Weirdhouse Cinema: Forbidden Planet

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the groundbreaking 1956 science fiction film "Forbidden Planet," starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen and Robby the Robot. The film also features the first full-length electronic musical score, by Bebe and Louis Barron.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
today we are going to be talking about the nineteen
fifty six American science fiction adventure Forbidden Planet, starring Walter
Pigeon and Francis and Leslie Nielsen. Yes, that Leslie Nielsen.
You know, before he went full irony mode with movies
like Airplane and The Naked Gun, he was a stern,

(00:35):
square jawed ham from outer space. And this movie makes
the best and the worst use of him.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yes, this movie is full of male actors, just like that.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
I had such a good time rewatching Forbidden Planet. This
wasn't the first time I'd seen it, but the first
time in a while. And it's one of those classic
films that both holds up so well and doesn't and
and both ways are good. Like it is at once gorgeous,
thoughtful and clever and also dated, corny and numb skullish,

(01:08):
and like both aspects make for a very good time.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
I will say that, at least in my viewing of
the film, it never felt completely offensive, and it never was,
but it was never boring. I guess it is a
film that has a well earned place in sci fi
cinema legend, and if it's easy to go into Forbidden
Planet expecting it to like wholly and completely live up

(01:34):
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

(01:55):
needs to deliver on all of these things, and you know,
ultimately it does and does so in a way that
is not completely shameful decades later. So I think I
have to tip my hat to it in that regard.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
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 2 (02:26):
Yeah, there's a huge element of mad men in space,
with a bunch of Don Draper esque male characters essentially
hitting on relentlessly, hitting on the one female in their vicinity.
Only instead of a like a secretary and in like
a New York office space, it is the daughter of
a brilliant scientist on a distant world.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
The one true extraterrestrial we get to meet in the movie.
Though she is a human, but she's from another planet.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Now, Joe, you fished up one of the posters for
Forbidden Planet, and oh it's so beautiful. It of course
features a non human entity carrying an unconscious, beautiful woman.
I can't recall. Does Robbie the Robot ever carry Ann
Francis in this picture?

Speaker 3 (03:11):
I don't remember if he does. He does carry the
doctor Doc Austro, remember that.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I wonder that that should have been on the poster.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Close enough, Yeah, it should have been like a uniformed
guy who just got his brains apped by an alien computer.
But no, he's carrying a blonde lady here. And she
doesn't look that much like Anne Francis, Like her hair's
really long, But you know, it's close enough. This was
the format at the time they tore Johnson to Robbie
the Robot.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
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

(04:00):
several times that Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
Ah, because planet runs with Janet. Yeah, yeah, it's perfect.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
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 (04:26):
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.

(04:46):
Like even if the movie had no dialogue or story
at all, I think it would be a wonderful experience
just to sit and absorb the sets and the painted backdrops,
the special effects, the costumes and the props. I'm thinking
about so many things that are just you know, caramel
chocolate to the eyes, like you know, the green sky
and the mountains that we see on Altair four, the

(05:09):
mid century future chic decor of the Morbius House with
that pink mod furniture and all the loosight beams and everything,
the forced perspective shots of the Krell technology where you've
got these bridges going over the bottomless pits of the
power generators and whatever those big white globes are that
are like riding belts up and down the walls into

(05:30):
the darkness. You've got that great alien garden around the
Morbius swimming pool. You've got the design of Robbie the robot,
which is just I don't know, we should come back
to that, because that alone is unbelievable, those great diamond
shaped archways. And I love, of course, when we finally
see the hand animated blood red outline of the beast

(05:52):
in the movie, the id beast that hunts the astronauts,
and also not just the visual but the sonic textures
as well. As you were just alluding to, it might
not be earworms. But the sounds of the movie are
so interesting. It's just a corn ucopia of fascinating ambient sound.
And so I was thinking that while we are today

(06:14):
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

(06:35):
full of pleasing visual and sonic textures. They are low
budget affairs without much exciting to show you other than
maybe like a monster costume. Even a lot of the
better ones are usually good because of the premise or
they're about ideas in some interesting way, and they consist
primarily of dudes standing around talking in a sparsely decorated set.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, I agree. I was just looking back at the
films we've covered from the nineteen fifties, and some of
them are, you know, definitely lower budget affairs. But yeah,
they're generally and that's part of it. You know, they're
making do with less, they're leaning more into the ideas,
and we're not getting into that rub defer territory that

(07:20):
we get with Forbidden Planet, which again is just like
it's not like you can even single out well one
or two visual elements or sonic elements as well, Like
they're just so many. It's like it's just a feast
for the eyes.

Speaker 3 (07:32):
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,

(07:55):
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,

(08:17):
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

(08:39):
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

(08:59):
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 2 (09:11):
Yeah, and I think This Island Earth is indeed probably
Forbidden Planet's closest peer. You know, it doesn't have a robot,
but it has a wonderful monster. It has, you know,
a lot of color and bizazz to it. But the
thing about about this Island Earth much smaller budget. Forbidden
Planet costs more than twice as much.

Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah. So there are some other examples of great looking
color sci fi films from the fifties, but not many,
and it just was not the norm for sci fi
movies at the time. Frankly, a lot of these movies
from the fifties, even the relatively good ones, are not
any more visually exciting than It Conquered the World. You know,
what makes them good might be good writing or good acting.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, or maybe how well they shoot the monster costume
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
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 2 (10:12):
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

(10:32):
you didn't have Forbidden Planet getting there early and setting
the trend.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
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

(10:57):
pointed out the plot of Forbidden Planet, and it seems
like a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. And
I think that was kind of interesting because I know
I've heard it said before that compared to most of
the plays of Shakespeare, The Tempest is rarely put on
film in anything like its original form. It's just not

(11:19):
a play that gets a straight adaptation to film very much.
Adaptations of The Tempest in cinema are almost always very loose.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, And you know, I took a few different Shakespeare
classes in college, and we never directly covered The Tempest,
as I recall, so maybe in part because we didn't
have as many adaptations to watch on video to discuss it.
But yeah, this is frequently cited as an adaptation of
the Tempest. We have the we have a prospero character,

(11:52):
our Miranda, and I guess we have our Caliban of
sorts as well, our monstrous creature, not to be confused
with the Caliban in class for the Titans. Was he
called Caliban and that I can't recall, but he the
character in that is very much based on this element
of the Tempest as well.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah. I think people have said have pointed out that
Robbie the robot is kind of aerial from the Tempest. Ah, yeah, yeah,
and that Adams is the Leslie Nielsen character is sort
of I forget the name, a bit like one of
the Italian nobles that gets a lured to the island.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
And who's cook Cook?

Speaker 3 (12:27):
Have a don't know, don't know about cook?

Speaker 2 (12:30):
All right, we'll get back to cook. So yeah, we
have a groundbreaking sonic and visual science fiction film here,
shot in color with a health very healthy by budget,
and it has Shakespearean elements in it's plotting. All right, Joe,
do you have an elevator pitch for this film?

Speaker 3 (12:47):
I couldn't get it down to one sentence, but here's
the setup. By the twenty third century, humankind has colonized
the galaxy with the help of faster than light travel,
but one mission, a mission to an exo plan in
it called Altaar four by the explorationship Bellerophon, has gone
silent after it arrived. Twenty years later, a United Planet's

(13:10):
starship under Commander JJ Adams is sent to the Altair
system to investigate the fate of the lost ship and
its crew. Once there, Adams and his men find that
the only survivor of the Bellerophon is a language scholar
named doctor Morbius, as well as his twenty year old
daughter Altara, who was born on the planet. What happened

(13:32):
to the rest of the crew? How have Morbius and
Altara survived all this time? And where can a guy
find bourbon and kissing lessons on a planet such as this?

Speaker 2 (13:42):
All this and more will be explored. All right, Let's
go ahead and listen to a little trailer on you you.

