When I was growing up there were a large number of science fiction movies appearing at the theater. Most involved cigar shaped space
ships with flames curving out of the ends (a product of filming the things in an Earth gravity field and atmosphere). There were bug eyed aliens, and men in flight suits and jet pilot helmets fighting them with .45 caliber pistols in hand. Or the men fell in with the hot women from Venus, or some other hokey plot. The actors were the B-list marvels who we saw in the same kind of movie last year and the year before. Some were decent actors. Most weren’t. They were still exciting to a young mind, who imagined blasting off with the spacemen and patrolling the lanes of the Solar System. And then there was the first of the truly modern science fiction movies, Forbidden Planet.
Forbidden Planet was a different sort of beast. Made a year before I walked this planet (or should I say the year before I lay in a crib screaming for food and crapping my diapers) Forbidden Planet had a cool looking flying saucer (that was stolen by Twilight Zone and many others later on), a great robot (also stolen for Twilight Zone and many others), an alien civilization that made you think, disintegrator beams, and really out of this world electronic music. Of course, since it was done at the beginning of the atomic age everything was atomic, with Neutron Beam disintegrators, in a time when the risks of nuclear power were not as clear. It had big name stars like Ann Francis and Walter Pidgeon, and Leslie Neilsen when he still considered becoming a serious actor. The setting was a planet around another star system. The special effects were wonderful for the time, even better than what Star Trek boasted ten years later, though to give Trek credit, they were a TV Show and as such low budget. I kept trying to catch Forbidden Planet on TV when I was small, but my parents kept taking me to other events when it was showing, so I never really saw the whole movie until I was twelve. When I did I was amazed. And science fiction movies as a whole got better.
Oh, not immediately. There were still low budget flicks with bug eyed monsters or civilizations of gorgeous women and no men, and rocket ships that would take forever just to get to Mars, but could get to the imaginary inhabitable worlds swarming our Solar System in days. But the seeds were planted by Disney, and we started getting some better movies in the 60s, even more in the 70s, and now we have a bunch of really high quality space movies coming out each year. Forbidden Planet opened up the possibility of movies about travel to other stars, a mainstay of written science fiction at the time, but not explored on the big screen. It opened up robots that weren’t just clunking pieces of stove pipe. And it opened up alien civilizations that weren’t just cruising the Galaxy looking for easy marks to conquer, and that didn’t look like us with silver skin. I think Forbidden Planet was a risk at the time. But it was a risk that paid off. I have watched the movie several times lately. Friends have remarked that it seems dated. To me it still looks wonderful. No, it’s not Star Wars or Trek, but keeping in context the time it was a very well done movie, a true classic that set the stage for Star Trek and Wars. And now I discover a Facebook Page called Forbidden Planet, that is not just a celebration of the movie, but of all science fiction. So hooray for Forbidden Planet, and may the Krell always dwell in our hearts and our imaginations.