kissing lessons on a planet such as this?
Speaker 2: All this and more will be explored. All right, Let's
Speaker 2: go ahead and listen to a little trailer on you you.
Speaker 4: Imagine yourself as one of the crew of this faster
Speaker 4: than light spaceship of the future, sharing their curiosity to
Speaker 4: know the unknown, their tension, their readiness for inconceivable adventures.
Speaker 4: When you reach the forbidden planet, you will meet doctor
Speaker 4: Morbius played by Walter Pigeon. The doctor is sole owner
Speaker 4: of this fabulous world. Anne Francis is his alluring daughter, Alta,
Speaker 4: who has never seen a young man till she meets
Speaker 4: Commander Adams played by talented Leslie Nielson. You will meet
Speaker 4: a charming character in the robot, able to produce on
Speaker 4: order ten tons of lead or a slinky evening gown,
Speaker 4: always at your service. You explore all the wonders of
Speaker 4: a vanished civilization. You travel deep down into the heart
Speaker 4: of the Forbidden Planet to discover the incredible marvels of
Speaker 4: this lost, genious race. These magnificent scenes in striking Eastman
Speaker 4: color stagger the imagination. Yet the wonders of planet al
Speaker 4: tear four and see you a strange and evil force, unknown, irresistible.
Speaker 2: All right, well, you may be wondering, Well, where can
Speaker 2: I watch Forbidden Planet? Well, this was a major release.
Speaker 2: It has been released on all formats over the years.
Speaker 2: It is definitely available on Blu ray I belief from
Speaker 2: Warner Home Video or something, And I'm not I didn't
Speaker 2: check for this, but it's possible, I guess. Given in
Speaker 2: this an MGM film, maybe MGM plus has its streaming,
Speaker 2: you might check around for that. I, however, watched this
Speaker 2: film on the big screen. I saw it over the
Speaker 2: weekend at Atlanta's Historic Plaza Theater, presented as part of
Speaker 2: the Silver Screen Spook Show series, and I have to
Speaker 2: say looks terrific watching it in those old squeaky chairs there.
Speaker 2: You know, the colors are fantastic. The sound is just
Speaker 2: resonating around you and sometimes feeling like it's moving from
Speaker 2: ear to ear. So I highly recommend seeing films like
Speaker 2: this in the theater if you do get a chance
Speaker 2: to see them. Silver Screens Spook Show. By the way,
Speaker 2: we'll be doing mathra versus Godzilla on May seventeenth, two
Speaker 2: shows as usual, a family friendly mattinee and a late
Speaker 2: night show for grown ups if you're in the Atlanta
Speaker 2: area on that date.
Speaker 3: All right, Should we get into the connections.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Starting at the top with the director. It's Fred M. Wilcox,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen oh seven through nineteen sixty four, American
Speaker 2: director who started out at MGM as an assistant to
Speaker 2: King Vidor, eventually working his way up through the MGM
Speaker 2: Shorts department to direct the nineteen forty three feature Lassie
Speaker 2: Come Home. Which starred a fourteen year old Roddy McDowell.
Speaker 3: Is he the voice of the kid yelling Lassie?
Speaker 2: I mean, he's the kid that presumably yells Lastie. So
Speaker 2: I guess so okay?
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 2: I felt this one was evidently a success because it
Speaker 2: had a sequel nineteen forty six is Courage of Lassie,
Speaker 2: and this one had a fully grown Elizabeth Taylor in it.
Speaker 3: Okay, did it also still have Roddy McDowell. No, No,
Speaker 3: Roddy McDowell.
Speaker 2: Okay, Elizabeth Taylor only ic okay, and then Roddy McDowell.
Speaker 3: He went from Lassie to laser Blast. That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another filming director of nineteen forty nine is The
Speaker 2: Secret Garden, which had a twelve year old Dean Stockwall
Speaker 2: in it. Huh yeah, yeah. You can look up screenshots
Speaker 2: from the Secret Garden and there's a little kid Dean Stockwell.
Speaker 3: Fact to check, Dean Stockwell was never twelve years old.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. He also did nineteen fifty two Shadow in
Speaker 2: the Sky with Nancy Reagan. Planet was produced by Willcox's
Speaker 2: nephew in law, producer Nicholas Nefek, and he was apparently
Speaker 2: going to produce another big budget sci fi film with
Speaker 2: a title something like Robot Planet, and Wilcock was going
Speaker 2: to direct that as well, but Neffact died in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty eight. Wilcock directed one more film himself, and then
Speaker 2: he also died in nineteen sixty four at the age
Speaker 2: of fifty six. But I believe this is one of
Speaker 2: those examples where the director didn't come out of science fiction,
Speaker 2: and his life and career wasn't long enough afterwards to
Speaker 2: return to any science fiction, So you know, it kind
Speaker 2: of stands out as a one off. But boy, what
Speaker 2: a one off. This is easily the film he's best
Speaker 2: remembered for, all right. The screenplay is by Cyril Hume,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen hundred through nineteen sixty six, American writer
Speaker 2: whose first novel, The Wife of the Centaur, was a
Speaker 2: big hit in nineteen twenty three and adapted into a
Speaker 2: King vidor Silent film in nineteen twenty four. He wrote
Speaker 2: a few more novels, but mostly transitioned into screenwriting, working
Speaker 2: on several Tarzan movies in the nineteen thirties, a nineteen
Speaker 2: forty nine adaptation of The Great Gatsby and then also
Speaker 2: a nineteen fifty six film titled Ransom exclamation Point, which
Speaker 2: was remade in nineteen ninety six, the Mel Gibson picture
Speaker 2: that some of you might remember. But it's worth noting
Speaker 2: that the nineteen fifty six Ransom was itself an adaptation
Speaker 2: of a nineteen fifty four episode that aired on the
Speaker 2: anthology series of The United States Steel Hour.
Speaker 3: What the United States Steel Out? Oh? It was just
Speaker 3: named after a sponsor. Yeah, yeah, Like what should we
Speaker 3: call it?
Speaker 2: Should we call it like action or thriller or you know,
Speaker 2: maybe some sort of a zone And they're like, nope,
Speaker 2: the United States Steel Hour.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's like the Colgate Comedy Hour.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess somewhere to deal. Hume also
Speaker 2: did some westerns. His only other sci fi screenplay was
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty seven's The Invisible Boy, a sort of sequel
Speaker 2: spin off to Forbidden Play, which we'll come back to.
Speaker 2: Forbidden Planet is Hume's most famous work, again highly influential,
Speaker 2: and is itself, at least a very loose adaptation of
Speaker 2: Shakespeare's The Tempest. Now there are a couple of story
Speaker 2: credits Irving Block and Alan Adler. Alan Adler lived nineteen
Speaker 2: sixteen through nineteen sixty four. Also worked on a film
Speaker 2: in fifty nine called The Giant Behemoth, and then Block
Speaker 2: lived nineteen ten through nineteen eighty six. He was a
Speaker 2: I think mostly a special effects and visual effects guy
Speaker 2: who worked exclusively in genre pictures, often B movies, mostly
Speaker 2: science fiction, and he sometimes contributed story ideas, this being
Speaker 2: the first case of that. Other story credits include fifty
Speaker 2: seven's Kronos, as well as Oh Boy, There's here's a
Speaker 2: title for you, The Saga of the Viking Women and
Speaker 2: their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent.
Speaker 3: I've seen that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Does that title cover everything?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: No, there's more, Okay, a longer title as possible. He
Speaker 2: also has story credits on Roger Corman's War of the
Speaker 2: Satellites in fifty eight.
Speaker 3: Those are both Roger Corman movies.
Speaker 2: Oh so the Saga the Viking Women and their Voyage
Speaker 2: to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent also.
Speaker 3: Corman also Corman I think in the same year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right, they're both fifty eight.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then he also has story credits on The thirty
Speaker 2: foot Bride of Candy Rock and Atomic Submarine, both in
Speaker 2: fifty nine.
Speaker 3: I haven't seen it, but I've just I have a
Speaker 3: premonition that the movie Atomic Submarine is super boring.
Speaker 2: Getting into the cast. Let's start at the top in
Speaker 2: terms of billing with Doctor Morbius played by Walter Pigeon,
Speaker 2: who lived eighteen ninety seven through nineteen eighty four. Walter Pigeon,
Speaker 2: a two time Oscar nominee who had not done I
Speaker 2: don't believe he'd really done a sci fi film up
Speaker 2: to this point, having been mostly known for stuff like
Speaker 2: nineteen forty one's How Green Was My Valley? After Forbidden Planet,
Speaker 2: he'd go on to appear in a handful of other
Speaker 2: sci fi flicks, sixty one's Voyage to the Bottom of
Speaker 2: the Sea, seventy three is the Neptune Factor. Oh, and
Speaker 2: then this was interesting. This is apparently a like a
Speaker 2: made for TV film movie of the Week situation nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy fours Live Again, Die Again, which is like about
Speaker 2: a woman who is cryogenically frozen and then is brought
Speaker 2: back to life and her husband is old now and
Speaker 2: played by Walter Pigeon.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, you know, I was thinking I like the
Speaker 3: line that Walter Pigeon rides in this movie between hero
Speaker 3: and villain for much of the film. You can't quite
Speaker 3: tell how like what his intentions are. So he's that
Speaker 3: kind of character who's mostly polite and helpful and seems
Speaker 3: mostly forthright, but also maybe seems to be hiding something.
Speaker 3: You don't know how much you can trust him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like he is he going to be? Is he
Speaker 2: Captain Nemo? Like that's kind of the big question that
Speaker 2: had to be on a lot of people's minds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so I don't know, I could
Speaker 3: see him, I could see him in another life of
Speaker 3: playing having played a Bond villain or something like maybe
Speaker 3: maybe nothing against Michael Lonsdale. He's great, but like he
Speaker 3: could have been in Moonreaker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, things have played out differently.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: I also like the ambiguity regarding his character. You're never
Speaker 2: really sure that he's a villain or what villainous elements
Speaker 2: he might have, but you also don't completely trust him.
Speaker 2: I guess it's easier as a modern viewer of this
Speaker 2: film to assume that he's up to no good. That's
Speaker 2: my kid also watched the film with me and they
Speaker 2: were like, oh, yeah, yeah, I knew he was hiding something, But.