Speaker 4 (13:55):
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

(14:16):
of this fabulous world. Anne Francis is his alluring daughter, Alta,
who has never seen a young man till she meets
Commander Adams played by talented Leslie Nielson. You will meet
a charming character in the robot, able to produce on
order ten tons of lead or a slinky evening gown,
always at your service. You explore all the wonders of

(14:42):
a vanished civilization. You travel deep down into the heart
of the Forbidden Planet to discover the incredible marvels of
this lost, genious race. These magnificent scenes in striking Eastman
color stagger the imagination. Yet the wonders of planet al
tear four and see you a strange and evil force, unknown, irresistible.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
All right, well, you may be wondering, Well, where can
I watch Forbidden Planet? Well, this was a major release.
It has been released on all formats over the years.
It is definitely available on Blu ray I belief from
Warner Home Video or something, And I'm not I didn't
check for this, but it's possible, I guess. Given in
this an MGM film, maybe MGM plus has its streaming,

(15:48):
you might check around for that. I, however, watched this
film on the big screen. I saw it over the
weekend at Atlanta's Historic Plaza Theater, presented as part of
the Silver Screen Spook Show series, and I have to
say looks terrific watching it in those old squeaky chairs there.
You know, the colors are fantastic. The sound is just

(16:10):
resonating around you and sometimes feeling like it's moving from
ear to ear. So I highly recommend seeing films like
this in the theater if you do get a chance
to see them. Silver Screens Spook Show. By the way,
we'll be doing mathra versus Godzilla on May seventeenth, two
shows as usual, a family friendly mattinee and a late

(16:31):
night show for grown ups if you're in the Atlanta
area on that date.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
All right, Should we get into the connections.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah. Starting at the top with the director. It's Fred M. Wilcox,
who lived nineteen oh seven through nineteen sixty four, American
director who started out at MGM as an assistant to
King Vidor, eventually working his way up through the MGM
Shorts department to direct the nineteen forty three feature Lassie
Come Home. Which starred a fourteen year old Roddy McDowell.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Is he the voice of the kid yelling Lassie?

Speaker 2 (17:09):
I mean, he's the kid that presumably yells Lastie. So
I guess so okay?

Speaker 3 (17:14):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
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 (17:23):
Okay, did it also still have Roddy McDowell. No, No,
Roddy McDowell.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Okay, Elizabeth Taylor only ic okay, and then Roddy McDowell.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
He went from Lassie to laser Blast. That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah. Another filming director of nineteen forty nine is The
Secret Garden, which had a twelve year old Dean Stockwall
in it. Huh yeah, yeah. You can look up screenshots
from the Secret Garden and there's a little kid Dean Stockwell.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
Fact to check, Dean Stockwell was never twelve years old.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
It's amazing. He also did nineteen fifty two Shadow in
the Sky with Nancy Reagan. Planet was produced by Willcox's
nephew in law, producer Nicholas Nefek, and he was apparently
going to produce another big budget sci fi film with
a title something like Robot Planet, and Wilcock was going

(18:14):
to direct that as well, but Neffact died in nineteen
fifty eight. Wilcock directed one more film himself, and then
he also died in nineteen sixty four at the age
of fifty six. But I believe this is one of
those examples where the director didn't come out of science fiction,
and his life and career wasn't long enough afterwards to

(18:36):
return to any science fiction, So you know, it kind
of stands out as a one off. But boy, what
a one off. This is easily the film he's best
remembered for, all right. The screenplay is by Cyril Hume,
who lived nineteen hundred through nineteen sixty six, American writer
whose first novel, The Wife of the Centaur, was a
big hit in nineteen twenty three and adapted into a

(18:56):
King vidor Silent film in nineteen twenty four. He wrote
a few more novels, but mostly transitioned into screenwriting, working
on several Tarzan movies in the nineteen thirties, a nineteen
forty nine adaptation of The Great Gatsby and then also
a nineteen fifty six film titled Ransom exclamation Point, which
was remade in nineteen ninety six, the Mel Gibson picture

(19:19):
that some of you might remember. But it's worth noting
that the nineteen fifty six Ransom was itself an adaptation
of a nineteen fifty four episode that aired on the
anthology series of The United States Steel Hour.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
What the United States Steel Out? Oh? It was just
named after a sponsor. Yeah, yeah, Like what should we
call it?

Speaker 2 (19:38):
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 (19:46):
Oh, it's like the Colgate Comedy Hour.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess somewhere to deal. Hume also
did some westerns. His only other sci fi screenplay was
nineteen fifty seven's The Invisible Boy, a sort of sequel
spin off to Forbidden Play, which we'll come back to.
Forbidden Planet is Hume's most famous work, again highly influential,
and is itself, at least a very loose adaptation of

(20:09):
Shakespeare's The Tempest. Now there are a couple of story
credits Irving Block and Alan Adler. Alan Adler lived nineteen
sixteen through nineteen sixty four. Also worked on a film
in fifty nine called The Giant Behemoth, and then Block
lived nineteen ten through nineteen eighty six. He was a
I think mostly a special effects and visual effects guy

(20:31):
who worked exclusively in genre pictures, often B movies, mostly
science fiction, and he sometimes contributed story ideas, this being
the first case of that. Other story credits include fifty
seven's Kronos, as well as Oh Boy, There's here's a
title for you, The Saga of the Viking Women and
their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
I've seen that one.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Yeah. Yeah, Does that title cover everything?

Speaker 3 (20:56):
No?

Speaker 2 (20:56):
No, there's more, Okay, a longer title as possible. He
also has story credits on Roger Corman's War of the
Satellites in fifty eight.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
Those are both Roger Corman movies.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Oh so the Saga the Viking Women and their Voyage
to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent also.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Corman also Corman I think in the same year.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, they're both fifty eight.

Speaker 3 (21:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
And then he also has story credits on The thirty
foot Bride of Candy Rock and Atomic Submarine, both in
fifty nine.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
I haven't seen it, but I've just I have a
premonition that the movie Atomic Submarine is super boring.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
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,

(21:58):
he'd go on to appear in a handful of other
sci fi flicks, sixty one's Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea, seventy three is the Neptune Factor. Oh, and
then this was interesting. This is apparently a like a
made for TV film movie of the Week situation nineteen
seventy fours Live Again, Die Again, which is like about
a woman who is cryogenically frozen and then is brought

(22:19):
back to life and her husband is old now and
played by Walter Pigeon.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
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

(22:44):
mostly forthright, but also maybe seems to be hiding something.
You don't know how much you can trust him.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Yeah, like he is he going to be? Is he
Captain Nemo? Like that's kind of the big question that
had to be on a lot of people's minds.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so I don't know, I could
see him, I could see him in another life of
playing having played a Bond villain or something like maybe
maybe nothing against Michael Lonsdale. He's great, but like he
could have been in Moonreaker.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, things have played out differently.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
I also like the ambiguity regarding his character. You're never
really sure that he's a villain or what villainous elements
he might have, but you also don't completely trust him.
I guess it's easier as a modern viewer of this
film to assume that he's up to no good. That's
my kid also watched the film with me and they
were like, oh, yeah, yeah, I knew he was hiding something, But.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
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 2 (23:42):
Yeah. Yeah, he also did some horror movies. He appeared
in seventy two's The Screaming Woman, and also a couple
of gorilla movies in the twenties and thirties. I think
they're two separate gorilla movies and not the same gorilla movie.
But you know, someone had to starring gorilla movies, so
more power to him.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Was he in any of the Machist Goes to Hell movies?

