ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Well, he was certainly tall enough, and he had the face for it, too!




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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

Well, I'm still looking for behind-the-scenes photographs that show the crashsite set used in "The Thing from Another World" at the RKO Encino Ranch, with the background painting and all that fake snow. But in the meantime I did run across these pictures of the RKO Ranch from 1952, with two paintings on each half (probably for a Western).

I adjusted the contrast a little, but they aren't very sharp I'm afraid. The big painting of the horizon and the sky blends in so well with the actual sky that I drew a blue line across the top of the backdrop in the second version of the picture below.

The two halves of the huge backdrop contain different skies and landscapes. The one on the right has a lighter sky and a flatter horizon.

First I found this picture, the clearest of the bunch.



Here's the same picture again, but with a blue line across the top of the backdrop structure. I didn't realize at first that the backdrop went all the way across, and the clouds on the left side are part of the painting!



Then I found this montage photograph. (I don't know why the yellow lines were added.) Notice that the three inserts show the same painted sky and the big fake rock that was built in front of the backdrop we can see in the aerial shot, at the northern border of the Ranch.



The three inserts show the left third, middle third, and right third of the giant backdrop. Here's a better version of the same aerial shot shown above, with more details.



I cropped and enlarged the three inserts of the backdrop at the bottom of the montage photo.

As Orzel-w pointed out earlier in this thread, the structure at the left edge is a seven-story motorized scaffold that the painters rolled along in front of the painting to give them access to all areas of the backdrop.



Same picture, with the upper edge marked in blue.



This is the middle third of the backdrop. This freakin' thing is huge . . .



Same picture, again with the blue line to show the upper edge.



Finally, the right-hand third, with the top and right edges marked with blue lines in the second photo below.





We can tell that the three pictures were taken in fairly rapid succession, because we can see three men walking left-to-right in each shot, and they're in the center of all three pictures as the photographer turned towards the right to get each of the three shots.

Look closely at the very first picture at the top of this post and you'll see the three men as they walk behind the wooden tower in the foreground. Therefore, that picture is a fourth shot in this same set, showing a slightly different view of the middle third of the backdrop painting. It's slightly sharper than the other three.

Here are the two pictures again, for comparison -- the shot of the backdrop's right third, and the very first picture at the top of this post.





One of these days I'm going to find behind-the-scenes shots that actually show this backdrop and the area in front of it the way it actually looked for "The Thing from Another World".

Then I can die a happy man. (A few decades later, hopefully . . . but very happy. )
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

Nice find, Bud!

I'm thinking that the sequential nature of the photos, together with their lack of sharpness, points toward a 16mm movie. Furthermore, the camera is not only panning to follow the three men; it's also moving with them to the right from the first to the second photo. Then it seems to stop and either zooms or moves back and rises slightly from the second to the third photo of those three "insert" shots.
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WayneO
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[Bud Brewster]

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Oh lord, what a tantalizing idea!

Somewhere there's a 16mm movie of people walking around in front of the mammoth RKO backdrop. I would love to see that piece of film.

And now you've got me thinking about the possibility of behind-the-scenes home movies of the crash site scene from The Thing.

Wow . . .
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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I found the picture below on the CHFB thread for this movie and wanted to add it here. Before doing so, I started reading some of the early posts on this thread, and I was a bit embarrassed by my frequent insistence that the crash site backdrop was a giant, curved cyclorama that partially encircled the set!

I posted colorful diagrams of what I thought it looked like, carefully rendered after hours of calculating angles and distances. It was all very enjoyable, of course, but now that I finally know how mistaken I was, it's downright embarrassing.

I'd like to say thanks to Wayne (orzel-w) for his patience during that long and spirited debate. He had to "unteach me" a lot of mistaken ideas I had until he finally set me straight on the matter.

Even though I was wrong, the experience proved something a wise man once said:

A debate is like a fencing match. You don't have to win to get a good workout.

(Hmmm . . . who said that? Oh, right. It was me, and it's my signature on every other message board I belong to except this one. )

Anyway, here's the nice picture I wanted to share.



* Complements of skeleton knaggs from CHFB
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Andrew Kidd]

My own article analyzing the film's themes and defending it against many of its critics, both past and present. A bittersweet note: I extensively cite Jacques Rivette's article on Hawks. As is well known, Rivette died earlier this January; I dedicate this article in his memory.