Speaker 3: Did he know he was hiding something. I guess he
Speaker 3: knew he was hiding something, but maybe not the thing
Speaker 3: you're thinking of.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, he also did some horror movies. He appeared
Speaker 2: in seventy two's The Screaming Woman, and also a couple
Speaker 2: of gorilla movies in the twenties and thirties. I think
Speaker 2: they're two separate gorilla movies and not the same gorilla movie.
Speaker 2: But you know, someone had to starring gorilla movies, so
Speaker 2: more power to him.
Speaker 3: Was he in any of the Machist Goes to Hell movies?
Speaker 2: All right? Well, again, we know that Ann Francis stars
Speaker 2: in Forbidden Planet, and indeed she does, playing Altara Morbius,
Speaker 2: the daughter of doctor Morbius. Anne Francis lived nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: through twenty and eleven. She's our lone female character in
Speaker 2: the film, the daughter of doctor Morbiuss, again seemingly doomed
Speaker 2: to never know love or Earth, at least until the
Speaker 2: rest of the cast shows up to just relentlessly hit
Speaker 2: on her again like she's a secretary and a Madman
Speaker 2: era office. She's our Miranda character, Golden Globe winning actress
Speaker 2: whose other films include nineteen fifty five's Bad Day at
Speaker 2: Black Rock, and nineteen sixty eight's Funny Girl, which also
Speaker 2: co starred Walter Pigeon. Her screen credits begin in the
Speaker 2: late forties. I believe she appeared on Broadway as a child,
Speaker 2: and she remained active, especially on TV up through two
Speaker 2: thousand and four, and she did two episodes of the
Speaker 2: original Twilight Zone.
Speaker 3: I also like Anne Francis in this role quite a
Speaker 3: lot because she she does bring a kind of in
Speaker 3: a way that you don't expect when you first meet
Speaker 3: the character. Like, so the character, as we'll get into later,
Speaker 3: I was describing her as sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger
Speaker 3: and Twins, Like she has learned all of the you know,
Speaker 3: all of the academic subjects, as she knows all the
Speaker 3: sciences and literature and everything, but is hopelessly naive about
Speaker 3: society and human interactions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of a subset of like she's not a
Speaker 2: full blown doll person where she's just like a child
Speaker 2: in in an adult's body. She knows plenty of things,
Speaker 2: she just doesn't have like a lot of like social
Speaker 2: real world experience because she's never been to Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she has no street smarts or savvy, so like
Speaker 3: doesn't know what to do when somebody is like trying
Speaker 3: to lie to her or take advantage of her. So
Speaker 3: there's a scene where this where a creep character is
Speaker 3: giving her kissing lessons. But she has a great kind
Speaker 3: of turn in that scene because he's like, he's like, oh,
Speaker 3: let's try kissing again, and she's like, I don't get it.
Speaker 3: There's is not very good.
Speaker 2: That got a lot of laughs with the audience, the
Speaker 2: live audience. So there's the humor in this film. You know,
Speaker 2: it mostly holds up sometimes. I mean it holds it
Speaker 2: holds up in places, and it's just kind of hammy
Speaker 2: and too old fashioned in other places, but in both
Speaker 2: regards generates laughter, so still effective. But yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2: I think she's good in the role. And of course
Speaker 2: she's a real beauty, no denying that. But I was
Speaker 2: surprised at how skimpy the outfits get in this picture.
Speaker 2: Oh like there is. I was confused by the bathing sequence.
Speaker 2: At first it seems like she's bathing nude, and then
Speaker 2: maybe she's wearing a garment, but maybe that's also a
Speaker 2: garment that they wore in movies at the time to
Speaker 2: make it seem like someone was bathing naked. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: It does seem to be really pushing the limits of
Speaker 3: what like an MGM picture would have allowed in the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties. But yeah, she's in the scene where she's swimming.
Speaker 3: I think she is supposed to be nude, and she's
Speaker 3: just like you know, when she gets out of the
Speaker 3: pool in a brief shot. I think she's wearing a
Speaker 3: garment match to her skin. And then it's supposed to
Speaker 3: just go by real quick. But maybe they weren't expecting
Speaker 3: to have the kind of definition that people have on
Speaker 3: screens today.
Speaker 2: It's true, like later in the picture, there's some very
Speaker 2: delicate wire work that allows Robbie the robot to carry
Speaker 2: the doctor's body and or doc's body, and it's very
Speaker 2: good wire work because you can barely see it even
Speaker 2: in like higher definition, so I'm guessing it would have
Speaker 2: been mostly invisible at one point. All Right, it's time
Speaker 2: to talk about Leslie Nielsen. He's our leading man here
Speaker 2: playing Commander Adams. Lesli Nielsen lived nineteen twenty six through
Speaker 2: twenty ten, and I think many many of you out there,
Speaker 2: myself included, for a long time anyway, when I thought
Speaker 2: about this Canadian actor, I mostly or even exclusively thought
Speaker 2: about his late career reinvention as a dead pan, comedic
Speaker 2: goof all of this coming in the wake of nineteen
Speaker 2: eighties Airplane and this era gay like that lasted the
Speaker 2: rest of his life and career gave us the likes
Speaker 2: of TV's Police Squad, It's Naked Gun spinoff films. I
Speaker 2: believe there were three of those, and such spoofs as
Speaker 2: mel Brooks Dracula Dead and Loving It from nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 2: and just a host of other goofy pictures where Leslie
Speaker 2: Nielsen continually plays these kind of either deadpan, funny characters
Speaker 2: or increasingly goofy characters. But they all stem from this
Speaker 2: initial Airplane Naked Gun phase where and these were both
Speaker 2: the work of David and Jerry Zucker.
Speaker 3: It's impossible to know, but I almost feel I could
Speaker 3: have predicted his career would or should take that turn,
Speaker 3: if you were to transport me back to the fifties
Speaker 3: and just show me his performance and Forbidden Planet, because
Speaker 3: he's playing the role totally serious. But he is such
Speaker 3: a natural ham He's just he's one of those guys
Speaker 3: who the more serious and deadpan and stern. He tries
Speaker 3: to act the funnier it gets.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think the important thing to realize about
Speaker 2: this late career reinvention as a comedic actor, especially with
Speaker 2: those early examples, they work entirely on the basis that
Speaker 2: Nielsen was known for these straightforward, serious roles that were
Speaker 2: a little bit hammy and you know, maybe lacking in
Speaker 2: a lot of nuance and his roleand Forbidden Planet is
Speaker 2: probably like the most famous example, you know, along side
Speaker 2: some other films and a great deal of TV work.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We've talked on the show before about the concept
Speaker 3: of the nineteen fifties movie the leading man as the
Speaker 3: rectangle as sort of a character type. Leslie Nielsen in
Speaker 3: this movie is the ultimate rectangle. Yeah, that is exactly
Speaker 3: what he is. He is just he is just there
Speaker 3: to sternly and straightforwardly execute the main motions of the
Speaker 3: plot and then eventually to kiss the girl.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think we would not be talking about him
Speaker 2: as much if he did not go on to all
Speaker 2: these other interesting things, because it's it's not a character
Speaker 2: that I found myself really connecting with on any level.
Speaker 2: Like he's just this this sort of hyper masculine ideal
Speaker 2: of the.
Speaker 3: Fifties, but not in an interesting way, not an interesting way. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it doesn't like get into that as themes like in
Speaker 3: say The Incredible Shrinking Man or something. Instead, it's just
Speaker 3: sort of unexamined. There are interesting characters in the movie,
Speaker 3: like Morbius and Altara are interesting, but yeah, uh, Doc.
Speaker 2: I think Doc who will get to in a second,
Speaker 2: like he's the character that in many ways should be
Speaker 2: like the main point of focus for us as the
Speaker 2: audience because he does the most amazing things.
Speaker 3: Yes, but Adams is almos. It almost feels like he's
Speaker 3: made boring on purpose. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, And of course this is not entirely Leslie Nielsen's fault.
Speaker 2: And I want to point out that Nielsen did have
Speaker 2: I think a pretty strong villain era. He appears as
Speaker 2: a villain in one of my favorite Night Gallery episodes
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine. Is a question of fear. I believe
Speaker 2: he's like a former mercenary, just a real ruthless character,
Speaker 2: and I think he ultimately did that really well, playing
Speaker 2: as he aged out of being any kind of a
Speaker 2: leading man character. He could play these like ruthless, cold
Speaker 2: characters really well. He plays one in Stephen King's Creep
Speaker 2: Show from nineteen eighty two, in which he viciously murders
Speaker 2: his wife and her lover, who's played by Ted Danson.
Speaker 3: And then gets some supernatural vengeance.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there's some zombie action of course.
Speaker 3: Or vengeance visited upon him gets the vengeance.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Other villain roles of note include nineteen seventy seven's
Speaker 2: Day of the Animals, in which he plays a really
Speaker 2: nasty character, and also nineteen eighty seven's Nuts.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have to see some more of the Leslie
Speaker 3: Nielsen villain stuff. I'm interested in that.
Speaker 2: And it is interesting that some of these villain roles
Speaker 2: that we just mentioned they occurred after airplanes, so he
Speaker 2: was really It's not like he just was like, oh,
Speaker 2: airplanes here, I can just do comedy from here on out. Like, No,
Speaker 2: he was sort of, you know, keeping it a little
Speaker 2: varied there for a bit, you know, playing a real
Speaker 2: dirt bag here, and then you know, hamming it up
Speaker 2: for laughs on the other side.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, at some point the rectangle was just cut loose.
Speaker 3: You got some curves, got some corners.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right. The next character we want to talk
Speaker 2: about is Lieutenant doc Ostro, played by Warren Stevens, who
Speaker 2: of nineteen nineteen through twenty twelve. This is the character
Speaker 2: that I think is the most interesting. He's the male
Speaker 2: character that I found myself relating to the most because
Speaker 2: he seemed most on mission. I think he was the
Speaker 2: only one that was not concerned with hitting on the
Speaker 2: strange alien woman. He's the one who actually attempts to
Speaker 2: solve problems that are the larger problems of the plot
Speaker 2: and has a tragic trajectory as opposed to the heroic
Speaker 2: trajectory of Leslie Nielsen's character.