Speaker 2 (24:04):
All right? Well, again, we know that Ann Francis stars
in Forbidden Planet, and indeed she does, playing Altara Morbius,
the daughter of doctor Morbius. Anne Francis lived nineteen thirty
through twenty and eleven. She's our lone female character in
the film, the daughter of doctor Morbiuss, again seemingly doomed
to never know love or Earth, at least until the

(24:24):
rest of the cast shows up to just relentlessly hit
on her again like she's a secretary and a Madman
era office. She's our Miranda character, Golden Globe winning actress
whose other films include nineteen fifty five's Bad Day at
Black Rock, and nineteen sixty eight's Funny Girl, which also
co starred Walter Pigeon. Her screen credits begin in the
late forties. I believe she appeared on Broadway as a child,

(24:47):
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 (24:54):
I also like Anne Francis in this role quite a
lot because she she does bring a kind of in
a way that you don't expect when you first meet
the character. Like, so the character, as we'll get into later,
I was describing her as sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Twins, Like she has learned all of the you know,

(25:15):
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 2 (25:25):
Yeah, kind of a subset of like she's not a
full blown doll person where she's just like a child
in in an adult's body. She knows plenty of things,
she just doesn't have like a lot of like social
real world experience because she's never been to Earth.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Yeah, she has no street smarts or savvy, so like
doesn't know what to do when somebody is like trying
to lie to her or take advantage of her. So
there's a scene where this where a creep character is
giving her kissing lessons. But she has a great kind
of turn in that scene because he's like, he's like, oh,
let's try kissing again, and she's like, I don't get it.

(25:59):
There's is not very good.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
That got a lot of laughs with the audience, the
live audience. So there's the humor in this film. You know,
it mostly holds up sometimes. I mean it holds it
holds up in places, and it's just kind of hammy
and too old fashioned in other places, but in both
regards generates laughter, so still effective. But yeah, I agree.

(26:22):
I think she's good in the role. And of course
she's a real beauty, no denying that. But I was
surprised at how skimpy the outfits get in this picture.
Oh like there is. I was confused by the bathing sequence.
At first it seems like she's bathing nude, and then
maybe she's wearing a garment, but maybe that's also a
garment that they wore in movies at the time to

(26:46):
make it seem like someone was bathing naked. I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
It does seem to be really pushing the limits of
what like an MGM picture would have allowed in the
nineteen fifties. But yeah, she's in the scene where she's swimming.
I think she is supposed to be nude, and she's
just like you know, when she gets out of the
pool in a brief shot. I think she's wearing a
garment match to her skin. And then it's supposed to
just go by real quick. But maybe they weren't expecting

(27:10):
to have the kind of definition that people have on
screens today.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
It's true, like later in the picture, there's some very
delicate wire work that allows Robbie the robot to carry
the doctor's body and or doc's body, and it's very
good wire work because you can barely see it even
in like higher definition, so I'm guessing it would have
been mostly invisible at one point. All Right, it's time

(27:33):
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

(27:54):
about his late career reinvention as a dead pan, comedic
goof all of this coming in the wake of nineteen
eighties Airplane and this era gay like that lasted the
rest of his life and career gave us the likes
of TV's Police Squad, It's Naked Gun spinoff films. I
believe there were three of those, and such spoofs as

(28:15):
mel Brooks Dracula Dead and Loving It from nineteen ninety five,
and just a host of other goofy pictures where Leslie
Nielsen continually plays these kind of either deadpan, funny characters
or increasingly goofy characters. But they all stem from this

(28:36):
initial Airplane Naked Gun phase where and these were both
the work of David and Jerry Zucker.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
It's impossible to know, but I almost feel I could
have predicted his career would or should take that turn,
if you were to transport me back to the fifties
and just show me his performance and Forbidden Planet, because
he's playing the role totally serious. But he is such
a natural ham He's just he's one of those guys

(29:05):
who the more serious and deadpan and stern. He tries
to act the funnier it gets.

Speaker 4 (29:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah, And I think the important thing to realize about
this late career reinvention as a comedic actor, especially with
those early examples, they work entirely on the basis that
Nielsen was known for these straightforward, serious roles that were
a little bit hammy and you know, maybe lacking in
a lot of nuance and his roleand Forbidden Planet is

(29:37):
probably like the most famous example, you know, along side
some other films and a great deal of TV work.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
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

(30:05):
plot and then eventually to kiss the girl.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Fifties, but not in an interesting way, not an interesting way. Yeah. Yeah,
it doesn't like get into that as themes like in
say The Incredible Shrinking Man or something. Instead, it's just
sort of unexamined. There are interesting characters in the movie,
like Morbius and Altara are interesting, but yeah, uh, Doc.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
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 (30:52):
Yes, but Adams is almos. It almost feels like he's
made boring on purpose. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
Now, And of course this is not entirely Leslie Nielsen's fault.
And I want to point out that Nielsen did have
I think a pretty strong villain era. He appears as
a villain in one of my favorite Night Gallery episodes
nineteen sixty nine. Is a question of fear. I believe
he's like a former mercenary, just a real ruthless character,

(31:24):
and I think he ultimately did that really well, playing
as he aged out of being any kind of a
leading man character. He could play these like ruthless, cold
characters really well. He plays one in Stephen King's Creep
Show from nineteen eighty two, in which he viciously murders
his wife and her lover, who's played by Ted Danson.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
And then gets some supernatural vengeance.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Oh yeah, there's some zombie action of course.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Or vengeance visited upon him gets the vengeance.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
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 (32:00):
I'm gonna have to see some more of the Leslie
Nielsen villain stuff. I'm interested in that.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah. Yeah, at some point the rectangle was just cut loose.
You got some curves, got some corners.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Yeah, all right. The next character we want to talk
about is Lieutenant doc Ostro, played by Warren Stevens, who
of nineteen nineteen through twenty twelve. This is the character
that I think is the most interesting. He's the male
character that I found myself relating to the most because
he seemed most on mission. I think he was the
only one that was not concerned with hitting on the

(32:51):
strange alien woman. He's the one who actually attempts to
solve problems that are the larger problems of the plot
and has a tragic trajectory as opposed to the heroic
trajectory of Leslie Nielsen's character.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
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

(33:30):
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 2 (33:51):
It's worth noting that this film in many ways influenced
Star Trek. We'll get to some examples of that with
from a visual standpoint in a bit. But also you
can easily look at Commander Adams Leslie Nielsen's character as
sort of being a proto Kirk, and you can kind
of look at Ostro as being a proto Spock.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Kind of. Yeah, you would think Bones because the doctor Bones. Yeah,
but no, Yeah, he's a little bit more spocky. He's
somewhere between Bones and Spock.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
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 (34:26):
Yeah. And then the third guy in the main three
landing party is just like Kirk two.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yes, yeah, I'll get to him and well, I'll go
ahead mention him and then come back to to Stevens.
But yeah. Jack Kelly plays Lieutenant Farman who live nineteen
twenty seven through nineteen ninety two, American actor whose other
credits include sixty one's A Fever in the Blood and
the TV show Maverick Warren Stevens. He also did a
fair amount of TV best Remembered for his role here

(34:54):
and Forbidden Planet. His other film credits include nineteen fifty
four is Gorilla at Large Again, You gotta have a
Gorilla movie in there somewhere, and The Barefoot Contests I
believe from the same year, opposite Humphrey Bogart and Ava
Gardner nineteen sixty six is Cyborg twenty eighty seven, and
he apparently has a cameo in nineteen ninety one Samurai Cup.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
Wow Man Cyborg twenty eighty seven. That sounds like the
name of a movie from the eighties, not a movie
from the sixties.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
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

(35:43):
cast member on TV's The Six Million Dollar Man. But
now it's time to talk about Cook Coook. What a character.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
I think at some point the other day I just
texted you the word Cook. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Cook. I was not expecting Cook. I should also add
I had not scene Forbiden Planet before before seeing it
in the theater, and I think I was kind of
expecting more like pure high minded science fiction. So the
Hammier elements kind of surprised me, and then Cook really
surprised me. A pure comic relief character who initially just

(36:21):
kind of like wanders into the scene like stirring some
biscuits or something and starts asking wise guy questions about
the plot.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
Yeah. I mean, so they're going to another star system
on this like multi year voyage to Altara four, and
some of the crew members are just guys like Cook.
Cook is just a total bumpkin who is looking for
whiskey on the other edge of the galaxy.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
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 (36:50):
What?

