"I bring you a warning." "Every one of you listening to my voice tell the world." "Tell this to everybody wherever they are:" "Watch the skies everywhere." "Keep looking." "Keep watching the skies." "I think science fiction is the greatest exercycle for the brain." "It is just..." "It just is like Pilates for the brain, you know?" "You know, it really stretches your beliefs that anything is possible." "And the reason I'm so interested in science fiction is because I have this overactive imagination and I've always believed, from childhood, that anything is possible." "But only science fiction can let you go there." "I'm a strong believer that if you can imagine something you can make it real." "And, uh, well, one thing movies do, science fiction in particular is that it re-allows you to see something so it comes into your imagination." "I loved cinema inordinately um, to the extent, in those days, you could sit down..." "You could go in at 2 and you could come out at 10." "And you weren't turfed out with a person with a torch saying, "Oy, get out," you know?" "As the lights went up, I would just sit and wait or go and get an ice cream and wait." "And I'd see it three times, the film." "There are so many films, science-fiction films that I saw as a kid and as a teenager that have left indelible images." "I can just go to that file and flip through it and see those pictures." "As if I had just seen it yesterday." "The atomic age ushered in the first great age of movie science-fiction." "When you come through the Second World War you've got a very specific enemy." "You know what that enemy is." "It's there for all the wrong reasons." "And it should be prevented, okay?" "Then you've got the next phase which is the Cold War." "Again, which is to do with paranoia." "But I think, real." "It's real." "Movies start to nip into that." "But no matter where they go or what they do they always try to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes right then." "It's a bomb!" "Duck and cover." "I would have to say there was a certain amount of anxiety about that." "I grew up right in the very heat of that." "And we did the duck-and-cover drills all the time." "We were always hearing about building fallout shelters about the end of the world." "Kind of, issues were always going on." "How many bombs were being built." "The Cold War was very in the media." "All of our fate as human beings, our destiny seems bound up in our technology." "And our technology is frightening." "It's terrifying." "Wow, the splitting of the atom." "Something we can't even see." "Forces that can only be explained by these guys in white coats." "All of a sudden, the guys in white coats became these kind of simultaneously rock stars and the most evil thing you could imagine." "Mom, if I grow up, do you know what I'm going to do?" "It's "when you grow up," dear, not "if."" "There was anxiety in the air." "It was not just fear of being beaten up by the local bully." "But the fear was being nuked." "I was more terrified of being nuked than my parents were." "My parents couldn't imagine that an intelligent nation like Russia would ever push a button on us, nor would we on them." "But we almost pushed the button on each other during the Cuban Missile Crisis." "My parents went to a party the day the crisis reached that critical..." "I was watching television and I had filled all the bathtubs up with water, just..." "Every sink and one bathtub in my mom's bedroom I filled it up with water because I figured the water's gonna stop." "They're gonna turn the water off." "This will be our drinking water." "We had no hole in our backyard." "We had no basement in Arizona." "But I was preparing for Armageddon." "I was absolutely preparing for that." "And these movies in the 1950s and early '60s played on those fears." "And these movies were all metaphors for those fears." "People started to think about:" ""Okay, this is what we know, which is the blast." "But what about what we don't know?"" "Out of that fear came, I think, a lot of the monsters which..." "You mess around with stuff and you're gonna unleash this unknown monster." "It's making tangible the unknown." "And I think a lot of that has to do with the mystery of this silent death that comes along with it, that nobody knows exactly what it is or where it came from or..." "Can't see it, can't touch it." "Well, let's make it easier to deal with by making it a giant monster that looks sort of like a dinosaur that we can actually look at and shoot guns at and stuff, and kind of cope with." "There was a whole string of movies where the smallest creatures that we just step on, on our way to school turned out to be mutant giants that wound up stepping on us." "Wait a minute!" "What are you doing out here, honey?" "Honey?" "What's your name?" "That little girl they find wandering the desert-.." "...And she's just absolutely in shock in a complete state of shock and they try to get her to speak and she won't." "And finally she hears that really great sound effect that the ants made." "It was from a distance, that kind of chirp." "That constant:" "And she just looks almost into the camera." "I was never frightened." "I was curious and I would be looking at the screen, thinking:" ""How'd they do that?" "How'd they make that this big?"" "I believed the ants in Them!" "I mean, I knew..." "There was a suspension of disbelief that kind of said, "These are kind of corny, big things."" "But at the same time, they were scary enough to where I believed they were what they were." "And Edmund Gwenn came on the screen." "I said, "Oh, my God!" "There's Santa Claus!" "That's Kris Kringle!"" ""Oh, my goodness." "Miracle on 34th Street!"" "I was, like..." "I couldn't believe he was in this science-fiction movie." "Get the antennae!" "Get the antennae!" "He brought credibility to the