Speaker 3: You know, I feel like there are things said about
Speaker 3: this character that are not fully demonstrated in any way
Speaker 3: that I recall, and that makes me wonder if there
Speaker 3: were more originally in the script, maybe some more interactions
Speaker 3: with him that didn't make it to the final cut. Specifically,
Speaker 3: I'm thinking of how it's implied that when Morbius meets
Speaker 3: the main members of the crew that he really sort
Speaker 3: of bonds with Ostro about like Ostro being a kind
Speaker 3: of scholar, a man of learning, somebody who's interested in
Speaker 3: learning scientific complexities and stuff like that, which, unless I'm
Speaker 3: forgetting something, I don't think we ever really see demonstrated
Speaker 3: about the character. It's just sort of said about him.
Speaker 2: It's worth noting that this film in many ways influenced
Speaker 2: Star Trek. We'll get to some examples of that with
Speaker 2: from a visual standpoint in a bit. But also you
Speaker 2: can easily look at Commander Adams Leslie Nielsen's character as
Speaker 2: sort of being a proto Kirk, and you can kind
Speaker 2: of look at Ostro as being a proto Spock.
Speaker 3: Kind of. Yeah, you would think Bones because the doctor Bones. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but no, Yeah, he's a little bit more spocky. He's
Speaker 3: somewhere between Bones and Spock.
Speaker 2: He does the sort of thing that I guess you
Speaker 2: could see Bones or Spock doing what this character ultimately does,
Speaker 2: but especially Spock.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then the third guy in the main three
Speaker 3: landing party is just like Kirk two.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, I'll get to him and well, I'll go
Speaker 2: ahead mention him and then come back to to Stevens.
Speaker 2: But yeah. Jack Kelly plays Lieutenant Farman who live nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty seven through nineteen ninety two, American actor whose other
Speaker 2: credits include sixty one's A Fever in the Blood and
Speaker 2: the TV show Maverick Warren Stevens. He also did a
Speaker 2: fair amount of TV best Remembered for his role here
Speaker 2: and Forbidden Planet. His other film credits include nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: four is Gorilla at Large Again, You gotta have a
Speaker 2: Gorilla movie in there somewhere, and The Barefoot Contests I
Speaker 2: believe from the same year, opposite Humphrey Bogart and Ava
Speaker 2: Gardner nineteen sixty six is Cyborg twenty eighty seven, and
Speaker 2: he apparently has a cameo in nineteen ninety one Samurai Cup.
Speaker 3: Wow Man Cyborg twenty eighty seven. That sounds like the
Speaker 3: name of a movie from the eighties, not a movie
Speaker 3: from the sixties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna have to look into that one more.
Speaker 2: Another crew member to briefly mention, we have Richard Anderson
Speaker 2: playing Chief Quinn. He lived nineteen twenty six through twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: American actor who also appeared in Stanley Kubrick's nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: seven war picture Paths of Glory. I don't remember who
Speaker 2: exactly he was in that. It's been a while since
Speaker 2: I've seen that movie. But he was also a regular
Speaker 2: cast member on TV's The Six Million Dollar Man. But
Speaker 2: now it's time to talk about Cook Coook. What a character.
Speaker 3: I think at some point the other day I just
Speaker 3: texted you the word Cook. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Cook. I was not expecting Cook. I should also add
Speaker 2: I had not scene Forbiden Planet before before seeing it
Speaker 2: in the theater, and I think I was kind of
Speaker 2: expecting more like pure high minded science fiction. So the
Speaker 2: Hammier elements kind of surprised me, and then Cook really
Speaker 2: surprised me. A pure comic relief character who initially just
Speaker 2: kind of like wanders into the scene like stirring some
Speaker 2: biscuits or something and starts asking wise guy questions about
Speaker 2: the plot.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, so they're going to another star system
Speaker 3: on this like multi year voyage to Altara four, and
Speaker 3: some of the crew members are just guys like Cook.
Speaker 3: Cook is just a total bumpkin who is looking for
Speaker 3: whiskey on the other edge of the galaxy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, He's like he sees Robby the rovine. He's like, well,
Speaker 2: what is it as a man? Is it a woman?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we we have a lot to say about Cook here,
Speaker 2: played by Earl Holloman who lived in nineteen twenty eight
Speaker 2: through twenty twenty four. Real Mike Nelson and looking guy
Speaker 2: after say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I could see Cook was almost like a
Speaker 3: character Mike Nelson would have played in one of the
Speaker 3: early show skits.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. I could have easily imagined Mike Nelson, you know,
Speaker 2: walking out on the set of The Sidle Lot of Love,
Speaker 2: like stirring the pot here. Now, Holloman's pretty interesting because
Speaker 2: he went on to appear in a number of big
Speaker 2: films in the nineteen fifties. He was in A fifty
Speaker 2: six Giant. He was also in The rain Maker and
Speaker 2: The rain Maker. His role in that earned him a
Speaker 2: Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, and he remained
Speaker 2: active up until I believe two thousand, doing a lot
Speaker 2: of TV, as well as popping up in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: Sharky's Machine, which keeps coming up on the show in
Speaker 2: the Connections, I've never seen it, but it is a
Speaker 2: neo noir set in Atlanta, directed by Burt Reynolds. So
Speaker 2: at some point I need to actually sit down and
Speaker 2: watch Sharky's Machine.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, I've never seen it either.
Speaker 2: I mean I don't even know that it actually has
Speaker 2: a machine. I had that question pop into my head
Speaker 2: and I was looking at the wikiped the article and
Speaker 2: like the plot summary, It's like, well, is there a
Speaker 2: machine or is there not a machine. I think the
Speaker 2: machine is one of the supporting characters. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I know Sharky is Burt Reynolds. That's oh okay.
Speaker 3: Maybe a machine is like a like a system of
Speaker 3: people doing something like a like a crime. Crime syndicate
Speaker 3: is a machine in some way.
Speaker 2: And speaking of machines, this film also famously stars Robbie
Speaker 2: the Robot playing Robbie the Robot.
Speaker 3: They give him billing.
Speaker 2: He has billing, and I am just ever pleased by
Speaker 2: the fact that he has his own IMDb page. He
Speaker 2: is treated by IMDb as an actual actor, alongside various
Speaker 2: dogs and cats and of course living in deceased human beings.
Speaker 2: This was his screen debut. Robbie the Robot was essentially
Speaker 2: born in nineteen fifty five. He was born in the
Speaker 2: MGM Props Department, with credit generally going to A. Arnold Gilepsi,
Speaker 2: Doug Hubbard, and Robert kin Shida. He's voiced here by
Speaker 2: Marvin Miller, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 2: with Frankie Darrow who lived nineteen seventeen through nineteen seventy six. Actually,
Speaker 2: in the suit, it is a suit. It's a big,
Speaker 2: clunky prop. Shane Morton, the host of the Silver Screens
Speaker 2: Spook Show, mentioned that in the intro to the presentation
Speaker 2: of the picture that it was apparently really loud, and
Speaker 2: if you watch Forbidden Planet a lot, you can maybe
Speaker 2: note that actors are maybe speaking a little louder when
Speaker 2: they're sharing a screen time with Robbie the Robot, because
Speaker 2: he had all sorts of clunky of business going on
Speaker 2: in his body, and it is probably a clunky, old
Speaker 2: fashioned design by today's standards, but it's an amazing build
Speaker 2: that you know, certainly resonated with sci fi fans. It
Speaker 2: made him icon of the genre. Is you think about
Speaker 2: robots from the nineteen fifties and sixties, you're probably going
Speaker 2: to think about Robbie the Robot.
Speaker 3: Oh Man, flunkiness does not downgrade him at all in
Speaker 3: my mind. I think Robbie is still to this day
Speaker 3: one of the best robots ever put on film. I
Speaker 3: love so much about his design. I love the non
Speaker 3: humanoid moving parts, so not just the arms and legs,
Speaker 3: but things like the cycling typewriter guts inside, the clear
Speaker 3: plastic dome of his head, and the chemical analyzer, the
Speaker 3: male slot mouth thing in his chest, the spinning navigation
Speaker 3: an tinny. It's just one of the best robot designs ever,
Speaker 3: and I love every moment he's on screen. I love
Speaker 3: the I think this is what you were just alluding to,
Speaker 3: being very loud. I love the clacking sound that starts
Speaker 3: as like the parts are moving inside before he starts talking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a great design. I love his shape.
Speaker 2: He has a great silhouette, instantly recognizable. I love his
Speaker 2: little centaur, a vehicle that he climbs into to roam
Speaker 2: about on the planet's surface.
Speaker 3: Oh the buggy, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, Robbie the Robot. He followed this up
Speaker 2: with the spinoff The Invisible Boy, in which a boy
Speaker 2: named Timmy in the year nineteen fifty seven is given
Speaker 2: a given super intelligence by a supercomputer and then he
Speaker 2: like reassembles Robbie again. This is kind of like a
Speaker 2: loose spin off sequel. I don't think it really necessarily
Speaker 2: supposed to think it is a legitimate follow up to
Speaker 2: Forbid the Planet, But Robbie the Robot mostly appeared in
Speaker 2: TV cameos after this. He showed up on the Twilight Zone,
Speaker 2: The Adams Family Lost in Space opposite the Robot the
Speaker 2: Robot from Lost in Space is another iconic robot costume
Speaker 2: of the time period. Showed up on Colombo, Wonder Woman,
Speaker 2: Mork and Mindy the Love Boat, and then you know
Speaker 2: of later appearances and things like Earth Girls Are Easy.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: Sometimes at IMDb he's credited as toy. I'm guessing like
Speaker 2: maybe he just shows up as a Robbie the Robot toy,
Speaker 2: which isn't quite the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some of his cameos are just he's a prop
Speaker 3: in the background.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think on like The Twilight Zone, he
Speaker 2: shows up as like it is a plot element to
Speaker 2: some extent, like he has a robot.
Speaker 3: So I mentioned earlier that the special effects throughout the
Speaker 3: film just look fantastic, Robbie of course being a major
Speaker 3: one of them, the prop created there. But also there
Speaker 3: are some animation effects in this movie that are I
Speaker 3: think just unparalleled, just absolutely spectacular.