[orzel-w]

Scifi Steve has interpreted the design of the saucer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTvv2_XuTDA

He always puts a lot of careful thought and analysis into his designs. And his videos are constantly improving in visual quality.
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WayneO
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[Bud Brewster]

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Great piece of research, with brilliant conclusions. SciFi Steve's videos are a joy to watch.

Ummm . . . correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he misuse the word "avionics" several times while he was talking about the shape of the spacecraft and how it was designed to have a "lifting body" fuselage?

Avionics is defined as "electronics as applied to aviation" or "electronic equipment fitted in an aircraft."

Steve meant to say "aerodynamics", I think.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

Right. But owing to the amount of work he's obviously put into these projects, I was willing to overlook it. I reverted to my fallback position, "If I can spot the error, I know what he meant to say/write, and the communication has been accomplished."
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WayneO
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[Bud Brewster]

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Agreed. I left him a nice compliment on Youtube, and I added a note at the end to let him know about the error. He'll probably fix it.

It took me quite a while to trim the somewhat distracting background from these screen shots and lighten them the right amount to allow us to see the shape, but I wanted to present SciFiSteve's magnificent design for the saucer.

Making the shape circular as seen from above and still serve as a lifting body to justify the ship's horizontal landing and its stabilizer which protrudes from the ice was absolutely brilliant.






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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Brent Gair]

My opinion...which is obviously only opinion because it's all guess work...is that I'm less inclined to accept the turned down edges of the saucer.

The video producer does correctly cite the concept of "compression lift" which is associated with the XB-70 bomber. And the anhedral on the saucer edges does correctly interpret that so kudos to him.

If I was to build a model, it's not a feature I would include. If one assumes this is primarily a space vehicle, that anhedral would wreak havoc during high speed entry into an atmosphere. And if you look at lifting bodies (do a google search) they commonly have significant dihedral (wing tips going up). Anhedral wings are not naturally stable.

And assume that the saucer did not land but, instead, made a force landing or crash landing. It would slide along the ice on it's belly making that narrow skid mark before settling into the circular depression.

That's my take.

EDITED to show lifting body dihedral photo:

[Bud Brewster]

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If they hadn't used the thermite, and Army engineers had built a structure around the landing site so that the saucer and the alien could be extracted from the ice carefully, this is what we'd have had in a few years after reverse engineering the ship and building our own.

















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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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My respect for Turner Classic Movies took a nose dive today when I discovered that they showed The Thing from Another World with the 4:3 picture cropped and zoomed in to eliminate the black bars on the sides!

I paused certain scenes and compared them to my DVD, playing on my laptop. Then I carefully recreate images that showed the shameful thing that had been done by TCM, along with the full screen image, for comparison.

This will break your hearts, TCM fans.

Here's what this shot in the mess hall (right after the fire scene) is supposed to look like.





And this is what it looked like on TCM. Notice that they cut of the bottom, not the top, to avoid lopping off people's heads.





But I was even more appalled by what TCM did to the climactic scene. Not only did they cut off a large chunk at the bottom, they even cut off some at the TOP!

Here's the full frame image.





And here's what TCM showed (only if was much darker than this, which made it worse!)





But the most shocking example of what TCM did is found in the scene when the hand starts to move. TCM couldn't cut of as much as they wanted to without either lopping off the top of people's heads or eliminating the view of the hand on the table.

So they did little of both! Here's the full frame from my DVD.





And here's the bastardized version they aired!





You can click on this link and see a clip of the scene above, exactly as TCM aired the movie! The scene above comes at the end of the clip.

http://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/movies/2848/Thing-From-Another-World-The-Movie-Clip-Super-Carrot/311048/

The decision to do this to The Thing from Another World is especially puzzling in view of the fact that TCM shows dozens of vintage movies every week in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. So, why did they suddenly violate their tradition of honoring the films' original frame dimensions just so they could fill up the screens of people's HD televisions?

Remember all those little promos TCM did to show the tragic difference between the dreaded pan-and-scan and the letterbox method which display movies in the correct aspect ratio?

I guess TCM decided that wasn't so important after all.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

[Krel]

From the view from the windows, Tex is in an observation/control tower room.

David.