Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Forbidden Planet

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. Yeah, it's
it's winter break week, so we have a rewind episode
here for you. This one originally published three seven, twenty
twenty five. It is our episode on the nineteen fifty
six science fiction classic Forbidden Planet. Such and such a
fun film, oh and such an iconic electronic musical score.

(00:26):
Let's jump right in.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
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 where he went full irony mode with
movies like Airplane and The Naked Gun. He was a stern,

(01:05):
square jawed ham from outer space. And this movie makes
the best and the worst use of him.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yes, this movie is full of male actors just like that.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
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
both ways are good. Like it is at once gorgeous,
thoughtful and clever and also dated, corny and numb skullish,

(01:37):
and like both aspects make for a very good time.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
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 you could, it's easy to go
into Forbidden Planet expecting it to like wholly and completely

(02:04):
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

(02:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, there's a huge element of mad men in space,
the 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 in a in like
a New York office space, it is the daughter of
a brilliant scientist on a distant world.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
The one true extraterrestrial we get to meet in the movie.
Though she is a human, but she's from another planet.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Now, Joe, you fished up one of the posters for
Forbidden Planet, and oh, it's so 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 Anne Francis in this picture?

Speaker 3 (03:41):
I don't remember if he does. He does carry the
doctor Doc Austro, Remember.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
That and wonder that that should have been on the poster?

Speaker 3 (03:48):
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 he's carrying a blonde lady here, and
she doesn't look that much like Anne Francis, Like really long,
but you know it's close enough. This was the format
at the time they tore Johnson to Robbie the Robot.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
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

(04:30):
several times that Ann Francis stars in Forbidden Planet.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Ah, because planet runs with Janet. Yeah, yeah, it's perfect.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
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.

(05:16):
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
back drops, 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,

(05:39):
the mid century future chic decor of the Morbius house,
so 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

(05:59):
wall 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

(06:21):
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

(06:42):
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.

(07:08):
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 like premise, or they're about ideas in some interesting way,
and they consist primarily of dudes standing around talking in
a sparsely decorated set.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
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,
there is, 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 reb defer territory

(07:49):
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.
They're just so many. It's like, is just a feast
for the eyes.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
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,

(08:25):
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,

(08:46):
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

(09:09):
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

(09:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
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 some 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.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
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,
would make them good might be good writing or good acting.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, or maybe how well they shoot the monster costume
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
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

(11:01):
you didn't have Forbidden Planet getting there early and setting
the trend.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
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

(11:26):
pointed out the plot of Forbidden Planet 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

(11:49):
that gets a straight adaptation to film very much. Adaptations
of the Tempest in cinema are almost always very loose.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
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 our Prospero character,

(12:21):
our Miranda, and I guess we have our Caliban of
sorts as well, our monstrous creature not to be confused
with the Caliban in Clash of the Titans. Was he
called Caliban and then I can't recall, but he the
character in that is very much based on this element
of the Tempest as well.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yeah. I think people have said have pointed out that
Robbie the robot is kind of aerial from the Tempest.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Ah, yeah, yeah, and that.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
Adams is the Leslie Nielsen character is sort of I
forget the name, but like one of the Italian nobles
that gets a lured to the island.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
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 its plotting. All right, Joe,

(13:15):
do you have an elevator pitch for this film?

Speaker 3 (13:17):
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 exoplanet called Alta
four by the explorationship Bellerophon, has gone silent after it arrived.
Twenty years later, a United Planet's starship under Commander JJ

(13:41):
Adams is sent to the Altaar 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 Belerophon is a language scholar named doctor Morbius, as
well as his twenty year old daughter Altera, who was
born on the planet. What happened to the rest of

(14:02):
the crew? How have Morbius and Altera survived all this time?
And where can a guy find bourbon and kissing lessons.
On a planet such as.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
This, all this and morel will be explored. All right,
let's go ahead and listen to a little trailer on here.