Speaker 2: That's right, because eventually we begin we begin to have
Speaker 2: these attacks by some sort of a monster, but it
Speaker 2: is an invisible monster for the most part, and we
Speaker 2: only get glimpses of its form as it interacts with
Speaker 2: various force fields and so forth, various like you know,
Speaker 2: energy sources, and the like. And when this occurs, we
Speaker 2: are seeing special effects that I believe are largely the
Speaker 2: work of one Joshua Maydor, who lived nineteen eleven through
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five. He's credited with special effects through courtesy
Speaker 2: of Walt Disney Productions, because indeed he was an animator
Speaker 2: and special effects artist who had worked on numerous Walt
Speaker 2: Disney animated features such as thirty seven Snow White nineteen forties,
Speaker 2: Fantasia nine fifties, Cinderella later on, as well as such
Speaker 2: live action productions as fifty four to twenty thousand Leagues
Speaker 2: under the Sea, which we just mentioned. And so yeah,
Speaker 2: his talents helped bring to life the invisible monstrosity. You know,
Speaker 2: they have some practical effects too, like you know, a
Speaker 2: tree getting knocked over on the set when the creature passes,
Speaker 2: But then also these animated effects that kind of give
Speaker 2: us a glimpse of this big kind of you know,
Speaker 2: monstrous almost I don't know, kind of like dog like
Speaker 2: bear like grimlin like being.
Speaker 3: I mean, we never see a very clear picture of
Speaker 3: what it is, which makes it all the more interesting.
Speaker 3: Like you only get these sort of illuminated electric outlines
Speaker 3: of the face in which it is. It is something
Speaker 3: that's kind of raging. It has a snarling, toothy mouth.
Speaker 3: It's gigantic, of course, and it also appears to be
Speaker 3: I don't know, almost kind of pyramid shaped.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's really cool and I think these effects
Speaker 2: hold up really well made or Outside of this, would
Speaker 2: mostly continue to work on Disney films and TV projects
Speaker 2: for the rest of his career, including animation effects on
Speaker 2: Darby Ogill and The Little People in fifty nine. He
Speaker 2: was also apparently an accomplished painter.
Speaker 3: Now, Rob, I know you already said you had been
Speaker 3: listening to the sounds from the film. I don't know
Speaker 3: if they called it a soundtrack in this in this
Speaker 3: case because a lot of it is not exactly what
Speaker 3: we'd think of as music, but is very important for
Speaker 3: the feeling of the film. But it was produced by
Speaker 3: actually a pair of creators, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a husband and wife team Beebe and Lewis Baron.
Speaker 2: Boebe lived nineteen twenty sixty two thousand and eight and
Speaker 2: Lewis lived nineteen twenty through nineteen eighty nine, and they
Speaker 2: are credited as composer electronic tonalities, which is perfect a
Speaker 2: perfect way to describe the music that they create. But
Speaker 2: I think there were also some technicalities regarding unions where
Speaker 2: they weren't allowed to say that it was a film
Speaker 2: score because they were not in the Music Film Score
Speaker 2: Union at the time, and I think therefore were also
Speaker 2: not eligible for OSCAR nomination. But yes, the score is terrific.
Speaker 2: It is an historic score in that it is the
Speaker 2: first fully electronic score for a motion picture. By nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty six, movies had been utilizing electronic elements in their
Speaker 2: sound design for quite a while. I was reading a
Speaker 2: little bit about the use of the therem and in
Speaker 2: film in a twenty eighteen article for The Script Lab
Speaker 2: by Claire Nina Anarelli, pointing out that the Theoreman was
Speaker 2: invented in nineteen twenty and by around nineteen thirty nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty one it was used in the Russian film auDNA
Speaker 2: or Alone. This was originally going to be a silent film,
Speaker 2: but then apparently had music, sound effects and some dialogue
Speaker 2: recorded in post and then played alongside it, and among
Speaker 2: those sounds we had Theramy music. There's another electronic instrument
Speaker 2: of the time period. In an early electronic instrument called
Speaker 2: the let's say the one Martineau, and this was also
Speaker 2: used in various scores and sound designs, including Bride of Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: And the author here points out that the instruments, this
Speaker 2: instrument that Theram in particular in particular, began to pop
Speaker 2: up in Hollywood films during the mid nineteen forties, generally
Speaker 2: to at first to emphasize instability, such as in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five Spellbound, so a destabilizing sonic effect, but then
Speaker 2: it began to be associated with sci fi and spaceships
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty with rocket Ship XM, and then of
Speaker 2: course in nineteen fifty one's The Day the Earth Stood Still,
Speaker 2: which features a traditional orchestral score but with two theremins
Speaker 2: so again. Up until this point, cinema had been playing
Speaker 2: with a little electronic sound, but no one had fully
Speaker 2: committed to a full length motion picture with exclusively electronic
Speaker 2: music until now. And apparently, like I was reading, apparently
Speaker 2: the way it started out, they were like, well, let's
Speaker 2: these guys were doing some really interesting work BB and Lewis.
Speaker 2: Let's bring them in to do you know, a few
Speaker 2: minutes worth of sound. And then like the right people
Speaker 2: liked it, and they were like, let's have them do
Speaker 2: the whole thing. Let's let's do this exclusively, which you know,
Speaker 2: for various reasons, this wasn't popular with everyone, and I
Speaker 2: can imagine, yeah, there were probably some people who are like,
Speaker 2: this doesn't sound like a film score, this doesn't sound
Speaker 2: like music. I mean, I would disagree. But their work
Speaker 2: was apparently very avant garde. They you know, they used
Speaker 2: ring modulator circuits and then altered the results with reverb,
Speaker 2: tape delay and other editing techniques. Apparently there was a
Speaker 2: very high unpredictability with their work, Like if they successfully
Speaker 2: created a certain soundscape, they couldn't necessarily come back and
Speaker 2: recreate it in the same way. So it was kind
Speaker 2: of a roll of the dice and then and then
Speaker 2: an editing exercise to get something that they wanted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a lot of music creators today might
Speaker 3: know that effect. If you've got like a pedal board
Speaker 3: that you run through and you might create some sound
Speaker 3: you really like, but then you mess with the knobs
Speaker 3: and then you can't get it to sound the same
Speaker 3: way again, you forget how you did it.
Speaker 2: Oh wow wow. So yeah, at this point, yeah, they
Speaker 2: were very avant garde. They had been contributing electronic sounds
Speaker 2: to various generally like short art films like the work
Speaker 2: of Ian Hugo. I believe he did some adaptations of
Speaker 2: an highs nin short stories, that sort of thing, so
Speaker 2: nothing that was at all mainstream Hollywood. And then here
Speaker 2: they are scoring the tonalities of Forbidden Planet, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's tremendous, but it is deeply weird and alien.
Speaker 2: It is largely devoid of any melodic content. It just
Speaker 2: the sounds like twinkle like stars against the dark void.
Speaker 2: They drip like liquid metal and alien caves, and it
Speaker 2: just delivers an overwhelming vibe of just inhuman mystery, which
Speaker 2: works exceedingly well with various aspects of the plot and
Speaker 2: certainly the look of the picture. Maybe less so with
Speaker 2: the more you know, hammy aspects of it. But to
Speaker 2: their credit, nobody went in and added like goofy sound
Speaker 2: effects for the comedic moments, like all the sound design
Speaker 2: we have here is exclusively sci fi.
Speaker 3: I think it's the kind of thing that too audiences
Speaker 3: going back today feels less groundbreaking because we have experienced
Speaker 3: a lot of what followed in its footsteps, and that
Speaker 3: if we were to be there in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 3: We would probably recognize the sound of this movie as
Speaker 3: being more we would recognize it for being how unique
Speaker 3: in time it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it seems I can imagine people being
Speaker 2: surprised though, because it at least, you know, to my ears,
Speaker 2: it hits pretty hard. It seems. It feels pretty far
Speaker 2: removed from something like, you know, some of the work
Speaker 2: of say Wendy Carlos, you would get a little over
Speaker 2: a decade later, was like Switched on Bach melodic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: very melodic, but very electronic at the same time. And
Speaker 2: this is just like, yeah, this stuff is just alien.
Speaker 2: It does not have the human touch, and I love
Speaker 2: it for that. But it it seems like a minor
Speaker 2: miracle that this score exists at all. It seems like
Speaker 2: exactly the sort of score that some sort of producer
Speaker 2: would come along and say and say, like, we can't
Speaker 2: use this. You can use it when the spaceship's landing,
Speaker 2: but let's get some stock music in here so that
Speaker 2: the humans can connect with the plot.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's too weird. Yeah, but no, they got away
Speaker 3: with it, and I'm glad they did. All Right, you
Speaker 3: want to talk about the plot.
Speaker 2: Let's get into the plot.
Speaker 3: Warning that this movie does have, in my opinion, some
Speaker 3: pretty good twists and reveals in it, especially the ending,
Speaker 3: and we are going to be talking about those. So
Speaker 3: if you want to see it without having anything spoiled,
Speaker 3: I would suggest pausing and doing that now.
Speaker 2: But you're still here, so I guess it's okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So opening monologue, I'm just going to read this
Speaker 3: to set the tone. The voice over tells us. In
Speaker 3: the final decade of the twenty first century, men and
Speaker 3: women in rocket ships landed on the Moon. Great start.
Speaker 3: Do you think we're going to make it to the
Speaker 3: Moon by the twenty nineties. By twenty two hundred AD,
Speaker 3: they had reached the other planets of our Solar system
Speaker 3: almost at once. There followed the discovery of hyperdrive, through
Speaker 3: which the speed of light was first attained and later
Speaker 3: greatly surpassed. And so at last mankind began the conquest
Speaker 3: and colonization of deep space. United Planets Cruiser C fifty
Speaker 3: seven D now more than a year out from Earth
Speaker 3: base on a special mission to the planetary system of
Speaker 3: the great main sequence star Altair. And so it's showing
Speaker 3: us the spaceship as it tells us what it is
Speaker 3: one thing I want to note here. In Forbidden Planet,
Speaker 3: the spaceship used by the human heroes is a flying saucer,
Speaker 3: and I think this is notable because while the flying
Speaker 3: saucer was absolutely well known in science fiction of the time,
Speaker 3: it had already been used in multiple movies. I think
Speaker 3: it was usually the form of ship used by non
Speaker 3: human aliens. More often, human ships are shown as elongated
Speaker 3: and cylindrical, vaguely rocket shaped, or maybe they were shaped
Speaker 3: like an airplane. I don't know if there is anything
Speaker 3: to read into this choice as far as the intentions
Speaker 3: of the filmmakers go, but at least to me, the
Speaker 3: choice of putting humans inside the flying saucer instead of
Speaker 3: having that be the alien vessel suggests that we are
Speaker 3: the aliens, which is relevant to the movie in multiple ways.