role... because of the earlier picture he'd made." "Get the other antenna!" "Get the other antenna!" "He's helpless without them!" "He was also the one that preached the gospel." "And gave the dire warnings to mankind and pointed his finger at mankind and said, "We made this happen." ""We created this." "We did this to ourselves."" "Species appears to be Camponotus vicinus." "One of the family Formicinae." " An ant." " An ant?" "I don't believe it." "It's not possible." "Then this is what got Ed Blackburn and Gramps Johnson and the rest?" "Yes." "A fantastic mutation." "Probably caused by lingering radiation from the first atomic bomb." "All these movies had some brainiac..." ""basically, at some point or another, saying, you know:" ""We only have ourselves to blame for this."" "Unless these queens are located and destroyed..." "Before they've established thriving colonies and can produce heaven alone knows how many more queen ants man, as the dominant species of life on Earth will probably be extinct within a year, doctor'?" "In the '5Os, coming out of World War II where every other guy walking around the street was a war hero for simply having survived the greatest action against evil that we could remember you've got this lingering sense that the military saved us." "That they're good guys." "That they represent the best of us." "And as the alien invaders..." "Sometimes abetted by the scientists, sometimes created by the scientists." "Come in, it was always the guys with the tanks and the Tommy guns." "The end of Them!" ", they're running around the sewers of Los Angeles with Tommy guns, shooting it out with the giant ants." "Ants are good because it's a known quantity." "As long as you make it reasonably credible." "Everybody knows what an ant looks like, and everybody knows what an ant would look like if it were big." "So if you make it look reasonably like an ant, you're okay." "When you get into aliens or monsters and everything then there is an aesthetic question of, "ls this a good enough monster to be what it's supposed to be?" ""Are we getting our monster's worth out of it?"" "Here." "It's a perfect fit." "This will give you the full effect." "You see?" "Lots of character in the tail, plenty of fright." "Needs a little puffing up but it'll be all right." "Of course, you gotta visualize it in the lights." "You gotta use your imagination." "Shoulder pads." "Straighten it right out." "This will give you the effect." "It'll be good." "The secret is to not show the monster." "The anticipation is greater than the reality." "No matter what it is." "When you have monsters from space or aliens inevitably when you finally show the monster it's a disappointment." "When you try to make that real with film, you have to make it exist at some point, some way that the illusion is there that..." "What you're seeing." "And that's always been a hard problem because it's really technical." "And from Millay's on, it's been, "How clever are you to trick the audience into believing something that can't possibly exist?"" "The generality of feature films has been the world of plot and story." "And therefore, the cleanest version of that is, like, a B science-fiction movie where it's just nothing but plot." "And then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens." "You barely get to know the names of the characters because they're simply saying:" ""Watch out." "Here we go." "Then we're gonna go over here." ""I know they're gonna be here by noon." "We've only got two hours left."" "Hey, you can see them from here!" "One totally weird solution to the monster problem:" "Make them as inanimate as they were implacable." "Monolith Monsters is this quirky little film obviously done on a Z-budget." "But the monster is so bizarre." "It's just these giant crystals that grow and then crash over." "And they grow and crash over." "And they fall on your house and then they fall on your town." "Now, these films weren't A movies directed by William Wyler and starring Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando." "Oh, no." "This was the trickle-down factor." "This went way below the front office down to the B-movie offices." "Those little, wooden-shingled bungalows way off in the back lot somewhere." "Right next to, probably, where they made the cartoons." "As early as 1953, Abbott and Costello were satirizing giganticism." "But what if...?" "What if our atomic carelessness had a reverse effect?" "That's what writer Richard Matheson and director Jack Arnold imagined in this science-fiction classic." "Radioactive fallout is impossible to picture persuasively in a movie." "But its consequences, in this case, lodged forever in a generation's memory." "Nobody quite knew what radiation did." "They knew it killed you, they knew it deformed you they knew it did horrible things and obviously..." "But it wasn't concrete enough because you didn't kind of see it work." "The Incredible Shrinking Man was a scary movie to me." "I was very young at the time." "And obviously for young people to get even smaller..." "I mean, you already feel small as it is." "So for any young person who's trying to grow up to say, "No, what's gonna happen:..."" ""We're gonna sprinkle you with magic, atomic dust..."" ""...and you're gonna get smaller and even less powerful..."" ""...and as a matter of fact, there's nothing we can do to stop this."" "So it's like stripping away all sense of power." "You're completely helpless." "That was an extremely frightening idea for a young person." "Forget about a kid having a problem with suddenly getting smaller as opposed to getting bigger." "How about a man who has a wife and all of a sudden he's diminishing." "The psychology of that." "Kiss me." "You think that's gonna fix it, huh?" "You didn't have to stretch." "You used to stand on your toes when you did that." "Why, in