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Yeah, we we have a lot to say about Cook here,
played by Earl Holloman who lived in nineteen twenty eight
through twenty twenty four. Real Mike Nelson and looking guy
after say.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Yeah, yeah, I could see Cook was almost like a
character Mike Nelson would have played in one of the
early show skits.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yes, exactly. I could have easily imagined Mike Nelson, you know,
walking out on the set of The Sidle Lot of Love,
like stirring the pot here. Now, Holloman's pretty interesting because
he went on to appear in a number of big
films in the nineteen fifties. He was in A fifty
six Giant. He was also in The rain Maker and
The rain Maker. His role in that earned him a

(37:30):
Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, and he remained
active up until I believe two thousand, doing a lot
of TV, as well as popping up in nineteen eighty one.
Sharky's Machine, which keeps coming up on the show in
the Connections, I've never seen it, but it is a
neo noir set in Atlanta, directed by Burt Reynolds. So
at some point I need to actually sit down and
watch Sharky's Machine.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
I guess, yeah, I've never seen it either.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
I mean I don't even know that it actually has
a machine. I had that question pop into my head
and I was looking at the wikiped the article and
like the plot summary, It's like, well, is there a
machine or is there not a machine. I think the
machine is one of the supporting characters. I don't know.
I know Sharky is Burt Reynolds. That's oh okay.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Maybe a machine is like a like a system of
people doing something like a like a crime. Crime syndicate
is a machine in some way.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
And speaking of machines, this film also famously stars Robbie
the Robot playing Robbie the Robot.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
They give him billing.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
He has billing, and I am just ever pleased by
the fact that he has his own IMDb page. He
is treated by IMDb as an actual actor, alongside various
dogs and cats and of course living in deceased human beings.
This was his screen debut. Robbie the Robot was essentially

(38:50):
born in nineteen fifty five. He was born in the
MGM Props Department, with credit generally going to A. Arnold Gilepsi,
Doug Hubbard, and Robert kin Shida. He's voiced here by
Marvin Miller, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen eighty five,
with Frankie Darrow who lived nineteen seventeen through nineteen seventy six. Actually,
in the suit, it is a suit. It's a big,

(39:14):
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

(39:36):
he had all sorts of clunky of business going on
in his body, and it is probably a clunky, old
fashioned design by today's standards, but it's an amazing build
that you know, certainly resonated with sci fi fans. It
made him icon of the genre. Is you think about
robots from the nineteen fifties and sixties, you're probably going

(39:57):
to think about Robbie the Robot.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
Oh Man, flunkiness does not downgrade him at all in
my mind. I think Robbie is still to this day
one of the best robots ever put on film. I
love so much about his design. I love the non
humanoid moving parts, so not just the arms and legs,
but things like the cycling typewriter guts inside, the clear

(40:22):
plastic dome of his head, and the chemical analyzer, the
male slot mouth thing in his chest, the spinning navigation
an tinny. It's just one of the best robot designs ever,
and I love every moment he's on screen. I love
the I think this is what you were just alluding to,
being very loud. I love the clacking sound that starts

(40:46):
as like the parts are moving inside before he starts talking.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great design. I love his shape.
He has a great silhouette, instantly recognizable. I love his
little centaur, a vehicle that he climbs into to roam
about on the planet's surface.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
Oh the buggy, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, so yeah, Robbie the Robot. He followed this up
with the spinoff The Invisible Boy, in which a boy
named Timmy in the year nineteen fifty seven is given
a given super intelligence by a supercomputer and then he
like reassembles Robbie again. This is kind of like a
loose spin off sequel. I don't think it really necessarily
supposed to think it is a legitimate follow up to

(41:29):
Forbid the Planet, But Robbie the Robot mostly appeared in
TV cameos after this. He showed up on the Twilight Zone,
The Adams Family Lost in Space opposite the Robot the
Robot from Lost in Space is another iconic robot costume
of the time period. Showed up on Colombo, Wonder Woman,

(41:49):
Mork and Mindy the Love Boat, and then you know
of later appearances and things like Earth Girls Are Easy.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
And.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Sometimes at IMDb he's credited as toy. I'm guessing like
maybe he just shows up as a Robbie the Robot toy,
which isn't quite the same thing.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
Yeah, some of his cameos are just he's a prop
in the background.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, but I think on like The Twilight Zone, he
shows up as like it is a plot element to
some extent, like he has a robot.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
So I mentioned earlier that the special effects throughout the
film just look fantastic, Robbie of course being a major
one of them, the prop created there. But also there
are some animation effects in this movie that are I
think just unparalleled, just absolutely spectacular.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
That's right, because eventually we begin we begin to have
these attacks by some sort of a monster, but it
is an invisible monster for the most part, and we
only get glimpses of its form as it interacts with
various force fields and so forth, various like you know,
energy sources, and the like. And when this occurs, we

(43:06):
are seeing special effects that I believe are largely the
work of one Joshua Maydor, who lived nineteen eleven through
nineteen sixty five. He's credited with special effects through courtesy
of Walt Disney Productions, because indeed he was an animator
and special effects artist who had worked on numerous Walt
Disney animated features such as thirty seven Snow White nineteen forties,

(43:29):
Fantasia nine fifties, Cinderella later on, as well as such
live action productions as fifty four to twenty thousand Leagues
under the Sea, which we just mentioned. And so yeah,
his talents helped bring to life the invisible monstrosity. You know,
they have some practical effects too, like you know, a
tree getting knocked over on the set when the creature passes,

(43:50):
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 (44:01):
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

(44:22):
I don't know, almost kind of pyramid shaped.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, so it's really cool and I think these effects
hold up really well made or Outside of this, would
mostly continue to work on Disney films and TV projects
for the rest of his career, including animation effects on
Darby Ogill and The Little People in fifty nine. He
was also apparently an accomplished painter.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
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 2 (45:04):
Yeah, a husband and wife team Beebe and Lewis Baron.
Boebe lived nineteen twenty sixty two thousand and eight and
Lewis lived nineteen twenty through nineteen eighty nine, and they
are credited as composer electronic tonalities, which is perfect a
perfect way to describe the music that they create. But

(45:25):
I think there were also some technicalities regarding unions where
they weren't allowed to say that it was a film
score because they were not in the Music Film Score
Union at the time, and I think therefore were also
not eligible for OSCAR nomination. But yes, the score is terrific.

(45:47):
It is an historic score in that it is the
first fully electronic score for a motion picture. By nineteen
fifty six, movies had been utilizing electronic elements in their
sound design for quite a while. I was reading a
little bit about the use of the therem and in
film in a twenty eighteen article for The Script Lab
by Claire Nina Anarelli, pointing out that the Theoreman was

(46:11):
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

(46:35):
of the time period. In an early electronic instrument called
the let's say the one Martineau, and this was also
used in various scores and sound designs, including Bride of Frankenstein.
And the author here points out that the instruments, this
instrument that Theram in particular in particular, began to pop
up in Hollywood films during the mid nineteen forties, generally

(46:58):
to at first to emphasize instability, such as in nineteen
forty five Spellbound, so a destabilizing sonic effect, but then
it began to be associated with sci fi and spaceships
in nineteen fifty with rocket Ship XM, and then of
course in nineteen fifty one's The Day the Earth Stood Still,
which features a traditional orchestral score but with two theremins

(47:22):
so again. Up until this point, cinema had been playing
with a little electronic sound, but no one had fully
committed to a full length motion picture with exclusively electronic
music until now. And apparently, like I was reading, apparently
the way it started out, they were like, well, let's
these guys were doing some really interesting work BB and Lewis.

