ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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What are you in the mood for today.

Could it be a story of visitors from the stars who make an unscheduled stop on Earth when their spaceship blows a gaskets!

Or how 'bout a story from Greek mythology with special effects that defy description?

Then again, maybe you're leaning towards a cosmic adventure that takes you to distant planet!

While you're pondering your choices, here's someone who might tempt you to choose the movie she happens to be in.




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It Came from Outer Space (1953)

IMDB has several interesting trivia items for this production.
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~ The Universal-International make-up department submitted two alien designs for consideration by the studio executives. The design that was rejected was saved and then later used as the Mutant in Universal-International's This Island Earth (1955).

Note from me: This movie would have been a completely different kind of story if the Mutant suit had been used. The whole concept of the aliens being shape shifters who could assume human form wouldn't work worth a damn it we had to believe that a creature that looked like this —


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— could morph into this!


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~ Although credited to Harry Essex, most of the script, including dialogue, is copied almost verbatim from Ray Bradbury's initial film treatment.

Note from me: Frankly some of Bradbury's dialog sounds a bit hokey, like when the telephone repairman starts talking about how "the wind gets in the wires, and hums, and listens and talks. Just like what we're hearing now."

It's almost like Ray Bradbury had a premonition that Sand Rock, Arizona, would be in a state that would legalize marijuana someday.

~ According to a magazine article, the "bubble" effect when the audience is seeing things from the alien's POV was achieved by blowing a specially formulated "tough" bubble around the camera lens. These shots were kept short since the bubbles only lasted a brief time.

Note from me: These days such an effect would be accomplished with CGI. But the bubble effect in this movie has such a perfectly "organic" look that I'm sure a CGI version would be much less impressive!

~ This was one of the few American movies from the 1950s to place its credits at the end rather than at the beginning.

Note from me: I'd like to think that director Jack Arnold made the decision to do this, because it gives the movie a unique feel to its opening closing. But then, I'm prejudiced, by Mr. Arnold directed my all-time favorite 1950s class, The Space Children.

~ In a separately filmed trailer, Richard Carlson talks to the audience about the film and about Three Dimension; animated sequences attempt to illustrate the three dimensional effect.

Note from me: I admire the studio for making this attempt to explain to public just who new and different this 3D movie would be, compared anything they'd seen before.

Here's the trailer described above.

____________ It Came From Outer Space trailer


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~ The shot of the spaceship destroying a ship was in fact a newsreel shot of HMS Balham exploding after being torpedoed in November 1941.

Note from me: Holy crap! This comment was supposed to be placed in the Earth vs the Flying Saucers listing on IMDB! No ships were destroyed by the aliens in this movie! This is a prime example of why IMDB's trivia items can't be trusted!

~ A rarity among science-fiction films in that its alien visitors are neither benevolent nor malevolent but instead seem indifferent to anything with our level of intelligence.

Note from me: Not true. The aliens make a heroic effort to respect human life, even though the humans in the story actually kill two of the aliens — the one who is disguised as the telephone repairman when the pose' causes his truck to crash and burn, and the one disguised as Barbara Rush when Russell Johnson shots her in the cave.

~ Steven Spielberg has credited this film and its plot, which is focused on benign alien visitors seemingly uninterested in helping or harming human beings, as the main inspiration for his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Note from me: Not true again. The aliens in Close Encounters blatantly disregard the detrimental effects on human lives they cause by abducting people (even a child) and not return some of them until decades later!

Do these allegedly intelligent beings not realize that returning their kidnapped people long after their friends and families have grown old and died is morally wrong? [/color][/size]
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Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

The YouTube link below provides something which I actually dreamed of somehow obtaining when I was a teenager in the early 1960s!

It's the complete soundtrack from Jason and the Argonauts, with every segment of Bernard Herrmann's brilliant score — from the original studio recordings!

I've watched this movie so many times since I first saw it — twice in one day at a theater with my friends — that listening to this magnificent presentation of the original score was like viewing it again!

I've downloaded the video, and I look forward to replaying it on the big sound system and shaking the walls in my living room. The elderly ladies who live on both sides of my townhouse might call me to complain about the loud noise — but I'll just ignore the ringing phone and apologize to them later.

After all, I've been waiting almost 60 years to enjoy this wonderful music in a way that would rock my world and rattle my teeth!

BERNARD HERRMANN JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS

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Conquest of Space (1955)

IMDB has a new and interesting trivia items for this production which I didn't include in my previous post.
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~ General Merritt's opinions on Man's 'trespass' into space was actually a reflection of a real-life movement.

In the 1950s there were those who claimed that the heavens were God's domain and that humans would be committing blasphemy by engaging in space travel.

Although real, the movement was never very widespread, and once actual space travel began, it was quickly drowned out by the public enthusiasm for the space race.

Note from me: The inclusion of a religious fanatic in this otherwise fine science fiction story proved to be the downfall of George Pal.

Fortunately he was able to give us The Time Machine in 1960 — but it took poor Mr. Pal five years to recover from his bad choice of story elements in Conquest of Space.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)