your stocking feet?" "I'm not even talking about the sexual side of that." "I'm just talking about the idea of your ego and your power base in a relationship gets smaller and smaller and eventually, they grow apart." "Well, I..." "I think I'll turn in." "Come on." "There." "Coming to bed?" " Yeah, soon." " Well, good night, then." "Good night, Louise." "The guy's house becomes this nightmarish place." "And it's taking the familiar and turning it." "And I think that's why it's so fascinating to people." "Instead of science creating these giant monsters it created a tiny guy." "And now his cat becomes his mortal enemy." "I remember the danger with the cat." "And science-fiction filmmakers use cats almost symbolically to portray how we feel inside about something we can't express." "Cats' instincts are much better than ours and cats are more finely-tuned to the dangers that surround us while people are sometimes dumb enough to let the danger come right into their bedrooms and kill them while they sleep." "Now, of course, when I was a kid and I saw that movie I'm more interested in the sewing-needle fight with the tarantula." "It was supposed to be a house spider but, I'm sorry, that was a tarantula." "That film had the advantage of character because it's basically just about him." "So you're really empathizing with him and his struggle." "Sort of sad and pathetic movie." "The Incredible Shrinking Man is one of the best science-fiction films ever." "With a very profound message about, not outer space but inner space." "And about the soul." "And where does the soul go and what is infinity?" "Is infinity out there, or is infinity in here?" "There's an aspect of science fiction that has always dealt with human psychology." "The nature of who and what we are." "Within our fuel range are the planets Venus and Mars." "One of these should be our destination." "Each of you gentlemen have before you a sheet of paper on which you will write the choice of your destination and a brief explanation of why you've chosen this particular planet." "Who knew the space race began with an essay test?" "Colonel Briteis, your ship is fuelled." "Check-off list completed." " Do you need any help?" " No, thank you, major." "I'm perfectly capable of getting into the rocket myself." "'50s sci-fi might aim at the stars but the dialogue often remained earthbound." "The moviemakers did imagine G-forces." "As the imaginary astronauts left Earth behind they were always on the alert for other dangers both science fiction and science fact had predicted." "Meteor showers were a standard menace." "I've been through some pretty heavy flak in my day." "But that's the worst I've ever had thrown at me." "Heavenly flak." "The rocket ships were sleek but they were also roomy and rather homey." "They would create love stories in space." "They would head for their destinations living a very terrestrial life." "A very, almost a soap-opera type life." "It's just that being confined like this has gotten on my nerves." "Mine too." " You listening, Karen?" " To what?" "I think that you are a prize package." " Is this for Jim's benefit?" " And very feminine." " He likes you." " I sure do, Mr. Engineer." "And I don't have to look in a test tube to find out." "Look!" "We got a stowaway aboard." "Weightlessness was a known scientific problem." "Hey, whoa." "I need you." "And a narrative issue." "Hope you enjoyed the trip, colonel." " Happy landings, Bill." " Thank you, captain." "They didn't have a way of doing weightlessness." "There was always the "weightless moment" where somebody floats out of a chair." "Then they forget about it and they're walking the rest of the film." "Because they could only do it once." "You mean this thing is working?" "We're..." "We're..." "No, sir." "Not me." "Nobody ever told me this was practical." "Turn this thing around, you hear?" "Take me back." "Nobody every predicted what it would really look like." "I mean, look at the LEM." "Look at the real lunar module." "All the spaceships that landed on the moon in science fiction were always pointy things with these big fins at the bottom." "Nobody ever predicted this gold-foil covered box, you know with insect legs." "It never looked like that." "Because our imagination was never able to predict what would really happen." "We could sometimes imagine other planets as paradises with girls." "Step on it, and don't spare the atoms." "We must warn the queen." "Our planet, Venus, has been invaded." "They looked more like Hollywood starlets than space aliens." "Anyway, they were eager to please." "May we serve you, Earth men?" "Their dancing, their music, their leotards were moderne Greenwich Village in outer space." "What gives?" "Where are all the men around here?" "You are the first man I've ever seen." "Well, honey, we gotta catch up for lost time." "If their costumes were usually pretty spacey their high heels owed something to Fifth Avenue." "There was a hint, a hope, that space girls might be easy." "If I'd known there was gonna be this kind of competition I would have undressed for the occasion." "Okay, let's get serious." "The way Destination Moon did, as early as 1950." "It was an attempt to depict space travel as it really might occur." "Based on what science actually knew at the time." "Destination Moon is an interesting film." "I don't like the film particularly." "It's an interesting film because..." "Only for its moment in history." "It's a response to this spread that was run in Colliers magazine of these paintings done by Chesley Bonestell of these gleaming spacecraft that were gonna go out and go to the moon and then go to Mars." "Destination Moon was a scientific attempt to create suspense based on no bad guys no villains and no aliens." "At the time, it was a very provocative idea because nobody had actually experienced or