(47:45):
Let's bring them in to do you know, a few
minutes worth of sound. And then like the right people
liked it, and they were like, let's have them do
the whole thing. Let's let's do this exclusively, which you know,
for various reasons, this wasn't popular with everyone, and I
can imagine, yeah, there were probably some people who are like,
this doesn't sound like a film score, this doesn't sound

(48:07):
like music. I mean, I would disagree. But their work
was apparently very avant garde. They you know, they used
ring modulator circuits and then altered the results with reverb,
tape delay and other editing techniques. Apparently there was a
very high unpredictability with their work, Like if they successfully

(48:30):
created a certain soundscape, they couldn't necessarily come back and
recreate it in the same way. So it was kind
of a roll of the dice and then and then
an editing exercise to get something that they wanted.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Yeah, I think a lot of music creators today might
know that effect. If you've got like a pedal board
that you run through and you might create some sound
you really like, but then you mess with the knobs
and then you can't get it to sound the same
way again, you forget how you did it.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Oh wow wow. So yeah, at this point, yeah, they
were very avant garde. They had been contributing electronic sounds
to various generally like short art films like the work
of Ian Hugo. I believe he did some adaptations of
an highs nin short stories, that sort of thing, so
nothing that was at all mainstream Hollywood. And then here

(49:16):
they are scoring the tonalities of Forbidden Planet, and I think, yeah,
it's it's tremendous, but it is deeply weird and alien.
It is largely devoid of any melodic content. It just
the sounds like twinkle like stars against the dark void.
They drip like liquid metal and alien caves, and it

(49:37):
just delivers an overwhelming vibe of just inhuman mystery, which
works exceedingly well with various aspects of the plot and
certainly the look of the picture. Maybe less so with
the more you know, hammy aspects of it. But to
their credit, nobody went in and added like goofy sound
effects for the comedic moments, like all the sound design

(49:59):
we have here is exclusively sci fi.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
I think it's the kind of thing that too audiences
going back today feels less groundbreaking because we have experienced
a lot of what followed in its footsteps, and that
if we were to be there in nineteen fifty six.
We would probably recognize the sound of this movie as
being more we would recognize it for being how unique

(50:24):
in time it was.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Yeah, I mean, it seems I can imagine people being
surprised though, because it at least, you know, to my ears,
it hits pretty hard. It seems. It feels pretty far
removed from something like, you know, some of the work
of say Wendy Carlos, you would get a little over
a decade later, was like Switched on Bach melodic. Yeah, yeah,
very melodic, but very electronic at the same time. And

(50:48):
this is just like, yeah, this stuff is just alien.
It does not have the human touch, and I love
it for that. But it it seems like a minor
miracle that this score exists at all. It seems like
exactly the sort of score that some sort of producer
would come along and say and say, like, we can't
use this. You can use it when the spaceship's landing,
but let's get some stock music in here so that

(51:09):
the humans can connect with the plot.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
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 2 (51:19):
Let's get into the plot.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
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 2 (51:35):
But you're still here, so I guess it's okay.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
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,

(51:57):
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

(52:19):
base on a special mission to the planetary system of
the great main sequence star Altair. And so it's showing
us the spaceship as it tells us what it is
one thing I want to note here. In Forbidden Planet,
the spaceship used by the human heroes is a flying saucer,

(52:40):
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

(53:02):
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.

(53:23):
One of these will be a spoiler, so again spoiler
warning number one. Of course, in this story, the humans
are colonizing an exoplanet far beyond Earth, so we are
the aliens in the scenario. We're not in our own
cosmic neighborhood. But the other sense in which humans are
the aliens in this movie has to do with the
big twist at the end. The supposedly alien force that

(53:46):
is attacking the humans is not actually of alien origin
but of human origin. And so anyway, I was thinking
about this for a bid. It made me think it
might be interesting at some point to come back into
a deep dive on the history of this ship form,
on the idea of the flying saucer as a shape,
to kind of look at that in history as far

(54:07):
as like UFO reports go, and then also in popular culture,
but then also compare that to real you know, flying
machine designs.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Yeah, yeah, I'm all for it. One quick note on
ship design again, this film was very influential on the
the ultimate shape that Star Trek would take. And it's
often pointed out that the stars the Starship Enterprise is
in many ways a disc based ship as well. It
is a flying saucer, but with other elements added to it. Yeah,

(54:38):
you know, with engines and the lower you know, engineering
portion of the ship and all, but you know, it's
mostly flying saucer and and part of that seems to
come from Forbidden Planet.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Yeah, it's kind of like a it's like a flying
saucer with a stem and legs. Yeah. So anyway, I'm
going to try to summarize the setup of the film here. So,
the crew of the uninspiringly named C fifty seven D
are on a mission to the planet Alta four to
investigate what happened to a ship named the Bellerophon, which

(55:11):
ventured out to the planet twenty years prior. In command
of this mission is JJ Adams, A by God Rectangle.
If we ever saw one gruff, tough, no nonsense, you'd
really get the feeling that he expects a rost ready
when he gets home from space. Yes, yeah, So when
the crew reaches the vicinity of Altar four, they receive

(55:33):
a radio message from a man. It's a human voice.
He comes on the radio and identifies himself as doctor
Edward Morbius. They check that against the manifest of the
original mission, and they verified that was part of the
original crew. Morbius is supposed to be there, though curiously
they note that he was a philologist, a language expert,

(55:54):
which is not exactly what you imagine in the landing
party among your geologists and exobiology and engineers and so forth.
Morbius warns them not to land. He says doing so
would put them in grave danger, but Adams is not deterred.
It's the mission, gentlemen, We've got a land. So they
come and set down in the middle of this vast

(56:17):
desert plain surrounded by jagged mountains, and oh, I love
love the design of the surface of all Ta four.
Here there is a painted backdrop which has a green
sky and sort of different strata of clouds with multiple
moons in the background. I love the rocky mountains. But

(56:37):
also this is not a barren, rocky planet, like we're
looking at a kind of desert plain, but different parts
of the planet have more vegetation, have strange looking trees
and brush and things like that.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
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

(57:12):
future might look like in space. But man, it Forbidden
Planet just looks amazing.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
So the crew lands on the surface, and I like
here how the different members of the crew have different
reactions to it, Like they debate how pleasant it is.
One person likes it, another person is put off and
just misses Earth. And so the crew they get out
and they are greeted by a robot whom they first

(57:37):
see hot rotting a buggy through the desert like they
just see dust kicking up in the desert in the distance, like, Wow,
something's coming to meet us. And when it pulls up.
When they first got there, I couldn't remember exactly what
was happening. I was like, Oh, did they get attacked
by the monster this early? No, that's not It's just
Robbie driving a buggy that he really looks like he

(57:58):
would be weighing down the front of this thing and
making it do I don't know whatever. The opposite of
pop and a wheelie is like coming down in the front,
but somehow it stays. It stays on all four wheels,
and it arrives and sort of a cage opens in
the front and Robbie walks out, and oh boy, what
a vision he is. We've already talked about how much

(58:19):
I like the design of Robbie the robot, but the
meeting is a magical moment and the crew were kind
of at a loss for words. He's like, you know,
I am monitored to respond to the name Robbie, and
he tries to say, hey, if you don't speak English,
you know, I speak one hundred and eighty seven other
languages and there are various various sub tongues, and they're like,

(58:40):
no English is okay? And they say hi to each other,
and we get a lot of kind of yuck yuck moments.
So with the more bumpkinny members of the crew trying
to figure out what to make of Robbie. Yeah, So
Robbie takes Adams, his lieutenant Jerry Farman, and the ship's doctor,
Doc Astro to the home of Edward Morbius, the guy