Speaker 4 (14:25):
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

(14:46):
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 a 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

(15:11):
a vanished civilization. You travel deep down into the heart
of the Forbidden Planet to discover the incredible marvels of
this last genious race. These magnificent scenes in striking Eastman
color stagger the imagination. Yet the wonders of the planet
all tear four conceal a strange and evil force unknown irresistible.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
All right. Well, you may be wondering 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

(16:17):
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

(16:40):
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 nay and a late

(17:00):
night show for grown ups. If you were in the
Atlanta area on that date.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
All right, should we get into the connections.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
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 Vedoor, 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.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
Is he the voice of the kid yelling Lassie?

Speaker 1 (17:39):
I mean, he's the kid that presumably yells Lassie, 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.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Okay? Did it also still have Roddy McDowell.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
No, No, Roddy McDowell, this okay, Elizabeth Taylor only okay?

Speaker 3 (18:00):
And then Roddy McDowell. He went from Lassie to Laser Blast.
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah. Another film he director was 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.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Fact to check, Dean Stockwell was never twelve years old.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
It's amazing. He also did nineteen fifty two Shadow in
the Sky with Nancy Reagan. Forbidden 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 Willcox was

(18:44):
going to direct that as well, but Nefact 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. Wow. But I believe this is
one of those examples where the director, you know, didn't
come out of science fiction, and his life and career

(19:04):
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

(19:24):
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,

(19:46):
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 The United States Steel Hour.

Speaker 3 (20:01):
What the United States Steel Out?

Speaker 1 (20:03):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (20:03):
It was just named after a sponsor.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Oh, it's like the Colgate Comedy Hour.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
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 Planet, 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

(20:39):
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 visual effects guy who

(21:01):
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 boys, here's a title for you,
The Saga of the Viking Women and their voyage to
the waters of the Great Sea Serpent.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
I've seen that one.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, yeah, does that title cover everything?

Speaker 3 (21:25):
No?

Speaker 1 (21:26):
No, there's more, Okay, a longer title is possible. He
also has story credits on Roger Corman's War of the
Satellites in fifty eight.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Those are both Roger Corman movies.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Oh so the saga the Viking Women and their Voyage
to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent also Corman.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
Also Corman, I think in the same year.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah, Yeah, that's right, they're both fifty eight.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
And then he also has story credits on The thirty
foot Bride of Candy Rock and Atomic Submarine, both in
fifty nine.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
I haven't seen it, but I've just I have a
premonition that the movie Atomic Submarine is super boring.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
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,

(22:28):
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's The Neptune Factor. Oh, and then
this was interesting. This is apparently 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

(22:49):
life and her husband is old now and played by
Walter Pigeon.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
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

(23:13):
mostly forthright, but also maybe seems to be hiding something.
You don't know how much you can trust him.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, Like 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.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so I don't know, I could
see him. I could see him in another life of
playing of having played a Bond villain or something like.
Maybeybe nothing against Michael Lonsdale. He's great, but like he
could have been in Moonriker.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
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

(23:59):
my kid also watch the film with me, and they
were like, oh, yeah, yeah, I knew he was hiding something, But.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
Did he know he was hiding something? I guess he
knew he was hiding something, but maybe not the thing
you're thinking of.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
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 gerrilla movies, so
more power to him.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Was he in any of the Machist Goes to Hell movies?

Speaker 1 (24:33):
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 Morbius, so again seemingly
doomed to never know love or earth, at least until

(24:53):
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

(25:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
I also like Anne Francis in this role quite a
lot because she she does bring a kind of edge
to it in a way that you don't expect when
you first meet the character. 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

(25:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, kind of a subset of like she's not a
full blown doll person where she's just like a child
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.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah, she has no street smarts or savvy, so like
has no 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.