seen anybody go to the moon." "It was a movie about the celebration of Americas power and technology and intellectual capacity to be able to leave the gravitational hold that it's had on us forever, and get to the moon for the first time and put men on the moon." "It's like a NASA recruiting film but NASA didn't even exist yet when that film was made." "A lot of the people at NASA, if you go and ask these people they were all inspired by that." "You know, this was what drove them on." "This was what made them say, "I wanna go and go to the moon." ""Because I saw somebody go to the moon."" ""Well, that was just a movie, son." "You go to your science class and when you get to the sixth grade..." ""...you'll see that that's not really possible."" "And he got to the sixth grade and he said, "Well, yeah..."" ""..." "I still think it's possible." "I'd like to see us go to the moon."" ""I think we could walk around on that thing."" "You know, and he got into college, got his master's degree and his Ph.D." "And said, "You know, I still think we can get to the moon."" "And enough of those guys grew up and they all went to the moon." "Now bend your elbow as though you were holding a heavy weight." "Now your hand." "That's it." "Hold it." "Okay." "That'll be something to show." " What is it, doc?" " You and the Earth." "Holding it up like a modern Atlas." "There hadn't been a movie as researched and interesting to me without aliens and UFOs and Earth versus the flying saucers until 2001:" "A Space Odyssey." "I actually feel that Destination Moon is the father of 2001." "Although I never could get Stanley to admit that he ever saw it." "Rocketship X-M was a B-picture designed to do one thing:" "Beat Destination Moon into theaters." "It did, and in its crummy little way, it offered a much darker message." "And Rocketship X-M is almost the anodyne to Destination Moon." "It was a cautionary story about how you're not gonna be able to control this technology." "They find this Martian civilization that was destroyed by its own technology and our technology will fail." "Pride in our technology, hubris of a kind sometimes precedes a tragic fall." "How are we doing?" "Not so good." "Well, what's the matter?" "Everything's worked out so far." "Right on the nose." "We haven't got enough fuel for landing." "The end of Rocketship X-M is a view of the Earth filling the viewport as they crash." "As they all die." "I'm not afraid anymore." "Something happened, like a great wave carrying us up, bearing us." "Protecting us." "Their last, desperate hope is for transcendence." "It's a pretty dark ending." "Were they trying to say there will be no exploration without sacrifice?" "That's something that we're wrestling with right now." "We just saw the Columbia disintegrate on entry a couple of years ago." "No, gentlemen." "The flight of the RX-M was not a failure." "Tomorrow we start construction of RX-M Two." "All science fiction is this kind of dualistic dance, love-hate relationship with technology." "We love it." "We have these great machines, these giant star-cruisers." "But we also build Death Stars that can destroy us." "You know, the nuclear bomb can destroy us but a nuclear-powered spaceship can take us to the stars." "Forbidden Planet is an amazing film." "It was amazing as a technical accomplishment in its day, just for its scope just for the scale of its imagination." "Every good science-fiction film must at least touch the dark side." "The film had a great model:" "It is, to some degree, a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest." "Some of the best science fiction is about..." "Touches on this idea of the great mysteries, the great enigmas." "The things that we struggle to understand..." ""...about ourselves, about our mortality, about our place in the universe."" "Are we alone in a vast, empty universe?" "Is it populated by other people?" "Are there soul mates for us out there?" "Are there enemies out there?" "The questions that can't be answered because we're a curious species." "We're these curious apes." "D.C. set and punched on, skipper." "All right, attention." "Captain to crew." "All hands squared away to decelerate." "Ship's beeper will as usual sound 10 times after lights dim." " Come on, Doc." "D.C., Bosun." " Aye, aye, sir." "D.C. stations." "On the double." "Wanna bounce through this one?" "Forbidden Planet also predicted a portion of science fiction's future." "The design of the spacecraft and some of its most imaginative technology obviously inspired the look of Star Trek when it came to television a few years later." "At its core is this idea that we are the monsters." "That we go out to the alien reaches of the universe and we confront ourselves." "In Forbidden Planet which I saw in the theater when it was in first-run and I remember seeing it and not understanding it the first time I saw it." "Coffee is ready, sir." "Gentlemen." "Forbidden Planet, I remember being beautifully designed in its own '50s way." "It could have been Frank Sinatra's living room in Las Vegas, right?" "Ha!" "The Walter Pidgeon character protecting his daughter, Anne Francis from the male hormones." "Alta." "Alta, I specifically asked you not to join us for lunch." "But, Father, lunch is over." "I'm sure you never said a word about not coming in for coffee." "Well, did you or did you?" "She was hot." "I mean, Anne Francis, my God." "I mean, she was a really..." "She was..." "I mean, I was a kid when I saw that movie and I wanted her to be my babysitter." " Good morning." " Good morning." "Alta was like the native women encountered in earthbound exploration movies:" "A wise innocent." "Come on in." "Didn't bring my bathing suit." "What's a bathing suit?" "Oh, murder." "Never mind." "I'm coming out." "There was stuff for the prepubescents like myself." "There was stuff for the child