(59:02):
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 2 (59:15):
I mean, it's very much a Captain Nemo sort of
vibe and and and you know, this is a highly
influential film like it, you know, there are also elements
like it reminds me of Alien Covenant a bit like, yeah, okay,
there's there's a guy here and he seems to be
doing just fine on a world where everyone else is
absolutely dead something here is us. But that being said,

(59:37):
Morbius comes off very pleasant, you know, in his his
crib is just luxurious. I love the blast curtains that
the oh, stop motion blast curtains that he demonstrates. I mean,
so he wins us over with charm, but you know,
remains suspicious.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
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 2 (01:00:12):
Yeah, yeah, which is which is created via some sort
of a stop motion approach. But it looks really good.
Like I totally buy this as a technology.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
So they get to know each other here over over
a pleasant lunch, and we learn about Robbie. We learned
that Robbie is immensely strong, and that he has the
power to synthesize any object or material that he analyzes
in his sort of male slot mouth in his chest.
I think we correct me if I'm wrong, But it
sort of suggested that the delicious food they just ate

(01:00:43):
was somehow extruded out of Robbie's holes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
I guess so. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:48):
And also we learned, I think, in borrowing from some
other science fiction, that Robbie has some of the laws
of robotics written into him, like that Isaac Asimov, Susan Calvin,
robos psychology stories, the laws of robotics. So Morbius demonstrates,
for example, that Robbie cannot harm a human by and
he demonstrates this in a great way. He's like, mister Adams,

(01:01:11):
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

(01:01:33):
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 2 (01:01:41):
Yeah, And they're very forgiving of doctor Morbius's terrifying demonstration
of power.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
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

(01:02:10):
army of fellow creatures, all grimly determined to be of service.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Yeah, but Adams is like, we've got to do it
by the book, you know, We've we've got to stick around,
and then we have to follow up.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
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

(01:02:42):
to explore the planet, something started going wrong, something started happening. Eventually,
every other member of the crew was murdered, literally torn
limb from limb by what he calls an invisible planetary force,
and in a certain group of the only survivors who
were left, say for Morbius tried to flee the planet

(01:03:05):
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.

(01:03:27):
Altara's mother was another scientist of the original Bellerophon Crewe.
She and Morbius fell in love and married on the
way to the planet, but unfortunately Altara's mother also died,
though she died of natural causes. So whatever it was
that literally ripped apart the bodies of the other members
of the crew, for some reason, it has never tried

(01:03:49):
to harm Morbius or his daughter.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
Which is also deeply suspicious. And when we meet Altaria again,
I hadn't seen the film before, so it's like she
she a space vampire. She is she a robot? Is
she an evil destructive force? I was trusting neither of
these two.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Really. Yeah, we don't know what to make of her
at first, and especially because it seems Morbius was hoping
to keep Altera's existence a secret from Adams and the crew.
It's like he was trying to hide her. And when
she becomes her existence becomes revealed, He's like, oh no, She.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
Like wanders out like it's past her bedtime, and like
guests have come over and it's like, oh, honey, go
back to bed, and there may be a go There
are at least a couple of scenes where she is
told to go to bed. Yeah the male characters.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
Yeah, yeah. So we already talked about Altara how she
is at once brilliant and naive. Like she you know,
she is schooled in all of the arts and sciences,
but she has no experience dealing with human society. She's
also kind of like snow White in that she has
animal friends like is deer and a tiger and stuff

(01:04:57):
that run out of the garden and just hang out
with her. And the tiger represents no threat. When it
first shows up, Adams is like pulling out his gun,
but they're like no, no, no, wait, watch and yeah,
it just wants to hang. So Adams and the rest
offered to take Morbius and Altara home to Earth, but
Morbius has no desire to go. And after this there's

(01:05:20):
some kind of technical work that has to be done.
I don't remember exactly what the deal is. I think
the crew of the ship has to build like a
faster than light radio transmitter to communicate with Earth and
find out what their orders are or something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Yeah, yeah, there's something in stalls them. So there's a
little time to meander about and get into trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:05:38):
Yeah, time for kissing lessons. So here's where we get
to that portion of the story. Essentially, al Tara is
she's very interested in all of the young men who
have arrived on this ship, and many of this the
men on the ship are interested in hers. Some of
the lovelorn dudes and the crew get obsessed with Altara.
She's known as Alta for short, by the way, so

(01:05:59):
that was kind of confusing first, but sometimes Morbies is
calling her Alta, And there is a scene where Jerry Farman,
the lieutenant sort of adams Is number two, takes Alta
for a walk on the planet's surface and they sort
of wander into the forest and he ends up trying
to convince her that he needs to teach her how
to kiss so that she can be in proper health,

(01:06:21):
because you need to kiss in order to be healthy.
This scene is both pretty cringey, but also, as I
was mentioning earlier, kind of funny because Alta does say these,
like really cutting things at him. She's like, isn't this
supposed to be stimulating? I don't find it remarkable. Yeah,
And in the middle of all this, Adams catches them

(01:06:43):
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

(01:07:05):
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 2 (01:07:13):
Well, Cook is in a supporting role, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
Yeah, no offense to the looks of Cook. I just mean, like,
is he the best Earth has at cooking?

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
Maybe we didn't know this was a breeding.

Speaker 3 (01:07:24):
Mission, Yeah, exactly so. Anyway, but al Tara, after this,
goes home and commissions Robbie to make her a new
dress that will cover her whole body. Of course, we
will see that dress later, and it also looks beautiful.
It's kind of a Greek goddess kind of address, but
interesting things in the scene, like the uncomfortable sexual politics

(01:07:47):
of it. Aside, the scene is interesting because it is
supposed to be I think Alta's first real experience with
the rest of humanity, with people who would judge her unfairly,
with people who would lie to her and treat her unkindly,
with people who would exploit and take advantage of her.

(01:08:07):
She's coming into collision with human nature after having grown
up in what's presented as a sort of perfect bubble
of cool, detached, trustworthy, scholarly enlightenment, and she's learning that
human nature has a dark and bestial side as well. Meanwhile,
things also start going wrong at the ship. In the

(01:08:30):
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 2 (01:08:42):
Yeah yeah, so already we're getting little invisible attacks that
are sabotaging the ship, keeping it from leaving.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
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

(01:09:10):
becomes clear that they are both interested in each other,
and Alta kisses Adams, and while they are kissing, they
are suddenly attacked by Alta's tiger friend. The tiger they
saw earlier that was so friendly and you know, not
a threat at all, appears on a sort of ledge
above them and then leaps at them, claws out as

(01:09:31):
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 2 (01:09:47):
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 (01:09:59):
Now from here we move move on to a big
reveal and a sequence of a lot of the best
sets and special effects shots in the movie. Morbius comes
to talk to Adams and doctor Ostro. Ostro was like
a long for the whole time, so just hanging out
for the kissing and the tiger killing. But Morbius comes
to tell Adams in Austro about the secrets of the planet,

(01:10:22):
the main secret being that all Tier four was once
inhabited by an extremely technologically advanced species of alien known
as the Krell. And here I'm going to read Morbius's
monologue about the Krell. He says, in times long past,
this planet was the home of a mighty and noble
race of beings which called themselves the Krell. Ethically as

(01:10:46):
well as technologically, they were a million years ahead of humankind,
for in unlocking the mysteries of nature, they had conquered
even their baser selves. And when in the course of
eons they had abolished sickness and an insanity, and crime
and all injustice, they turned still with high benevolence outward
towards space. Long before the dawn of man's history, they

(01:11:10):
had walked our Earth and brought back many biological specimens
like the tiger exactly. He goes on the heights they
had reached, but then, seemingly on the threshold of some
supreme accomplishment, which was to have crowned their entire history.
This all but divine race perished in a single night

(01:11:32):
in the two thousand centuries. Since that unexplained catastrophe, even
their cloud piercing towers of glass and porcelain and adamantine
steel have crumbled back into the soil of alta fur
and nothing, absolutely nothing remains above ground.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Yeah, so we're getting into some pretty ambitious science fiction here.
Reminds me a bit of the various sublime civilizations in
Ianimbank's Culture series. These civilizations that have advanced to a state
where they end up leaving our dimension of space and
time for higher dimensions, generally leaving behind a great deal
of technology that's now redundant to them. But I guess

(01:12:13):
in this scenario, it sounds like the Krell might have
been on the cusp of subliming, of moving on, and
then something terrible kept them from not only kept them
from moving on to this next level of existence, but
also just eradicated them entirely, and all we have left
are the technological depths of the planet.