Speaker 3: One of these will be a spoiler, so again spoiler
Speaker 3: warning number one. Of course, in this story, the humans
Speaker 3: are colonizing an exoplanet far beyond Earth, so we are
Speaker 3: the aliens in the scenario. We're not in our own
Speaker 3: cosmic neighborhood. But the other sense in which humans are
Speaker 3: the aliens in this movie has to do with the
Speaker 3: big twist at the end. The supposedly alien force that
Speaker 3: is attacking the humans is not actually of alien origin
Speaker 3: but of human origin. And so anyway, I was thinking
Speaker 3: about this for a bid. It made me think it
Speaker 3: might be interesting at some point to come back into
Speaker 3: a deep dive on the history of this ship form,
Speaker 3: on the idea of the flying saucer as a shape,
Speaker 3: to kind of look at that in history as far
Speaker 3: as like UFO reports go, and then also in popular culture,
Speaker 3: but then also compare that to real you know, flying
Speaker 3: machine designs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm all for it. One quick note on
Speaker 2: ship design again, this film was very influential on the
Speaker 2: the ultimate shape that Star Trek would take. And it's
Speaker 2: often pointed out that the stars the Starship Enterprise is
Speaker 2: in many ways a disc based ship as well. It
Speaker 2: is a flying saucer, but with other elements added to it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, with engines and the lower you know, engineering
Speaker 2: portion of the ship and all, but you know, it's
Speaker 2: mostly flying saucer and and part of that seems to
Speaker 2: come from Forbidden Planet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of like a it's like a flying
Speaker 3: saucer with a stem and legs. Yeah. So anyway, I'm
Speaker 3: going to try to summarize the setup of the film here. So,
Speaker 3: the crew of the uninspiringly named C fifty seven D
Speaker 3: are on a mission to the planet Alta four to
Speaker 3: investigate what happened to a ship named the Bellerophon, which
Speaker 3: ventured out to the planet twenty years prior. In command
Speaker 3: of this mission is JJ Adams, A by God Rectangle.
Speaker 3: If we ever saw one gruff, tough, no nonsense, you'd
Speaker 3: really get the feeling that he expects a rost ready
Speaker 3: when he gets home from space. Yes, yeah, So when
Speaker 3: the crew reaches the vicinity of Altar four, they receive
Speaker 3: a radio message from a man. It's a human voice.
Speaker 3: He comes on the radio and identifies himself as doctor
Speaker 3: Edward Morbius. They check that against the manifest of the
Speaker 3: original mission, and they verified that was part of the
Speaker 3: original crew. Morbius is supposed to be there, though curiously
Speaker 3: they note that he was a philologist, a language expert,
Speaker 3: which is not exactly what you imagine in the landing
Speaker 3: party among your geologists and exobiology and engineers and so forth.
Speaker 3: Morbius warns them not to land. He says doing so
Speaker 3: would put them in grave danger, but Adams is not deterred.
Speaker 3: It's the mission, gentlemen, We've got a land. So they
Speaker 3: come and set down in the middle of this vast
Speaker 3: desert plain surrounded by jagged mountains, and oh, I love
Speaker 3: love the design of the surface of all Ta four.
Speaker 3: Here there is a painted backdrop which has a green
Speaker 3: sky and sort of different strata of clouds with multiple
Speaker 3: moons in the background. I love the rocky mountains. But
Speaker 3: also this is not a barren, rocky planet, like we're
Speaker 3: looking at a kind of desert plain, but different parts
Speaker 3: of the planet have more vegetation, have strange looking trees
Speaker 3: and brush and things like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does just look absolutely terrific. You can just
Speaker 2: imagine how sci fi fans of the time just probably
Speaker 2: lost their mind when they'd seen this. You know, this
Speaker 2: was you know, obviously this was before two thousand and
Speaker 2: one a Space Odyssey, which you know, really set an
Speaker 2: all new standard for what visions of a sci fi
Speaker 2: future might look like in space. But man, it Forbidden
Speaker 2: Planet just looks amazing.
Speaker 3: So the crew lands on the surface, and I like
Speaker 3: here how the different members of the crew have different
Speaker 3: reactions to it, Like they debate how pleasant it is.
Speaker 3: One person likes it, another person is put off and
Speaker 3: just misses Earth. And so the crew they get out
Speaker 3: and they are greeted by a robot whom they first
Speaker 3: see hot rotting a buggy through the desert like they
Speaker 3: just see dust kicking up in the desert in the distance, like, Wow,
Speaker 3: something's coming to meet us. And when it pulls up.
Speaker 3: When they first got there, I couldn't remember exactly what
Speaker 3: was happening. I was like, Oh, did they get attacked
Speaker 3: by the monster this early? No, that's not It's just
Speaker 3: Robbie driving a buggy that he really looks like he
Speaker 3: would be weighing down the front of this thing and
Speaker 3: making it do I don't know whatever. The opposite of
Speaker 3: pop and a wheelie is like coming down in the front,
Speaker 3: but somehow it stays. It stays on all four wheels,
Speaker 3: and it arrives and sort of a cage opens in
Speaker 3: the front and Robbie walks out, and oh boy, what
Speaker 3: a vision he is. We've already talked about how much
Speaker 3: I like the design of Robbie the robot, but the
Speaker 3: meeting is a magical moment and the crew were kind
Speaker 3: of at a loss for words. He's like, you know,
Speaker 3: I am monitored to respond to the name Robbie, and
Speaker 3: he tries to say, hey, if you don't speak English,
Speaker 3: you know, I speak one hundred and eighty seven other
Speaker 3: languages and there are various various sub tongues, and they're like,
Speaker 3: no English is okay? And they say hi to each other,
Speaker 3: and we get a lot of kind of yuck yuck moments.
Speaker 3: So with the more bumpkinny members of the crew trying
Speaker 3: to figure out what to make of Robbie. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: Robbie takes Adams, his lieutenant Jerry Farman, and the ship's doctor,
Speaker 3: Doc Astro to the home of Edward Morbius, the guy
Speaker 3: they talked to on the radio, and Morbius greets them
Speaker 3: courteously and invites them in for lunch. Now, what would
Speaker 3: you say is what's your read on Morbius when we
Speaker 3: first meet him here?
Speaker 2: I mean, it's very much a Captain Nemo sort of
Speaker 2: vibe and and and you know, this is a highly
Speaker 2: influential film like it, you know, there are also elements
Speaker 2: like it reminds me of Alien Covenant a bit like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: there's there's a guy here and he seems to be
Speaker 2: doing just fine on a world where everyone else is
Speaker 2: absolutely dead something here is us. But that being said,
Speaker 2: Morbius comes off very pleasant, you know, in his his
Speaker 2: crib is just luxurious. I love the blast curtains that
Speaker 2: the oh, stop motion blast curtains that he demonstrates. I mean,
Speaker 2: so he wins us over with charm, but you know,
Speaker 2: remains suspicious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the blast curtains you're talking about. There's like an
Speaker 3: open design of the house. It's one of those mid
Speaker 3: century kind of West Coast designs where it's all glass
Speaker 3: walls all around or loose sight maybe. But then yeah,
Speaker 3: suddenly he can like snap his fingers or press a
Speaker 3: button and all of the windows get replaced with like
Speaker 3: solid lead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, which is which is created via some sort
Speaker 2: of a stop motion approach. But it looks really good.
Speaker 2: Like I totally buy this as a technology.
Speaker 3: So they get to know each other here over over
Speaker 3: a pleasant lunch, and we learn about Robbie. We learned
Speaker 3: that Robbie is immensely strong, and that he has the
Speaker 3: power to synthesize any object or material that he analyzes
Speaker 3: in his sort of male slot mouth in his chest.
Speaker 3: I think we correct me if I'm wrong, But it
Speaker 3: sort of suggested that the delicious food they just ate
Speaker 3: was somehow extruded out of Robbie's holes.
Speaker 2: I guess so. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also we learned, I think, in borrowing from some
Speaker 3: other science fiction, that Robbie has some of the laws
Speaker 3: of robotics written into him, like that Isaac Asimov, Susan Calvin,
Speaker 3: robos psychology stories, the laws of robotics. So Morbius demonstrates,
Speaker 3: for example, that Robbie cannot harm a human by and
Speaker 3: he demonstrates this in a great way. He's like, mister Adams,
Speaker 3: you know, give me your gun, and he takes it.
Speaker 3: He puts it in Robbie's hand first as Robbie zap
Speaker 3: a plant in their garden, and then he's like, okay,
Speaker 3: point the blaster at Commander Adams and kill him. But
Speaker 3: Robbie can't do it. He starts to sizzle and fry.
Speaker 3: All these like purple sparks shoot inside his head. And
Speaker 3: this is caused by a contradiction between receiving the order
Speaker 3: which he is supposed to follow and his inability to
Speaker 3: harm anyone. And he just stands there, frozen in that
Speaker 3: state until Morbius says, canceled the order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they're very forgiving of doctor Morbius's terrifying demonstration
Speaker 2: of power.
Speaker 3: I would say we also get the impression that Morbius
Speaker 3: is not too happy about this visit from the crew.
Speaker 3: He is not rude to them, but he says, for
Speaker 3: one of the lines, is how ironic that a simple
Speaker 3: scholar with no ambition beyond a modest measure of seclusion, should,
Speaker 3: out of the clear sky find himself besieged by an
Speaker 3: army of fellow creatures, all grimly determined to be of service.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but Adams is like, we've got to do it
Speaker 2: by the book, you know, We've we've got to stick around,
Speaker 2: and then we have to follow up.
Speaker 3: The mission, so we learn what happened to the rest
Speaker 3: of the crew, the original crew of the Bellerophon. Morbius
Speaker 3: tells the story of how after they landed and began
Speaker 3: to explore the planet, something started going wrong, something started happening. Eventually,
Speaker 3: every other member of the crew was murdered, literally torn
Speaker 3: limb from limb by what he calls an invisible planetary force,
Speaker 3: and in a certain group of the only survivors who
Speaker 3: were left, say for Morbius tried to flee the planet
Speaker 3: in their spaceship. That ship was obliterated upon takeoff. Now,
Speaker 3: Morbius himself has no idea what the force was, but
Speaker 3: it seems he is somehow immune to it, as is
Speaker 3: surprise we find out about his twenty year old daughter, Altara,
Speaker 3: who was born right after their arrival on the planet.