in me, like Robby the Robot." "I thought he was amazing." "I'm sure George..." "Whether in George Lucas' subconscious or whether in his legitimate conscious." "...said, "C-3PO is my version of Robby the Robot."" "Because they both, kind of, were serving-men." "Well, Metropolis actually influenced me more for C-3PO than Robby the Robot did." "If you do not speak English I am at your disposal with 187 other languages along with their various dialects and sub-tongues." "Colloquial English will do fine, thank you." "Robby the Robot was designed as a kind of comic robot." "And a perfect '50s robot." "Four hundred and eighty pints." "As you requested." "Total, 60 gallons." "Genuine Kansas City bourbon." "It's smooth too." "Robby, I ain't never gonna forget this." "Anytime you're hard up for a couple of gallons of lube oil, you just let me know." "And they both believed the Asimov law that they couldn't do harm to you." "They could serve you and they could help you but they could never do harm to a human being." "Um, um, that was great stuff." "So there were huge high-points in Forbidden Planet for me." "Aim right between the eyes." "Fire." "You see, he's helpless." "Locked in a sub-electronic dilemma between my direct orders and his basic inhibitions against harming rational beings." "Cancel." "If I were to allow that to continue he would blow every circuit in his body." "Oh, you know the other good thing about that movie?" "The brain test." "Now, doctor, you can read it here." "Well, there's something wrong here." "I have an IQ of 161 yet I don't register a third what you did." "Hmm." "Now the commander." "It's all right, sir." "A commanding officer doesn't need brains." "Just a good loud voice, huh?" "They put these little earmuffs on to see if they could raise the bar on themselves, to see what they could..." "And Leslie Nielsen, our hero, our handsome hero, couldn't..." "He couldn't get it up very high." "I mean, it was basically about getting it up how high can you get up on that bar?" "Walter Pidgeon, he could really get it up." "He was in the red zone." "Like Shakespeare's Prospero, Morbius had devoted himself to deciphering the magical secrets of a lost and in this case, technologically superior civilization that of the Krell." "He can't imagine that what destroyed them was something like original sin, the evil side of their natures." "In his pride, he doesn't know that he, too, has a dark side." "What were they like?" "No record of their physical nature has survived." "Except, perhaps, in the form of this characteristic arch." "I suggest you consider it in comparison to one of our functionally-designed human doorways." "I was deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed that I didn't get to see the aliens that needed a triangular doorway to fit through." "Just the suggestion of that doorway that the Krell built for themselves offered all sorts of images in my imagination..." ""...about what they must have looked like."" "But I kept waiting, "Okay, now show me a Krell."" "I wanted to see something that needs a triangle to get through." "Not a square, not a rectangle." "And they never show you the Krell." "What they showed instead was this more shadowy less-defined monster." "And at the end of the picture I remember thinking the film sucked." "Not anymore, but then, because I was let down." "I kept waiting for the big third-act payoff when the Krell attack." "And even though I was kind of satiated a little bit by the big creature..." "Disney animators actually animated for MGM that particular creature." "It was a kind of a nice thing where Disney loans out their animators to do one effect-sequence on a competitor's movie." "The monster is a projection of Morbius' unconscious." "It's his defense against anyone who would challenge his powers." "To borrow a phrase, "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters."" "I never heard the concept of the id, I didn't know what that was." "I expected the id to show up in the third act and scare me." "And when the id didn't make an appearance and wasn't hairy and had five eyes, and a bunch of claws, I was let down." " What is the id?" " Id, id, id." "LI'$ 8..." "It's an obsolete term I'm afraid, once used to describe the elementary basis of the subconscious mind." "Here you had this shining civilization, the Krell, who had created wonders and who thought they had evolved beyond their animal selves much as we believe this fantasy that we have evolved beyond our animal selves." "In fact, we haven't." "And all of those demons are still inside us, only suppressed." "Guilty." "Guilty." "My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it." "Walter Pidgeon becomes a tragic figure at the end of Forbidden Planet because he possess too much knowledge and his entire struggle is between heart and knowledge." "Stop." "No further." "I deny you, I give you up." "All of his motivations were good and yet the seeds of failure were built in to what he was doing from the beginning and the hubris of thinking he could command a godlike power." "Here below we imagined, some of us even more terrible monsters." "Alien creatures bent on visiting our small planet and wreaking havoc on it." "Roswell for real, maybe." "Or Russians." "But with their weaponry and malevolence raised to paranoid heights." "Some films take the position that we will not fare well in an initial contact with something that we don't understand." "And it's really a comment about our inability to deal with other human populations we don't understand." "Spread out, everybody." "We're gonna try to figure out the shape of this thing." "Here are the tools, sir." "The Thing, in 1951 was the movies' first monstrous visitor from outer space and the movie's success helped make science fiction the decade's most prolific genre." "It arrived, of course, in the