(26:29):
There's it's not very good.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
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 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,

(26:52):
I think she's she's good in the role. And of
course she's a real beauty, no denying that, but I
was surprised at how 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

(27:14):
time to make it seem like someone was bathing naked.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
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 then
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

(27:39):
expecting to have the kind of definition that people have
on screens today.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
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 most invisible at one point. All Right, it's time

(28:03):
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

(28:23):
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 gave 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

(28:45):
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 dead pan, funny
characters or increasingly goofy characters. But they all stem from

(29:05):
this initial Airplane Naked Gun phase where and these were
both the work of David and Jerry Zucker.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
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 just he's one of those guys who

(29:35):
the more serious and deadpan and stern he tries to act,
the funnier it gets.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
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 roland Forbidden Plannet

(30:07):
is probably like the most famous example, you know, along
side some other films and a great deal of TV work.

Speaker 3 (30:12):
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

(30:34):
plot and then eventually to kiss the girl.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
But not in an interesting way.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
Not an interesting way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, it doesn't like get into that as themes like
say the Incredible Shrinking Man or something. Instead, it's just
sort of unexamined. There are interesting characters in the movie,
like Morbius and Alta are interesting, but yeah, uh.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yes, but Adams is almos. It almost feels like he's
made boring on purpose.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
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
he appears as a villain in one of my favorite
Night Gallery episodes nineteen sixty nine, is a question of fear.

(31:48):
I believe he's like a former mercenary, just a real
ruthless character. And I think he ultimately did that really well,
playing in as he you know, aged out of being
any kind of a leading and 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

(32:10):
played by Ted Danson.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
And then gets some supernatural vengeance.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
Oh yeah, there's some zombie action of course.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
Or vengeance visited upon him, not gets the vengeance.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
I'm gonna have to see some more of the Leslie
Nielsen villain stuff. I'm interested in that.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
Yeah, at some point the rectangle was just cut loose.
You got some curves, got some corners. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
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.

(33:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
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

(33:59):
the 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.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
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 Nilsen's character as
sort of being a proto Kirk, and you can kind
of look at Ostro as being a proto Spock. Kind of.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah, you would think Bones because the doctor Bones settlement,
but no, Yeah, he's a little bit more Spocky. He's
somewhere between Bones and Spock.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
He does the sort of thing that I guess you
could see Bones or Spock doing what this character ultimately does,
but especially Spock.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah, and then the third guy in the main three
landing Party is just like Kirk two.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yes, yeah, I'll get to him. 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 in Forbidden Planet.

(35:25):
His other film credits include nineteen fifty four is Gorilla
at Large Again you got to have a Gorilla movie
in there somewhere, and the Barefoot Contests I believe in
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 Cop.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
Wow Man Cyborg twenty eighty seven. That sounds like the
name of a movie from the eighties, not a movie
from the sixties.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
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

(36:13):
cast member on TV's The Six Million Dollar Man. But
now it's time to talk about Cook.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
COOKOK, what a character. I think at some point the
other day I just texted you the word cook. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
Cook. I was not expecting Cook. I should also add
I had not seen for Bid Blennett 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 character, a pure comic relief character

(36:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah, he's like he sees Robby the rovine. He's like, well,
what is it as a man? Is it a woman?

Speaker 3 (37:19):
What?

Speaker 1 (37:21):
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. A real Mike Nelson looking guy.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
I have to say, yeah, yeah, I could see Cook
was almost like a character Mike Nelson would have played
in one of the early show skits.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yes, exactly. I could have easily imagined Mike Nelson, you know,
walking out on the set of the Sidle Out of Love,
like stirring the pot here. Now. Holloman's pretty interesting tho,
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 in The rain Maker. His role in that earned

(37:59):
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

(38:19):
sit down and watch Sharky's Machine.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
I guess, yeah, I've never seen it either.

