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