era's most talked-about space vehicle." "Holy cat." "Hey it's almost..." "Yeah, almost a perfect..." "It is." "It's round." " We finally got one." " We found a flying saucer." "A few minutes from now, we may have the key to the stars." "A million years of history are waiting for us in that ice." "The great and the bad thing about The Thing is that most of it you never see the Thing." "And when you finally do, it's mostly backlit weird." "You can't really see it." "That was scary because I really believed that was alien." "It was a vegetable but it was nevertheless an indestructible killing machine." " Ready, Bob?" " No, but go ahead and open it." "There are things that make you jump and one of the biggest jumps ever is when the Thing's hand comes around and that's the first time you see him." "And it's just terrifying." "Audiences were not accustomed to springboard, jack-in-the-box pop-up scares in those days." "I remember the image of him standing in the door backlit." "A shadow." "I mean, just a shape in the door." "The Thing's behind the door and it bursts into the room." "The guy throws the bucket of kerosene or gasoline on it." "They shoot it with the flare pistol and it lights up and it's the only light in the room." "And they had slow film, they're shooting in black and white but the courage to light the scene with a human torch." "And a full-body burn I don't believe had be done before that." "And they were gonna light up the whole room with a guy on fire." "The military characters are the heroes, the scientists are the bad guys." "The scientists are the guys who are lured as a moth to a flame, to the forbidden knowledge." "And they're trying to seek something and it just compromises everybody." "Eddie, get back here." "Stay away from that wire." "Listen, I'm your friend." "Look, I have no weapons." "I'm your friend." "You're wiser than I, you must understand what I'm trying to tell you." "Don't go any farther, they'll kill you." "They think you mean to harm us all but I want to know you, to help you." "Believe that." "You're wiser than anything on Earth." "Use that intelligence." "Look at me and know what I'm trying to tell you." "I'm not your enemy, I'm a scientist." "I'm a scientist who's trying..." "I think when they first give it to the Thing with all the electricity it creates an image." "It's what cinema's always about." "If you walk out of a movie with one indelible image that movie will live forever." "And I think The Thing lives forever because of the image of Arness being zapped in two directions by the electricity." "And that, to me, is the emblem of The Thing." "I'll never forget that." "I thought The Day the Earth Stood Still was kind of very interesting." "First time the idea of science fiction kind of hit me." "Interesting context, was about something." "The effects of the ship coming across the city didn't have those funny, little jagged lines and they didn't move in a funny fashion." "And that's why I started to buy into it, and, uh, it just impressed me." "The director managed to capture the idea of the importance of:" ""What if we have a visitor from elsewhere?"" "We have come to visit you in peace and with goodwill." "Our reaction to alien invaders or alien contact is representative of our reaction to China to France, to the Muslim countries." "Our inability to see the world through their eyes." "Klaatu comes out, he pops out something that he's gonna give them..." "Kind of like a bowling trophy from the stars." "...And they think it's a weapon and they start blazing away." "And Gort has to kind of hose the place with his heat ray." "That was a great robot because it was such a sleek and kind of simple thing without trying to overdo the menacing part of it." "Michael Rennie was always one of those great chiseled faces that would work well on-screen- But also, even more so he was excellently chosen as an extraterrestrial." "I will not speak with any one nation or group of nations." "I don't intend to add my contribution to your childish jealousies and suspicions." "Our problems are very complex, Klaatu, you mustn't judge us too harshly." "I can judge only by what I see." "Your impatience is quite understandable." "I'm impatient with stupidity." "He befriends a young boy who befriends him." "And that young boy represents the future of Earth if they listen to Michael Rennie's commandments." "If they heed his warnings, young boys like that will grow up and be able to live full lives and be able to perhaps explore the universe without atomic weapons." "I like you, Mr. Carpenter." "You're a real screwball." "The best scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still for me is where he goes into the scientist's room with the big blackboard and he completes the equations." "It's the scene that I understood as a kid." "And I understood that we could live in harmony with another race from another world because mathematics gave us a kind of level playing field." "Did he do it wrong?" "He just needs a little help." "That was a picture with a very strong and powerful message that they will not let us continue to experiment with atomic bombs." "So long as you were limited to fighting among yourselves with your primitive tanks and aircraft, we were unconcerned." "But soon one of your nations will apply atomic energy to spaceships." "That will create a threat to the peace and security of other planets." "That, of course, we cannot tolerate." "What exactly is the nature of your mission, Mr. Klaatu?" "I came hereto warn you that by threatening danger your planet faces danger." "Very grave danger." "They were able to demonstrate their power." "But it was amazing." "That sequence pays the title off." "It's a wonderful scene where everything stops." "I assume hospitals didn't stop and I assume that nobody was killed during this hiatus from