Speaker 4 (38:22):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
I mean, I don't even know that it actually has
a machine. I was I had that question pop into
my head and I was looking at the Wikipedia 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 all.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
Oh okay, maybe machine is like a like a system
of people doing something like a like a crime. Crime
syndicate is a machine in some way.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
And speaking of machines, this film also famously stars Robbie
the Robot playing Robbie the Robot.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
They give him billing, he.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Has bill in 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

(39:19):
born in nineteen fifty five. He was born in the
MGM Props Department, with credit generally going to a. Arnold Gailepsi,
Doug Hubbard, and Robert Kinoshita. 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

(39:44):
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

(40:05):
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 and
it made him icon of the genre. You know, this
is you think about robots from the nineteen fifties and sixties,

(40:26):
you're probably going to think about Robbie the Robot.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Oh Man, the clunkiness 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'd 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

(40:52):
plastic dome of his head and the chemical analyzer, the
male slot mouth thing in his chest, the spinning navigation,
and timmy. 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

(41:16):
as like the parts are moving inside before he starts talking.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great design. I love his shape.
He has a great silhouette, instantly recognizable. I love his
little centaur vehicle that he climbs into to roam about
on the planet's surface.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
Oh the buggy, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, so yeah, Robbie the Robot. He followed this up
with the spinoff The Invisible Boy, in which a boy
named Kimmy 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 spinoff sequel. I don't think it really necessarily supposed
to think it is a legitimate follow up to Forbid

(41:59):
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,
More Can Mindy, the Love Boat, and then you know

(42:22):
of later appearances and things like Earth Girls Are Easy
and sometimes a IMDb he's credited as toy. Like I'm guessing,
like maybe he just shows up as a Robbie the
Robot toy, which isn't quite the same thing.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
Yeah, some of his cameos are just he's a prop
in the background.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
Yeah, but I think I like the Twilight Zone, he
shows up as like it is a plot element and
to some extent like he has a Robot.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
So I mentioned earlier that the special effects throughout the
film just looked 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.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
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 energy sources

(43:33):
and the like. And when this occurs, we are seeing
special effects that I believe are largely the work of
one Joshua Mador 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

(43:53):
who had worked on numerous Walt Disney animated features such
as thirty seven Snow White nineteen forties, Fan Tasa nineteen
fifty 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

(44:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
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

(44:52):
I don't know, almost kind of pyramid shaped.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah, so it's it's really cool and I think these
effects hold up really well. Mayde 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.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Yeah, 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

(45:55):
think there were also some technicalities regarding like 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 we're also
not eligible for OSCAR nomination. But yes, the score is terrific.

(46:17):
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 theorem and in
film in a twenty eighteen article for the Script Lab
by Claire Nina Narelli pointing out that the Theoreman was

(46:41):
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

(47:05):
of the time period, 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, began to pop up in Hollywood
films during the mid nineteen forties, generally at first to

(47:28):
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

(47:53):
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

(48:15):
him 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.

(48:38):
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 create they

(49:00):
did 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.

Speaker 3 (49:12):
Yeah. I think a lot of music creators today might
know that effect. If you've got like a pedal board
that you runar 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.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Oh wow wow. So yeah, at this point, yeah, they
were very avant garde. They had been contributing electronic sounds
to various generally got short art films, like the work
of Ian Hugo. I believe he did some adaptations of
anis nin short stories, that sort of thing, So nothing
that was at all mainstream Hollywood. And then here they

(49:46):
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

(50:06):
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 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

(50:29):
there is exclusively sci fi.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
I think it's the kind of thing that to 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

(50:54):
in time it was.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
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 Yeah, yeah,
very melodic but very electronic at the same time, and

(51:17):
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 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 let's get some stock music in

(51:38):
here so that the humans can connect with the plot.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
Let's get into the plot.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
But you're still here, so I guess it's okay.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
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,

(52:27):
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

(52:49):
base on a special mission to the planetary system of
the great main sequence star Altear 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.

(53:09):
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

(53:31):
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.