Speaker 3 (01:12:34):
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 2 (01:12:46):
Summer light paintings are just amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
Yeah, it's so good. So they go through like a
giant underground power plant that they say is a huge
buried cube running something that's like twenty miles in every direction,
which we see them. They're crossing this great chasm on
a on a little suspension bridge, and we see these
things moving up and down the chasm and electricity arcing

(01:13:09):
through it. Also, there is a device they come across.
They go to this essentially Krell's schoolhouse, where there was
a device that the Krell used to train the brains
of their young, and Morbius explains, when this device is
used by humans, it is almost always fatal, but if
you can use it and survive, it will double your IQ.

(01:13:34):
And that's how Morbi's got so smart. By the way
he increased his intelligence with the machine, I guess he
started off pretty smart, though he's humble about it, but
then he's like, you know, I took my normal, you know,
my middling intellect when I first got here, and I
doubled it with this machine. Everybody else who tried it
was killed, but by surviving that process himself that allowed

(01:13:55):
him to decipher the Krell histories and figure out parts
of Krell technology and to for example, a symbol Robbie
the robot.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
It's explained as well that this maybe not the device itself,
but there's an element of the device that is like
a high striker a strong man game from your fare
or Carnival, you know, where you you hit a circle
with a hammer or mallet as hard as you can
and then it causes this little float be lee to go,
you know, to rise up and with your brain, but

(01:14:25):
with your brain. Yeah, so it's it's the smart man game.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
Yeah, and I liketriker. They put Leslie Nielsen on it
and he can barely get the thing to go off,
and they're like, well that's a you know, it doesn't
take brains to command a starship.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
Yeah, massive dig on.

Speaker 3 (01:14:41):
Adam's here anyway, after learning about all this stuff that
this like power this underground power plant that can generate
generate what seems to be an infinite amount of energy,
and this brain boosting machine, Adams says, you know what,
this changes everything Earth has to know about these devices.
But Morbius resists he's like, I think this is what

(01:15:01):
he was trying to hide from them before. He's like,
humans are not ready for this kind of power, and
this technology may have been what wiped out the Krell,
but if so, we don't know how.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
Yeah again, because the Krell we're millions of years ahead
of humans, and something tripped them up in their dizzying
ascent with this technology, so we're clearly not ready for it.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
Should we do something on the B plot here about
cook and the synthesis of whiskey? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Yeah, yeah, this is so can you set this one up?
So you know cook? I guess in sort of like
the you know, you know, old fashioned US military sense
of these kind of plot developments. He's supposed to acquire
some local ingredients and also find like local illicit sources
of hooch for cooking, but also clearly not for cooking.

Speaker 3 (01:15:55):
He's like, I need to go out and look for
some wild radishes. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Yeah, And basically what he runs into Robbie the robot
and he's like, hey, I need some more of this stuff,
and he shows him like a mostly empty flask of
whiskey and Robbie grabs it shoots it back into his
mail slot, and Cook is like, well, well that was
my last swig. How could you do that? And Robbie's like,
I will now synthesize this for you. Will let you say, like,

(01:16:24):
will sixty gallons be sufficient?

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
Yes? Yeah? And then Cook comes back later and there's
there's like a giant pyramid of heights of whiskey in
their own individual glass bottles.

Speaker 2 (01:16:38):
And somehow Cook doesn't die at this moment, like I
feel like later on in like in speculative media, like
this would be the moment where the monster comes and
kills him, you know where He's like, I have all
the whiskey in the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Instant monster death? Booze enough at last, yes, exactly, but
no Cook will survive a little longer.

Speaker 3 (01:17:00):
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?

(01:17:23):
They describe it in a quite grisly way. I think
they say, he smeared all over the walls of the
communication room, and then after that they set up a perimeter.
You know what we should do sometime on the show,
is we should set up a list of the best
establishing a perimeter scenes.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Yes, because this is pretty good though, I mean, the
technology is convincing, and yeah, everyone left. I mean it
really this also reminded me of what would come much
later with Aliens, with you know, it's like, all right,
is it it's inside the perimeter? You know, I'm reading
it's reading right, and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:18:00):
Yeah, it's very similar what happens here. In fact, I
almost feel like that scene in Aliens. It feels like
a callback to this.

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):
Yeah, they establish a perimeter, and eventually this creature, this
invisible creature, comes in a brazen frontal attack where the
crew are resisting with big energy weapons, these big beam
weapons and then handheld laser rifles. And when the thing,
when the invisible creature gets illuminated by all of the
energy weapons that are hitting it, we suddenly see pieces

(01:18:40):
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

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

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
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 3 (01:19:23):
Yeah. Yeah. Oh and Jerry Farman, the lieutenant who is
trying to do the kissing lessons, he gets killed in
one of these attacks.

Speaker 2 (01:19:31):
Yeah. Eventually Cook does too, right, Cook's taken out by
the monster.

Speaker 3 (01:19:35):
Oh is he? I didn't remember that? How could they
do that to Cook?

Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
Thank God he's secured all that whiskey first bourbon read.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
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

(01:20:07):
home and then at the other end of the planet,
not at the other end of the planet, but away where
the monster is attacking, it suddenly vanishes. Oh oh. So
after this attack, Adams goes back to the Morbius and
Altara house to try to get I think the reason
is he wants Altara to leave the planet with him.

(01:20:28):
He's like, you know, this monster is attacking. We've got
to go now, and for your own safety, you should
come with me.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
Plus, we're in love. Now this is meant to be.
You've got to run away with me.

Speaker 3 (01:20:38):
Yeah. And to be clear, it seems reciprocal, like she's
very into him.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
Yeah, And that's part of you know, this part of
the split that's going on here is that now she
is more she is attracted to the outside world, the
world of Adams, the world of Earth, and wants to leave.
I mean, she wants to bring her father with her
if possible, but she is also ready to leave her
father's home, her father's world for the first time.

Speaker 3 (01:21:05):
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

(01:21:26):
he can't hurt them, could they couldn't they just force
their way past him?

Speaker 2 (01:21:30):
Yeah, no, he is he's bulky.

Speaker 3 (01:21:32):
Yeah, that's true anyway. So, uh So, now we have
Adams and Astro in the in the Morbius home, and
at some point here Astro sneaks away because, oh, because
this is another part of their plan. They're like, we've
got to find a way to defeat this monster. So
either Adams or Astro, one of them needs to use

(01:21:53):
the brain enhance her machine, which you know they have
learned will probably kill you, but if you can survive it,
it'll make you super small art and they think they
will need those extra smarts in order to survive. Well.
While they're hanging out Robbie, Robbie at some point like
comes in carrying the body of Ostro and it's like, uh, oh,
he tried to he tried to get smart. Bad move.

Speaker 2 (01:22:15):
And this is an example of a scene that I
wish we could have seen like this would have This
is a highly dramatic moment for this character, and it
occurs entirely off screen, and they're like, oh, by the way,
he did it. He plugged in and now he's dying.
But we do get some final last words.