technology." "It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet." "But if you threaten to extend your violence this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder." "Your choice is simple:" "Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration." "We shall be waiting for your answer." "The decision rests with you." "My dad was an amateur astronomer." "When I looked through the telescope..." "That, by the way, he for made for me with his own hands." "...For the first time I looked at Mars and the first time I saw Jupiter." "And the first time I actually was able to perceive the slight hazy rings of Saturn I didn't imagine being attacked by those wonders of the universe." "For me, it was a journey into discovery." "I didn't feel anxious." "I didn't feel a threat from up there." "Mars." "They'll be leaving day after tomorrow." "I wonder if they'll make it." "And what they'll find if they do." "Life, maybe." "Life of some sort." "I know enough about astronomy, about the scale of the universe so that the Drake equation the way in which life seems to inhabit every niche no matter how hostile, that we know about..." "It's almost inconceivable that there isn't life throughout the galaxy and throughout the universe." "Of course, there's life in outer space." "I mean, you'd have to be nuts not to think there was life in outer space." "What that life is, God knows." "Their technology was infinitely superior but in the '50s, outer space was a terrorist haven." "The aggressive alien I think maybe only should exist in entertainment." "Because if they're gonna come in and aggress and attack then in a funny kind of way, they're not so superior if they're carrying that kind of xenophobia." "Just because someone drives a spaceship doesn't mean they're smarter." "Somebody somewhere has more technology than we do which is different." "Who do we send into space?" "Fighter pilots." "We send tough people that can handle a situation." "They're gonna be survivors, right?" "So if this guy is a solo pilot from another star system, he's gonna survive." "We have no idea who we might meet first." "It might be a conquering race or it might be an angelic race that's here to help us." "The invaders from Mars were no angels." "They were here to bend our minds." "They were the thieves of love and trust." "The film was directed by the great art director, William Cameron Menzies who gave it a memorably surreal design on a tiny budget." "Gee whiz." "Whew." "That movie just..." "It just undid my world." "And I saw that movie in a movie theater." "I saw that movie, I believe it was the Kiva theater in Scottsdale, Arizona." "It wasn't first-run, either." "I saw that a couple of years after it had been made." "And I remember it really turned my world around..." ""...because it got to a primal place"" "...which basically says the first people not to trust is your father and mother." "What is the deep-seated psychological fear that's happening here?" "Maybe it's as simple and elemental as you're in a relationship with somebody whether it's child/parent, husband/wife but you never really know what that other person is thinking and they might be evil." "Certainly touched nerves in the kids like myself who saw that movie at a very young age." "That you would come home and you would not recognize your mom and dad." "They would have changed into people who hate you." "Dad, while you were out there, did you see anything?" "Let's not start that flying-saucer nonsense again." " Hey, Dad." " What do you want?" "What happened to your neck?" "It looks like there's a..." "Nothing." "I caught it on a barbed-wire fence." "Barbed wire?" "But there isn't any barbed wire between..." "I caught it on barbed wire, I said!" "That's a shattering, primal attack on all of us when we went to see this movie, but I saw the movie five times." "Because I kept expecting the parents not to turn against the kid." "Somehow, when I was like 11 or 10 years old, and I saw that movie I thought, "Well, maybe the fourth time I see it, the parents will be nice."" "I was, like, thinking that maybe film was like that." "Film, you know, isn't a set story locked in cement, but it can actually change." "The director was at the top of his form in this sequence." " Gotta see the chief right away." " The chief, huh?" "Must be very important." "I think Menzies gave himself the license to do some very Bertolt Brechtian sets because it was a dream." "And only he knew that." "The audience didn't know that." " It's..." "You wouldn't believe me, and..." " What makes you think the chief will?" "What's the trouble, Mac?" "Dinley, come in here." " Just a minute." " Let me go." "Let me out of here." "Forget about the bad costumes." "Forget about the fact that the mutants, as they called them had zippers up the back of their velour suits." "How is this film working on a kind of a metaphorical level?" "And why does it have the power that it does?" "It was a metaphor for parents who were out of control because of alcoholism or a disintegrating relationship or whatever and how terrifying that would look to a child where all of a sudden, parents turn into alien monsters." "What really unseats you as a child when you see that movie at the very end, it was all a dream." "It was all a dream." "He wakes up and his mom's normal and his dad's normal and they don't believe him." "But what happens in the last scene?" "It all happens over and over again." "Gee whiz." "I think that movie is the Groundhog Day of science fiction." "Ha, ha!" "He'll just go through the whole loop and then he'll wake up then he'll go through the loop and wake up." "It'll be a never-ending mirror tunnel of nightmare." "Hey, look up there." "In classic sci-fi the innocence of children often saved the world." "They had the purity of vision adults lacked." "In Jack Arnold's The Space Children