(53:52):
One of these will be a spoiler, so again spoiler
warning number one. Of course, in this story, the humans
are colonizing an ex soa planet 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

(54:15):
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 bit. 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

(54:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
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 Inner is
in many ways a disc based ship as well. It
is a flying saucer, but with other elements added to it,

(55:07):
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 part of that seems to come
from Forbidden Planet.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Yeah, it's kind of like a it's like a flying
saucer with a stem and legs.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
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 all Tear four to investigate what happened to
a ship named the Beleerophon, which ventured out to the
planet twenty years prior. In command of this mission is

(55:45):
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 reached which
is the vicinity of Altar four, they receive a radio
message from a man. It's a human voice he comes

(56:06):
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

(56:27):
your geologists and exobiologists 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

(56:51):
love the design of the surface of Altaar 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 plane. But different parts of

(57:12):
the planet have more vegetation, have strange looking trees and
brush and things like that.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
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

(57:42):
future might look like in space. But man, it Forbidden
Planet just looks amazing.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
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
missing Earth. And so the crew they get out and
they are greeted by a robot whom they first see

(58:07):
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. He really looks like he would

(58:28):
be weighing down the front of this thing and making
it do I don't know whatever. The opposite of popping
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

(58:49):
like the design of Robbie the robot, but he 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,

(59:10):
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

(59:32):
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?

Speaker 1 (59:44):
I mean, it's very much a Captain Nemo sort of vibe,
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 on a world where everyone else is absolutely dead.
Something here is us. But that being said, Morbius comes

(01:00:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
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 as a technology.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
So they get to know each other here over a
over a pleasant lunch, and we learn about Robbie. We
learned that Robbie is immensely strong, uh, 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

(01:01:12):
just ate was somehow extruded out of Robbie's holes.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
I guess so. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
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 robopsychology 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,

(01:01:40):
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

(01:02:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
Yeah, and they're very forgiving of doctor Morbius's terrifying demonstration
of power.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
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

(01:02:39):
army of fellow creatures, all grimly determined to be of service.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Yeah. But Adams is like, we've got to do it
by the book, you know, We've got to stick around,
and then we have to follow up.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
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

(01:03:12):
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 when a certain group of the only survivors who
were left, say for Morbius, tried to flee the planet

(01:03:35):
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.

(01:03:56):
Altara's mother was another scientist of the original Billerophon Crewe.
She and Morbius fell in love and married on the
way to the planet, but unfortunately, Altera'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

(01:04:19):
to harm Morbius or his daughter.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Which is also deeply suspicious. And when we meet Altaria again,
I hadn't seen the film before, so it's like, is
she she a space vampire? She is she a robot?
Is she an evil destructive force? I was trusting neither
of these two. Really.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
Yeah, we don't know what to make of her at first,
and especially because it seems Morbius was hoping to keep
Altara'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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:53):
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 it may be you go. There
are at least a couple of scenes where she is
told to go to bed by yeah, the male characters.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
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 it's deer and a tiger and stuff

(01:05:27):
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 Altera home to Earth, but
Morbius has no desire to go. And after this there's

(01:05:50):
some kind of technical work that has to be done
and 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.

Speaker 1 (01:06:03):
Yeah, yeah, there's something in stalls them. So there's a
little time to meander about and get into trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Yeah, time for kissing lessons. So here's where we get
to that portion of the story. Essentially, Altara 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

(01:06:28):
was kind of confusing at first. But sometimes Morbies is
calling her Alta, and there is a scene where Jerry Farman,
the lieutenant sort of Adams's 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

(01:06:49):
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,

(01:07:10):
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

(01:07:34):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
Well, Cook is in a supporting role.