Speaker 3 (01:22:33):
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

(01:22:55):
the purpose of essentially doing away with all all need
for mechanical labor and mechanical devices, and instead would would
allow any of the Krell to make a physical reality
manifest simply by thinking about it. So you can interface

(01:23:16):
with this giant machine and it will interpret your thoughts
and then manifest those thoughts as physical atoms and energy,
which sounds great. Okay, it's just like infinite free energy
and labor. You know, you can all want all kind
of problems. Material problems are done away with, right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:37):
Yeah, if the rational mind can imagine it, then it
is real and it is in action.

Speaker 3 (01:23:42):
Except the problem is what the Crell did not foresee
and what Ostro figures out happened to them is it's
not only the rational mind that's in the driver's seat now, baby,
Both the rational mind and the sort of the ego,
the rational mind and the base design of the ID
are hooked up to this machine. And so it began

(01:24:04):
manifesting the Krell's unconscious or subconscious thoughts and desires as well.
Everything that they knew they shouldn't do but deep down
secretly wanted that was manifest as well. And so what
that turned into was the slaughter and extermination of their
entire people, all.

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
The demons of the mind unleashed on the planet with
infinite power backing them up. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's amazing,
like this is such a Again, when this movie goes
hard on its on its genre elements, it's really spectacular.

Speaker 3 (01:24:41):
I agree. It's a great premise, and it not to
spoil it by saying this, but I realized I came
to these in backwards order. But when I was younger,
I read the books Sphere by Michael Crichton, which essentially
has the same premise. It's like they come across alien
technology that can make your thoughts manifest, but then they realize, like, oh,

(01:25:01):
it's also making subconscious thoughts manifest. So everybody's anxieties and
fears are like becoming physical objects that are attacking them.
And so, in fact, what the characters discover here in
Forbidden Planet is not only is that what happened to
the Krell, it's still operating that way, and so it
is taking the subconscious fears and desires and complexes of

(01:25:28):
doctor Morbius who has linked his brain to the machine
by using it and making those manifest. And in fact,
not all of the links are fully spelled out, but
it's sort of suggesting the idea that like, he doesn't
want to go back to Earth, he doesn't want Altera
to go back to Earth. He doesn't want the corrupting

(01:25:50):
influence of Earth to change his daughter, to sort of
like corrupt the perfect precious existence he has created for them.
And you know, you can kind of understand why. You
can see how Altera's first encounter with the broader human
kind involved, like, you know, some dudes being creeps to her. Yeah,
so you can see where his desire is to kind

(01:26:12):
of like just create a bubble and live in it
with his family and live in that protective bubble without
any intrusion where that desire comes from. But it is
manifesting as the creation of a violent monster that lashes
out to kill anything that threatens to puncture the bubble.

Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
Yeah, and now that we know what the monster is,
it is coming for our main characters, and it is
we realize inexorable. It is unstoppable. And this just leads
to like an avalanche of scenes that are really highly effective.

Speaker 3 (01:26:48):
Yeah, exactly. And I like the way that it really
does make sense taken given the premise of the story,
because you might think, well, couldn't he just call it off?
But as anybody who's ever had like a panic attack,
you know, you can know rationally that the thing that
you are afraid of is not something you should be
afraid of, It's not a real threat, and yet you

(01:27:10):
still just can't make your subconscious mind to give in.
The subconscious is resistant to rational control.

Speaker 2 (01:27:17):
Yeah, yeah, so he can't call it off, he can't
control it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:21):
It is.

Speaker 2 (01:27:22):
It is coming no matter what, and even like knowing
what it is doesn't give him power over it, which
you know matches up with some of these states of
the mind as we experience them as well. I Mean,
sometimes knowing can help, and that can be part of
the tools of controlling things like anxiety in some cases.
But but yeah, not necessarily at all.

Speaker 3 (01:27:44):
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 2 (01:28:03):
Yeah, that's excellent, And it just leads them to they
have to like start retreating through these various levels of protection.
So for instance, the homes, combat shades come up, and
of course the doors, yeah, the blast doors, and the
monster makes pretty quick work of that, and they have
to retreat into the Krell subsurface chambers and they have

(01:28:24):
all those really cool doors to move behind and the
locking mechanism, but even that is not going to keep
the monster at bay, and we get this terrific scene
where the monster is like literally melting its way through
the door.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
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

(01:28:59):
all the way more, more and more, and like the
energy produced is limitless, and they realize, like it's just
not going to stop now. I think finally, Morbius was
resistant to the idea at first that he was the
one creating the monster, but he eventually comes to accept
it and then sort of gets in the path of
the monster, and I think as he is fatally injured

(01:29:19):
by it, that sort of like makes it dematerialize for
the moment.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
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 (01:29:38):
Yeah, and so at that point they somehow they end
up setting a self destruct thing for the entire planet.
You have ten minutes to reach minimum safe distance. They
set up a self destruct for the planet, and then
Adams and Altara have to escape back to the ship.
Oh and I think Robbie comes with them, doesn't he
as Robbie comes too.

Speaker 2 (01:29:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Robbie is to come along for the ride.

Speaker 3 (01:30:01):
It's a fair trade. I mean like they made the
right decision to set the self destruct like such a
such a technology that makes all our thoughts manifest that
there's no way that can be wielded correctly. You just
just had to be destroyed. There's can't be good. But Robbie,
I feel like Robbie's he's good tech. You can bring
him with us.

Speaker 2 (01:30:20):
Yeah, his programming is sound, uh, and so yeah, he's
a board. We have a moment where the surviving crew
members there witness the destruction of the planet from afar,
which is a little weird because Adams is like, there
it goes your dad's on that planet or what's left
of him, and yeah, it's like, well yes, obviously.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
But the ending line I remember is a little hokie.
He has basically a he tampered in God's domain And yeah,
a statement I think, but they but also there's a
good observation where they're like, you know, what the crew
achieved is not unique to the Krell. Maybe someday long
in the future, humans will achieve the same level of

(01:31:01):
technology and then we'll be facing the same problem.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
Yeah, and this is a valid point. We see this
in sci fi time and time again. It remains pretty accurate,
and that is that our technological achievements tend to outstrip
our ability to control ourselves regarding that technology at a
personal level or at like a governmental level.

Speaker 3 (01:31:24):
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

(01:31:44):
we've seen happen again and again in technological history. People
figure out how to do something before they've thought through
all of the ways in which it could be used
for ill and should thus be constrained or constrained to
the extent that it could be constrained. I mean, some
things are really hard to constrain, but you know, to
whatever extent we have the power to. And so, yeah,
we don't want to become like the Krell. We should

(01:32:06):
think hard about how technological creations could go wrong before
we create them. It's kind of a plea for science fiction.

Speaker 2 (01:32:14):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:32:16):
Anyway, that's Forbidden Planet.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
That is the Forbidden Planet. And yeah, I think it
was an absolute delight. I highly recommend checking this one
out if you've managed to not see it thus far.
Like we said before, sometimes these highly influential films, they
can be easy films to miss because you have at
least sort of surface level understanding of what it's about,

(01:32:40):
and it's easy to sort of put that one on
the back burner. But this one's worth coming back to
for sure. All Right, we would love to hear from
everyone out there. What is your history with Forbidden Planet?
What are your thoughts concerning it and other pictures from
this timeframe? Are there other movies that you would compare
favorably to Forbidden Plant from the nineteen fifties? Yeah, right

(01:33:02):
in we'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast with core episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. In the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film here on Weird House Cinema. And if you want
a complete list of all the movies we've covered thus far, well,

(01:33:25):
you can head on over to letterbox dot com. You
can look us up. Our user name is weird House
and we have an episode list of everything we've covered
thus far. I believe at this point what are we
up to? It is exactly one hundred and ninety five films,
so we're closing in on two hundred. If you have
an idea for what we should cover for our two

(01:33:46):
hundredth episode of Weird House Cinema, right in with suggestions.

Speaker 3 (01:33:50):
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 1 (01:34:15):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.