only the kids can hear and heed the growing brain from outer space." "It's sending roughly the same message Klaatu did." "You knew it would be here." " Did it tell you?" " Yes." "I don't have a complete memory of the story of Space Children but I just have a couple of key images." "One is of this giant, glowing brain in a cave which seems to be calling children everywhere, like the pied piper to gather around and listen to its message." "And I remember seeing that movie and thinking:" ""Isn't it interesting." "The kids know something that the parents do not."" "And that's where the empowerment of children works its magic at least, it did on me." "Because the parents were unaware of a secret the kids held as a group." "Not an individual child, but there was a group secret and that was important." "Jack never thought he was making a B movie." "None of these filmmakers ever thought they were being lowbrow in their choices, in their career choices." "They thought they were making statements and they thought it was a pleasure for the audience." "They wanted to scare the crap out of the audience." "But they also wanted to say something." "All science fiction ends with a message." "The children of rocket scientists these kids sabotaged the grownups' ICBM." "In their minds, the moral issue is clear." "In the minds of the soldiers and scientists, it never occurs." "You would just think that, if our parents are going to destroy the world children would never do that." "Because we really have all of the tools of tolerance and kind of like global understanding and that's why we, the children, need to be empowered to tell the parents what they need to know to protect all of us, you know, as a whole." "And that's what that movie kind of was saying at the end." "Four, three, two, one, fire." "I don't understand." "Why did it destroy the thunder?" "Why?" "Why?" "It had to, because the world wasn't ready to do it." "The world?" "What do you mean, the world?" "The children all over the world." "They did what we did in every country." "You mean the warheads in Moscow and Prague and London?" " They're all useless?" " Yes." "It is a message and it's a message as immediate as the headlines in that day's newspaper." "It's a little bit daunting that there seems to be this great silence out there." "Why?" "Well, I have a theory and I call it the Whac-A-Mole theory." "Have you ever played Whac-A-Mole?" "It's a carnival game, okay?" "Mole comes up, you hit it." "Another mole comes up, you hit it." "There's a possibility that, if you have gotten on top as a galactic civilization another civilization starts to rise up toward your level you've gotta whack them, because you don't know what they might do." "And they threaten you, your way of life, and your children." "It's sort of how we think, sort of how Americans deal with other cultures and pretty much sort of how all ascendant cultures have dealt with lesser cultures throughout all of human history." "So nature and all of human history support the Whac-A-Mole theory much more than the benign, angelic alien theory." "Never more so than in The War of the Worlds." "In every version of H.G. Wells' immortal tale the alien invaders are purely malevolent." "They're not here to teach us a useful lesson." "They're here to colonize us." " Is that a fireball or something?" " Boy, that's big." "Maybe it's a comet." "I read War of the Worlds in college." "And I had never seen the movie before I was at Long Beach State College and then I saw the movie on television one day." "The earthlings are almost like the residents of a Third World country." "Innocent, eager to welcome and learn from the strangers." "They are moles ready for a whacking." "We're friends, yeah?" "Hey, there, open up." "This happened in so many movies where at least we tried to lead with our..." "Put our best foot forward and show that we are basically good human beings." "And we went out there, and we went out there with all sorts of iconography to get them to understand." "A white flag." "Hey, there, open up." "Come on out." "We're friends." "That's right." "We welcome you." "We're friends, yeah." ""Everybody understands the white flag."" "Look what they got." "A priest with a prayer book, with a Bible walks across, walks towards the machines as he prays from the 23rd Psalm, I believe." "And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." "And what does he get for extending the olive branch?" "He gets lasered." "You know:" "He's gone." "You know, he's toast." "He's a pile of ash." "He was neither the first nor the last victim." "Like our religion, our weaponry was impotent against the invaders." "They're bent on genocide." "And I think some of this subliminally came from the Holocaust." "I think some of this subliminally came from the information that was coming out, every year or so, more and more about the true extent of what happened." "This genocide spared no one." "It was a holocaust that extended to every corner of the globe." "And in the '50s, when they redid it, they redesigned the walkers and turned them into sort of spacey, weird aliens and it was still, in essence, a monster movie." "The movie saw the aliens as pre-moral." "Don't be fooled by his childlike curiosity and appearance." "He's a killer." "That was the state of the art of special effects at that particular point in time." "You look at it now and it's not as good as the book." "The movie, produced by science-fiction specialist, George Pal changed Wells' locale from London to Los Angeles." "But the Martians' capacity for devastation was intact." "Five seconds, four, three, two, one." "Alta, about a million years from now the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy and your father's name will shine again like a beacon in the galaxy." "It's true it will remind us that we are, after all, not God."