Speaker 4 (01:07:44):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:44):
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 Altara, after this, goes home and
co miss Robbie to make her a new dress that
will cover her whole body. Of course, we will see

(01:08:05):
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,

(01:08:27):
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,

(01:08:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
Yeah, yeah, so already we're getting little invisible attacks that
are sabotaging the ship, keeping it from leaving.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
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

(01:09:40):
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, and
not a threat at all, appears on a sort of
ledge above them and then leaps at them, claws out

(01:10:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:10:28):
Now from here we 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. Astro was like along
for the whole time, so just hanging out for the
kissing and the tiger killing. But Morbius comes to tell
Adams and Astro about the secrets of the planet, the

(01:10:52):
main secret being that All Tai 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

(01:11:16):
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 insanity, and crime and
all injustice, they turned still with high benevolence outward towards space.

(01:11:37):
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

(01:11:57):
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 all Ta four, and nothing,
absolutely nothing remains above ground.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
Yeah, so we're getting into some pretty ambitious science fiction here.
Reminds me a bit of the various Sublime civilizations and
Ian m Banks culture series civilizations that 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

(01:12:42):
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 level of existence,
but also just eradicated them entirely, and all we have
left are the technological depths of the planet.

Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
Some are like paintings are just amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:13:18):
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 little suspension bridge, and we see these things moving
up and down the chasm and electricity arcing through it. Also,

(01:13:41):
there is a device they come across. They go to
this essentially Krell schoolhouse, where there is a device that
the Crell 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

(01:14:04):
how Morby has 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

(01:14:25):
him to decipher the Krell histories and figure out parts
of Krell technology and to for example, a symbol Robbie
the robot.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
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 hit a circle with
a hammer or mallet as hard as you can and
then it causes this little float be ley to go,
you know, to rise up and with your brain, but

(01:14:55):
with your brain. Yeah, so it's it's the smart man game.

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
Yeah, And I like Striker. They put Leslie Nielsen on
it and he can barely get the thing to go off,
and they're like, well that's you know, it doesn't take
brains to command a starship.

Speaker 1 (01:15:09):
Yeah. Massive dig on Adams here.

Speaker 3 (01:15:11):
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

(01:15:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
Yeah again, because the Krell were 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.

Speaker 3 (01:15:56):
Should we do something on the B plot here about
cook and the synth synthesis of whiskey?

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is this is so 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

(01:16:23):
not for cooking.

Speaker 3 (01:16:24):
He's like, I need to go out and look for
some wild radishes. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
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 twig.
How could you do that? And Robbie's like, I will

(01:16:51):
now synthesize this for you. Will let you say, like,
will sixty gallons be sufficient?

Speaker 3 (01:16:56):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:16:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:16:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
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
now Cook will survive a little bit longer.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
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?

(01:17:52):
They describe it in a quite grizzly way. I think
they say he smeared all over the walls of the
communication room. And 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.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
Yes, beca, isn't it? This is pretty good though, I mean,
the 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? You know it's inside the perimeter.
You know I'm reading it's reading right, and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):
Yeah, it's very similar what happens here. In fact, I
almost feel like that that scene in Aliens. It feels
like a callback to this.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
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 a laser rifle. And when the thing,
when the invisible creature gets illuminated by all of the
energy weapons that are hitting it, we suddenly see pieces

(01:19:09):
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

(01:19:31):
ram lion bulldog monster with sort of horns or something,
and it's made out of flames.

Speaker 1 (01:19:39):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:19:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:53):
Yeah. Oh, and Jerry Farman, the lieutenant who is trying
to do the kissing lessons, he gets killed in one
of these attacks.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
Yeah. Eventually Cook does too, right, Cook's taken out by
the monster.

Speaker 3 (01:20:04):
Oh is he? I didn't remember that? How could they
do that to Cook?

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
Thank god he's secured all that whiskey first.

Speaker 3 (01:20:14):
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

(01:20:37):
home and then at the other end of the planet,
not 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.

(01:20:57):
He's like, you know, this monster is attacking. You've got
to go now, and for your own safety you should
come with me.

Speaker 1 (01:21:03):
Plus we're in love. Now this is meant to be
you've got to run away with me.

Speaker 3 (01:21:08):
Yeah, And to be clear, it seems reciprocal, like she's
very into him.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Yeah, and that's 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.