Speaker 3: Altara's mother was another scientist of the original Bellerophon Crewe.
Speaker 3: She and Morbius fell in love and married on the
Speaker 3: way to the planet, but unfortunately Altara's mother also died,
Speaker 3: though she died of natural causes. So whatever it was
Speaker 3: that literally ripped apart the bodies of the other members
Speaker 3: of the crew, for some reason, it has never tried
Speaker 3: to harm Morbius or his daughter.
Speaker 2: Which is also deeply suspicious. And when we meet Altaria again,
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen the film before, so it's like she
Speaker 2: she a space vampire. She is she a robot? Is
Speaker 2: she an evil destructive force? I was trusting neither of
Speaker 2: these two.
Speaker 3: Really. Yeah, we don't know what to make of her
Speaker 3: at first, and especially because it seems Morbius was hoping
Speaker 3: to keep Altera's existence a secret from Adams and the crew.
Speaker 3: It's like he was trying to hide her. And when
Speaker 3: she becomes her existence becomes revealed, He's like, oh no, She.
Speaker 2: Like wanders out like it's past her bedtime, and like
Speaker 2: guests have come over and it's like, oh, honey, go
Speaker 2: back to bed, and there may be a go There
Speaker 2: are at least a couple of scenes where she is
Speaker 2: told to go to bed. Yeah the male characters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. So we already talked about Altara how she
Speaker 3: is at once brilliant and naive. Like she you know,
Speaker 3: she is schooled in all of the arts and sciences,
Speaker 3: but she has no experience dealing with human society. She's
Speaker 3: also kind of like snow White in that she has
Speaker 3: animal friends like is deer and a tiger and stuff
Speaker 3: that run out of the garden and just hang out
Speaker 3: with her. And the tiger represents no threat. When it
Speaker 3: first shows up, Adams is like pulling out his gun,
Speaker 3: but they're like no, no, no, wait, watch and yeah,
Speaker 3: it just wants to hang. So Adams and the rest
Speaker 3: offered to take Morbius and Altara home to Earth, but
Speaker 3: Morbius has no desire to go. And after this there's
Speaker 3: some kind of technical work that has to be done.
Speaker 3: I don't remember exactly what the deal is. I think
Speaker 3: the crew of the ship has to build like a
Speaker 3: faster than light radio transmitter to communicate with Earth and
Speaker 3: find out what their orders are or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's something in stalls them. So there's a
Speaker 2: little time to meander about and get into trouble.
Speaker 3: Yeah, time for kissing lessons. So here's where we get
Speaker 3: to that portion of the story. Essentially, al Tara is
Speaker 3: she's very interested in all of the young men who
Speaker 3: have arrived on this ship, and many of this the
Speaker 3: men on the ship are interested in hers. Some of
Speaker 3: the lovelorn dudes and the crew get obsessed with Altara.
Speaker 3: She's known as Alta for short, by the way, so
Speaker 3: that was kind of confusing first, but sometimes Morbies is
Speaker 3: calling her Alta, And there is a scene where Jerry Farman,
Speaker 3: the lieutenant sort of adams Is number two, takes Alta
Speaker 3: for a walk on the planet's surface and they sort
Speaker 3: of wander into the forest and he ends up trying
Speaker 3: to convince her that he needs to teach her how
Speaker 3: to kiss so that she can be in proper health,
Speaker 3: because you need to kiss in order to be healthy.
Speaker 3: This scene is both pretty cringey, but also, as I
Speaker 3: was mentioning earlier, kind of funny because Alta does say these,
Speaker 3: like really cutting things at him. She's like, isn't this
Speaker 3: supposed to be stimulating? I don't find it remarkable. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And in the middle of all this, Adams catches them
Speaker 3: and so he chews out Jerry. But then he also
Speaker 3: gets super flustered and he criticizes Alta for wearing revealing clothes,
Speaker 3: and in one funny note, adams freak out here contains
Speaker 3: a rant about like how attractive and sext up his
Speaker 3: men are. Yeah, He's like, all of my crew members
Speaker 3: are the prizest specimens of twenty four year old men
Speaker 3: on Earth. But I was thinking, like even Cook, Is
Speaker 3: that what he thinks about Cook?
Speaker 2: Well, Cook is in a supporting role, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no offense to the looks of Cook. I just mean, like,
Speaker 3: is he the best Earth has at cooking?
Speaker 2: Maybe we didn't know this was a breeding.
Speaker 3: Mission, Yeah, exactly so. Anyway, but al Tara, after this,
Speaker 3: goes home and commissions Robbie to make her a new
Speaker 3: dress that will cover her whole body. Of course, we
Speaker 3: will see that dress later, and it also looks beautiful.
Speaker 3: It's kind of a Greek goddess kind of address, but
Speaker 3: interesting things in the scene, like the uncomfortable sexual politics
Speaker 3: of it. Aside, the scene is interesting because it is
Speaker 3: supposed to be I think Alta's first real experience with
Speaker 3: the rest of humanity, with people who would judge her unfairly,
Speaker 3: with people who would lie to her and treat her unkindly,
Speaker 3: with people who would exploit and take advantage of her.
Speaker 3: She's coming into collision with human nature after having grown
Speaker 3: up in what's presented as a sort of perfect bubble
Speaker 3: of cool, detached, trustworthy, scholarly enlightenment, and she's learning that
Speaker 3: human nature has a dark and bestial side as well. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: things also start going wrong at the ship. In the
Speaker 3: middle of the night, something invisible sneaks into the ship.
Speaker 3: And I love the special effects in these nighttime sneaking scenes,
Speaker 3: by the way, But something sneaks into the ship and
Speaker 3: sabotages the equipment.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, so already we're getting little invisible attacks that
Speaker 2: are sabotaging the ship, keeping it from leaving.
Speaker 3: Now. The next day, Adams goes to the home of
Speaker 3: Morbius and Alta to apologize to Alta for one thing
Speaker 3: for his behavior the day before. He sort of realizes
Speaker 3: he was in the wrong and when he arrives, Alta
Speaker 3: is swimming naked in the pool and Adams gets all
Speaker 3: super flustered again. He's like, oh uh, I don't know
Speaker 3: what to do. But in a scene after this, it
Speaker 3: becomes clear that they are both interested in each other,
Speaker 3: and Alta kisses Adams, and while they are kissing, they
Speaker 3: are suddenly attacked by Alta's tiger friend. The tiger they
Speaker 3: saw earlier that was so friendly and you know, not
Speaker 3: a threat at all, appears on a sort of ledge
Speaker 3: above them and then leaps at them, claws out as
Speaker 3: if ready to attack. Adams just at the last second
Speaker 3: has to zapf it with his phaser gun, and it's
Speaker 3: like there's this feeling Alta has of how why, Like
Speaker 3: the tiger had never tried to harm her before and
Speaker 3: suddenly it has turned hostile.
Speaker 2: Yeah, something has changed. And this was also I was
Speaker 2: really shocked by this scene when the tiger was completely
Speaker 2: annihilated in mid air by the laser gun, absolutely disintegrated.
Speaker 3: Now from here we move move on to a big
Speaker 3: reveal and a sequence of a lot of the best
Speaker 3: sets and special effects shots in the movie. Morbius comes
Speaker 3: to talk to Adams and doctor Ostro. Ostro was like
Speaker 3: a long for the whole time, so just hanging out
Speaker 3: for the kissing and the tiger killing. But Morbius comes
Speaker 3: to tell Adams in Austro about the secrets of the planet,
Speaker 3: the main secret being that all Tier four was once
Speaker 3: inhabited by an extremely technologically advanced species of alien known
Speaker 3: as the Krell. And here I'm going to read Morbius's
Speaker 3: monologue about the Krell. He says, in times long past,
Speaker 3: this planet was the home of a mighty and noble
Speaker 3: race of beings which called themselves the Krell. Ethically as
Speaker 3: well as technologically, they were a million years ahead of humankind,
Speaker 3: for in unlocking the mysteries of nature, they had conquered
Speaker 3: even their baser selves. And when in the course of
Speaker 3: eons they had abolished sickness and an insanity, and crime
Speaker 3: and all injustice, they turned still with high benevolence outward
Speaker 3: towards space. Long before the dawn of man's history, they
Speaker 3: had walked our Earth and brought back many biological specimens
Speaker 3: like the tiger exactly. He goes on the heights they
Speaker 3: had reached, but then, seemingly on the threshold of some
Speaker 3: supreme accomplishment, which was to have crowned their entire history.
Speaker 3: This all but divine race perished in a single night
Speaker 3: in the two thousand centuries. Since that unexplained catastrophe, even
Speaker 3: their cloud piercing towers of glass and porcelain and adamantine
Speaker 3: steel have crumbled back into the soil of alta fur
Speaker 3: and nothing, absolutely nothing remains above ground.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're getting into some pretty ambitious science fiction here.
Speaker 2: Reminds me a bit of the various sublime civilizations in
Speaker 2: Ianimbank's Culture series. These civilizations that have advanced to a state
Speaker 2: where they end up leaving our dimension of space and
Speaker 2: time for higher dimensions, generally leaving behind a great deal
Speaker 2: of technology that's now redundant to them. But I guess
Speaker 2: in this scenario, it sounds like the Krell might have
Speaker 2: been on the cusp of subliming, of moving on, and
Speaker 2: then something terrible kept them from not only kept them
Speaker 2: from moving on to this next level of existence, but
Speaker 2: also just eradicated them entirely, and all we have left
Speaker 2: are the technological depths of the planet.
Speaker 3: That's right, when we get a tour of these technological depths,
Speaker 3: a tour of their underground facilities, and again I can't
Speaker 3: emphasize enough how amazing these sets and special effects are.
Speaker 2: Summer light paintings are just amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so good. So they go through like a
Speaker 3: giant underground power plant that they say is a huge
Speaker 3: buried cube running something that's like twenty miles in every direction,
Speaker 3: which we see them. They're crossing this great chasm on
Speaker 3: a on a little suspension bridge, and we see these
Speaker 3: things moving up and down the chasm and electricity arcing
Speaker 3: through it. Also, there is a device they come across.
Speaker 3: They go to this essentially Krell's schoolhouse, where there was
Speaker 3: a device that the Krell used to train the brains
Speaker 3: of their young, and Morbius explains, when this device is
Speaker 3: used by humans, it is almost always fatal, but if
Speaker 3: you can use it and survive, it will double your IQ.