Speaker 3 (01:21:35):
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

(01:21:56):
he can't hurt them, could they couldn't they just force
their way past him?

Speaker 1 (01:22:00):
Yeah, though he is he's bulky.

Speaker 3 (01:22:02):
Yeah, that's true anyway. So, uh So, now we have
Adams and Ostro 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

(01:22:22):
the brain enhancer machine, which you know they have learned
will probably kill you, but if you can survive it,
it'll make you super smart, 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 Astro and it's like, uh, oh,
he tried to he tried to get smart. Bad move.

Speaker 1 (01:22:44):
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. They're like, oh, by the way,
he did it. He plugged in and now he's done.
But we do get some final last words.

Speaker 3 (01:23:02):
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

(01:23:25):
the purpose of essentially doing a way with all need
for mechanical labor and mechanical devices and instead would allow
any of the Krell to make a physical reality manifest
simply by thinking about it. So you can interface with

(01:23:46):
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 in it free energy
and labor. You know, you can all want all kind
of problems. Material problems are done away with, right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:07):
Yeah, if the rational mind can imagine it, then it
is real and it is in action.

Speaker 3 (01:24:12):
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 desires of the ID
are hooked up to this machine, and so it began

(01:24:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:24:53):
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 genre elements, it's really spectacular.

Speaker 3 (01:25:11):
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 Fear 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

(01:25:34):
everybody's anxieties and fears are like becoming physical objects that
are attacking them. And so in fact, what the characters
discover here and 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

(01:25:55):
and complexes of doctor Morbius, who has linked his brain
to the machine by by using it uh 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.

(01:26:15):
He doesn't want Altera to go back to Earth. He
doesn't want the corrupting influence of Earth to 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 Alta's
first encounter with the broader human kind involved like, you know,

(01:26:37):
some dudes being creeps to her. Yeah, so you can
see where his desires to kind of like just create
a bubble and live in it with his family and
live in that protective bubble without any without any intrusion
where that desire comes from. But it is manifesting as
the creation of a violent monster that lashes out to

(01:26:57):
kill anything that threatens to puncture the bubble.

Speaker 1 (01:27:00):
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 are really
highly effective.

Speaker 3 (01:27:17):
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, no,
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

(01:27:40):
still just can't make your subconscious mind give in. The
subconscious is resistant to rational control.

Speaker 1 (01:27:47):
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 you know, states to 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 but yeah,

(01:28:11):
not not necessarily at all.

Speaker 3 (01:28:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
Yeah, that's that's excellent. And it just leads them to
they have to like start retreating through these various levels
of protection, so the 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 into the Krell sub
surface chambers, and they have all those really cool doors

(01:28:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:29:07):
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

(01:29:28):
all the way 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,

(01:29:50):
that sort of like makes it demateialized for the moment.

Speaker 1 (01:29:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:30:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:30:27):
Too, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Robbie gets to come along for
the ride.

Speaker 3 (01:30:31):
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. Can't be good. But Robbie,
I feel like Robbie's he's good tech. You can bring
him with this.

Speaker 1 (01:30:49):
Yeah, his programming is sound, 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.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
And the ending line I remember is a little Hokia.
He has basically a he tampered in God's domain statement,
I think. But also there's a good observation where they're like,
you know, what the Crell 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

(01:31:32):
facing the same problem.

Speaker 1 (01:31:34):
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 you know, governmental level.

Speaker 3 (01:31:54):
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

(01:32:14):
we've seen happen again 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

(01:32:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:32:47):
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 the 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,

(01:33:09):
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? Or are there other movies that you would
compare favorably to Forbidden Planet from the nineteen fifties? Yeah,

(01:33:32):
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

(01:33:53):
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.

(01:34:13):
If you have an idea for what we should cover
for our two hundredth episode of Weird House Cinema, write
in with suggestions.

Speaker 3 (01:34:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:34:44):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Forbidden Planet