Speaker 3: And that's how Morbi's got so smart. By the way
Speaker 3: he increased his intelligence with the machine, I guess he
Speaker 3: started off pretty smart, though he's humble about it, but
Speaker 3: then he's like, you know, I took my normal, you know,
Speaker 3: my middling intellect when I first got here, and I
Speaker 3: doubled it with this machine. Everybody else who tried it
Speaker 3: was killed, but by surviving that process himself that allowed
Speaker 3: him to decipher the Krell histories and figure out parts
Speaker 3: of Krell technology and to for example, a symbol Robbie
Speaker 3: the robot.
Speaker 2: It's explained as well that this maybe not the device itself,
Speaker 2: but there's an element of the device that is like
Speaker 2: a high striker a strong man game from your fare
Speaker 2: or Carnival, you know, where you you hit a circle
Speaker 2: with a hammer or mallet as hard as you can
Speaker 2: and then it causes this little float be lee to go,
Speaker 2: you know, to rise up and with your brain, but
Speaker 2: with your brain. Yeah, so it's it's the smart man game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I liketriker. They put Leslie Nielsen on it
Speaker 3: and he can barely get the thing to go off,
Speaker 3: and they're like, well that's a you know, it doesn't
Speaker 3: take brains to command a starship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, massive dig on.
Speaker 3: Adam's here anyway, after learning about all this stuff that
Speaker 3: this like power this underground power plant that can generate
Speaker 3: generate what seems to be an infinite amount of energy,
Speaker 3: and this brain boosting machine, Adams says, you know what,
Speaker 3: this changes everything Earth has to know about these devices.
Speaker 3: But Morbius resists he's like, I think this is what
Speaker 3: he was trying to hide from them before. He's like,
Speaker 3: humans are not ready for this kind of power, and
Speaker 3: this technology may have been what wiped out the Krell,
Speaker 3: but if so, we don't know how.
Speaker 2: Yeah again, because the Krell we're millions of years ahead
Speaker 2: of humans, and something tripped them up in their dizzying
Speaker 2: ascent with this technology, so we're clearly not ready for it.
Speaker 3: Should we do something on the B plot here about
Speaker 3: cook and the synthesis of whiskey? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is so can you set this one up?
Speaker 2: So you know cook? I guess in sort of like
Speaker 2: the you know, you know, old fashioned US military sense
Speaker 2: of these kind of plot developments. He's supposed to acquire
Speaker 2: some local ingredients and also find like local illicit sources
Speaker 2: of hooch for cooking, but also clearly not for cooking.
Speaker 3: He's like, I need to go out and look for
Speaker 3: some wild radishes. Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And basically what he runs into Robbie the robot
Speaker 2: and he's like, hey, I need some more of this stuff,
Speaker 2: and he shows him like a mostly empty flask of
Speaker 2: whiskey and Robbie grabs it shoots it back into his
Speaker 2: mail slot, and Cook is like, well, well that was
Speaker 2: my last swig. How could you do that? And Robbie's like,
Speaker 2: I will now synthesize this for you. Will let you say, like,
Speaker 2: will sixty gallons be sufficient?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yeah? And then Cook comes back later and there's
Speaker 3: there's like a giant pyramid of heights of whiskey in
Speaker 3: their own individual glass bottles.
Speaker 2: And somehow Cook doesn't die at this moment, like I
Speaker 2: feel like later on in like in speculative media, like
Speaker 2: this would be the moment where the monster comes and
Speaker 2: kills him, you know where He's like, I have all
Speaker 2: the whiskey in the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 2: Instant monster death? Booze enough at last, yes, exactly, but
Speaker 2: no Cook will survive a little longer.
Speaker 3: So another thing that happens at this point in the
Speaker 3: story is that the attacks on the ship become much
Speaker 3: more severe. What we got in the first attack by
Speaker 3: the Invisible Force at night was just the sabotaging of equipment,
Speaker 3: but this escalates to in one instance, murder. I believe
Speaker 3: the communications officer Quinn is found murder. Did they say?
Speaker 3: They describe it in a quite grisly way. I think
Speaker 3: they say, he smeared all over the walls of the
Speaker 3: communication room, and then after that they set up a perimeter.
Speaker 3: You know what we should do sometime on the show,
Speaker 3: is we should set up a list of the best
Speaker 3: establishing a perimeter scenes.
Speaker 2: Yes, because this is pretty good though, I mean, the
Speaker 2: technology is convincing, and yeah, everyone left. I mean it
Speaker 2: really this also reminded me of what would come much
Speaker 2: later with Aliens, with you know, it's like, all right,
Speaker 2: is it it's inside the perimeter? You know, I'm reading
Speaker 2: it's reading right, and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very similar what happens here. In fact, I
Speaker 3: almost feel like that scene in Aliens. It feels like
Speaker 3: a callback to this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they establish a perimeter, and eventually this creature, this
Speaker 3: invisible creature, comes in a brazen frontal attack where the
Speaker 3: crew are resisting with big energy weapons, these big beam
Speaker 3: weapons and then handheld laser rifles. And when the thing,
Speaker 3: when the invisible creature gets illuminated by all of the
Speaker 3: energy weapons that are hitting it, we suddenly see pieces
Speaker 3: of its form and yeah, it's oh, it's frightening. I
Speaker 3: mean I've read things that like I think the producers
Speaker 3: were worried that this would be so frightening that like
Speaker 3: it would be, it would make the movie inappropriate for
Speaker 3: younger audiences. And I can see why. It's a truly
Speaker 3: scary thing that they conjure up. It's like a kind
Speaker 3: of a ram lion bulldog monster with sort of horns
Speaker 3: or something, and it's made out of flames.
Speaker 2: Yeah. To compare it to things that would come much
Speaker 2: later and may have been each in their own way
Speaker 2: or at least in their visualization on screen, been inspired by.
Speaker 2: This reminds me a bit of the ball Rog. Reminds
Speaker 2: me a bit of the red bull from The Last Unicorn.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Oh and Jerry Farman, the lieutenant who is
Speaker 3: trying to do the kissing lessons, he gets killed in
Speaker 3: one of these attacks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Eventually Cook does too, right, Cook's taken out by
Speaker 2: the monster.
Speaker 3: Oh is he? I didn't remember that? How could they
Speaker 3: do that to Cook?
Speaker 2: Thank God he's secured all that whiskey first bourbon read.
Speaker 3: But during this attack we start to get an indication
Speaker 3: of where this alien monster is coming from, because we
Speaker 3: cut away in the middle of the attack to Morbius,
Speaker 3: who is sleeping in his home. I think he's fallen
Speaker 3: asleep on his desk and he is maybe having a nightmare,
Speaker 3: and at one point suddenly he snaps awake in his
Speaker 3: home and then at the other end of the planet,
Speaker 3: not at the other end of the planet, but away where
Speaker 3: the monster is attacking, it suddenly vanishes. Oh oh. So
Speaker 3: after this attack, Adams goes back to the Morbius and
Speaker 3: Altara house to try to get I think the reason
Speaker 3: is he wants Altara to leave the planet with him.
Speaker 3: He's like, you know, this monster is attacking. We've got
Speaker 3: to go now, and for your own safety, you should
Speaker 3: come with me.
Speaker 2: Plus, we're in love. Now this is meant to be.
Speaker 2: You've got to run away with me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And to be clear, it seems reciprocal, like she's
Speaker 3: very into him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's part of you know, this part of
Speaker 2: the split that's going on here is that now she
Speaker 2: is more she is attracted to the outside world, the
Speaker 2: world of Adams, the world of Earth, and wants to leave.
Speaker 2: I mean, she wants to bring her father with her
Speaker 2: if possible, but she is also ready to leave her
Speaker 2: father's home, her father's world for the first time.
Speaker 3: I think. When so Adams and Astro go to the house,
Speaker 3: and when they first get there, Robbie's trying to block
Speaker 3: their way. He's like, I am monitored not to permit you.
Speaker 3: But they're kind of discussing, like what's he gonna do.
Speaker 3: He can't hurt us, so I think we could. But
Speaker 3: then we never see that tested, right, because eventually Altara
Speaker 3: shows up and is like, cancel the order, let them in.
Speaker 3: But I was curious about that. It's like, Okay, if
Speaker 3: he can't hurt them, could they couldn't they just force
Speaker 3: their way past him?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, he is he's bulky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true anyway. So, uh So, now we have
Speaker 3: Adams and Astro in the in the Morbius home, and
Speaker 3: at some point here Astro sneaks away because, oh, because
Speaker 3: this is another part of their plan. They're like, we've
Speaker 3: got to find a way to defeat this monster. So
Speaker 3: either Adams or Astro, one of them needs to use
Speaker 3: the brain enhance her machine, which you know they have
Speaker 3: learned will probably kill you, but if you can survive it,
Speaker 3: it'll make you super small art and they think they
Speaker 3: will need those extra smarts in order to survive. Well.
Speaker 3: While they're hanging out Robbie, Robbie at some point like
Speaker 3: comes in carrying the body of Ostro and it's like, uh, oh,
Speaker 3: he tried to he tried to get smart. Bad move.
Speaker 2: And this is an example of a scene that I
Speaker 2: wish we could have seen like this would have This
Speaker 2: is a highly dramatic moment for this character, and it
Speaker 2: occurs entirely off screen, and they're like, oh, by the way,
Speaker 2: he did it. He plugged in and now he's dying.
Speaker 2: But we do get some final last words.
Speaker 3: His final last words are solve the riddle. Solve the
Speaker 3: riddle of the movie. So by increasing his intelligence, he
Speaker 3: did doom himself to death, but he also was able
Speaker 3: to understand what happened to the Krell and how it's
Speaker 3: still affecting them now. So it turns out the big
Speaker 3: reveal is this giant underground power plant was created for
Speaker 3: the purpose of essentially doing away with all all need
Speaker 3: for mechanical labor and mechanical devices, and instead would would
Speaker 3: allow any of the Krell to make a physical reality
Speaker 3: manifest simply by thinking about it. So you can interface
Speaker 3: with this giant machine and it will interpret your thoughts
Speaker 3: and then manifest those thoughts as physical atoms and energy,
Speaker 3: which sounds great. Okay, it's just like infinite free energy
Speaker 3: and labor. You know, you can all want all kind
Speaker 3: of problems. Material problems are done away with, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if the rational mind can imagine it, then it
Speaker 2: is real and it is in action.
Speaker 3: Except the problem is what the Crell did not foresee
Speaker 3: and what Ostro figures out happened to them is it's
Speaker 3: not only the rational mind that's in the driver's seat now, baby,
Speaker 3: Both the rational mind and the sort of the ego,
Speaker 3: the rational mind and the base design of the ID
Speaker 3: are hooked up to this machine. And so it began
Speaker 3: manifesting the Krell's unconscious or subconscious thoughts and desires as well.
Speaker 3: Everything that they knew they shouldn't do but deep down
Speaker 3: secretly wanted that was manifest as well. And so what
Speaker 3: that turned into was the slaughter and extermination of their
Speaker 3: entire people, all.
Speaker 2: The demons of the mind unleashed on the planet with
Speaker 2: infinite power backing them up. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's amazing,
Speaker 2: like this is such a Again, when this movie goes
Speaker 2: hard on its on its genre elements, it's really spectacular.
Speaker 3: I agree. It's a great premise, and it not to
Speaker 3: spoil it by saying this, but I realized I came
Speaker 3: to these in backwards order. But when I was younger,
Speaker 3: I read the books Sphere by Michael Crichton, which essentially
Speaker 3: has the same premise. It's like they come across alien
Speaker 3: technology that can make your thoughts manifest, but then they realize, like, oh,
Speaker 3: it's also making subconscious thoughts manifest. So everybody's anxieties and
Speaker 3: fears are like becoming physical objects that are attacking them.
Speaker 3: And so, in fact, what the characters discover here in
Speaker 3: Forbidden Planet is not only is that what happened to
Speaker 3: the Krell, it's still operating that way, and so it
Speaker 3: is taking the subconscious fears and desires and complexes of
Speaker 3: doctor Morbius who has linked his brain to the machine
Speaker 3: by using it and making those manifest. And in fact,
Speaker 3: not all of the links are fully spelled out, but
Speaker 3: it's sort of suggesting the idea that like, he doesn't
Speaker 3: want to go back to Earth, he doesn't want Altera
Speaker 3: to go back to Earth. He doesn't want the corrupting
Speaker 3: influence of Earth to change his daughter, to sort of
Speaker 3: like corrupt the perfect precious existence he has created for them.
Speaker 3: And you know, you can kind of understand why. You
Speaker 3: can see how Altera's first encounter with the broader human
Speaker 3: kind involved, like, you know, some dudes being creeps to her. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so you can see where his desire is to kind
Speaker 3: of like just create a bubble and live in it
Speaker 3: with his family and live in that protective bubble without
Speaker 3: any intrusion where that desire comes from. But it is
Speaker 3: manifesting as the creation of a violent monster that lashes
Speaker 3: out to kill anything that threatens to puncture the bubble.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now that we know what the monster is,
Speaker 2: it is coming for our main characters, and it is
Speaker 2: we realize inexorable. It is unstoppable. And this just leads
Speaker 2: to like an avalanche of scenes that are really highly effective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And I like the way that it really
Speaker 3: does make sense taken given the premise of the story,
Speaker 3: because you might think, well, couldn't he just call it off?
Speaker 3: But as anybody who's ever had like a panic attack,
Speaker 3: you know, you can know rationally that the thing that
Speaker 3: you are afraid of is not something you should be
Speaker 3: afraid of, It's not a real threat, and yet you
Speaker 3: still just can't make your subconscious mind to give in.
Speaker 3: The subconscious is resistant to rational control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so he can't call it off, he can't
Speaker 2: control it.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: It is coming no matter what, and even like knowing
Speaker 2: what it is doesn't give him power over it, which
Speaker 2: you know matches up with some of these states of
Speaker 2: the mind as we experience them as well. I Mean,
Speaker 2: sometimes knowing can help, and that can be part of
Speaker 2: the tools of controlling things like anxiety in some cases.
Speaker 2: But but yeah, not necessarily at all.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of interesting things that happen in
Speaker 3: the climax here, Like at one point they try to
Speaker 3: command Robbie the robot to kill the monster that's attacking
Speaker 3: them in the house. But Robbie, knowing that the monster
Speaker 3: is a manifestation of a human mind, can't can't hurt it,
Speaker 3: right because he can't hurt a human.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's excellent, And it just leads them to they
Speaker 2: have to like start retreating through these various levels of protection.
Speaker 2: So for instance, the homes, combat shades come up, and
Speaker 2: of course the doors, yeah, the blast doors, and the
Speaker 2: monster makes pretty quick work of that, and they have
Speaker 2: to retreat into the Krell subsurface chambers and they have
Speaker 2: all those really cool doors to move behind and the
Speaker 2: locking mechanism, but even that is not going to keep
Speaker 2: the monster at bay, and we get this terrific scene
Speaker 2: where the monster is like literally melting its way through
Speaker 2: the door.
Speaker 3: And we see the power plant. There's like a readout
Speaker 3: engine on this showing how much energy is being directed
Speaker 3: into the machine that this alien power plant is generating.
Speaker 3: And earlier we were seeing things happen where there's like,
Speaker 3: you know, fifty lights lined up and only the first
Speaker 3: one is barely lighting. But when the monster's trying to
Speaker 3: get through the door, we see it like lighting up
Speaker 3: all the way more, more and more, and like the
Speaker 3: energy produced is limitless, and they realize, like it's just
Speaker 3: not going to stop now. I think finally, Morbius was
Speaker 3: resistant to the idea at first that he was the
Speaker 3: one creating the monster, but he eventually comes to accept
Speaker 3: it and then sort of gets in the path of
Speaker 3: the monster, and I think as he is fatally injured
Speaker 3: by it, that sort of like makes it dematerialize for
Speaker 3: the moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like he stands up to it, he basically has
Speaker 2: a you shall not pass moment. But yeah, at that,
Speaker 2: I mean, he still can't overpower it, and it manages
Speaker 2: to fatally injure him in the process.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so at that point they somehow they end
Speaker 3: up setting a self destruct thing for the entire planet.
Speaker 3: You have ten minutes to reach minimum safe distance. They
Speaker 3: set up a self destruct for the planet, and then
Speaker 3: Adams and Altara have to escape back to the ship.
Speaker 3: Oh and I think Robbie comes with them, doesn't he
Speaker 3: as Robbie comes too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Robbie is to come along for the ride.
Speaker 3: It's a fair trade. I mean like they made the
Speaker 3: right decision to set the self destruct like such a
Speaker 3: such a technology that makes all our thoughts manifest that
Speaker 3: there's no way that can be wielded correctly. You just
Speaker 3: just had to be destroyed. There's can't be good. But Robbie,
Speaker 3: I feel like Robbie's he's good tech. You can bring
Speaker 3: him with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his programming is sound, uh, and so yeah, he's
Speaker 2: a board. We have a moment where the surviving crew
Speaker 2: members there witness the destruction of the planet from afar,
Speaker 2: which is a little weird because Adams is like, there
Speaker 2: it goes your dad's on that planet or what's left
Speaker 2: of him, and yeah, it's like, well yes, obviously.
Speaker 3: But the ending line I remember is a little hokie.
Speaker 3: He has basically a he tampered in God's domain And yeah,
Speaker 3: a statement I think, but they but also there's a
Speaker 3: good observation where they're like, you know, what the crew
Speaker 3: achieved is not unique to the Krell. Maybe someday long
Speaker 3: in the future, humans will achieve the same level of
Speaker 3: technology and then we'll be facing the same problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is a valid point. We see this
Speaker 2: in sci fi time and time again. It remains pretty accurate,
Speaker 2: and that is that our technological achievements tend to outstrip
Speaker 2: our ability to control ourselves regarding that technology at a
Speaker 2: personal level or at like a governmental level.
Speaker 3: I think it's a plea for a kind of a
Speaker 3: regulatory or limiting consciousness about technology before it's achieved. It's
Speaker 3: recognizing that the story of the Krell is literally people
Speaker 3: achieving a power to do something before they've fully thought
Speaker 3: through what it would mean to have that power, and
Speaker 3: then of course it destroys them. And this is something
Speaker 3: we've seen happen again and again in technological history. People
Speaker 3: figure out how to do something before they've thought through
Speaker 3: all of the ways in which it could be used
Speaker 3: for ill and should thus be constrained or constrained to
Speaker 3: the extent that it could be constrained. I mean, some
Speaker 3: things are really hard to constrain, but you know, to
Speaker 3: whatever extent we have the power to. And so, yeah,
Speaker 3: we don't want to become like the Krell. We should
Speaker 3: think hard about how technological creations could go wrong before
Speaker 3: we create them. It's kind of a plea for science fiction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3: Anyway, that's Forbidden Planet.
Speaker 2: That is the Forbidden Planet. And yeah, I think it
Speaker 2: was an absolute delight. I highly recommend checking this one
Speaker 2: out if you've managed to not see it thus far.
Speaker 2: Like we said before, sometimes these highly influential films, they
Speaker 2: can be easy films to miss because you have at
Speaker 2: least sort of surface level understanding of what it's about,
Speaker 2: and it's easy to sort of put that one on
Speaker 2: the back burner. But this one's worth coming back to
Speaker 2: for sure. All Right, we would love to hear from
Speaker 2: everyone out there. What is your history with Forbidden Planet?
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts concerning it and other pictures from
Speaker 2: this timeframe? Are there other movies that you would compare
Speaker 2: favorably to Forbidden Plant from the nineteen fifties? Yeah, right
Speaker 2: in we'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder
Speaker 2: that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
Speaker 2: and culture podcast with core episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind. In the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
Speaker 2: feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 2: film here on Weird House Cinema. And if you want
Speaker 2: a complete list of all the movies we've covered thus far, well,
Speaker 2: you can head on over to letterbox dot com. You
Speaker 2: can look us up. Our user name is weird House
Speaker 2: and we have an episode list of everything we've covered
Speaker 2: thus far. I believe at this point what are we
Speaker 2: up to? It is exactly one hundred and ninety five films,
Speaker 2: so we're closing in on two hundred. If you have
Speaker 2: an idea for what we should cover for our two
Speaker 2: hundredth episode of Weird House Cinema, right in with suggestions.
Speaker 3: Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, to suggest a two hundredth
Speaker 3: film for us to cover, or just to say Hi.
Speaker 3: You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: Your Mind dot com.
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