"Attention." "Captain to crew, attention." "Our destination, Altair-4, is now visible on the main view plate." "Forbidden Planet really was the Star Wars of the 1950s." "It was the first film I know of where you were immersed in this other world, with no compromises." "Even people who didn't read science fiction could tell when watching Forbidden Planet that they were seeing something made by people who respected the genre." "The imagination really was at play, and still is, when you watch this film." "The idea of a creature from the unconscious is really, really different." "Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical scientific values, gentlemen." "Forbidden Planet was me benchmark for years just in terms of sheer production value and scope." "The effects were stellar, but so was the story." "It was a perfect match." "It's that MGM gloss, and instead of Singin' in the Rain, it's science fiction." "Flying saucer, cool robot..." "Can I be of service, sir?" "...and a horrible monster." "Now, what could be better than that?" "The sci-fi films before Forbidden Planet were really low-budget." "Usually they were B pictures, or black and white." "They had a reputation of being, generally speaking, adequate or bad." "What passed for science fiction were what we'd call giant-bug movies." "You got your yuks, it sold popcorn, and everybody was happy." "And that was good enough." "It was just a formula the formulas were great and it worked, but Forbidden Planet broke it because it was in color and wide-screen and because of the incredible special effects." "Forbidden Planet, it was the first science-fiction film to step beyond the bounds of the solar system." "It's the first time in the 1950s that Earth people showed up in a flying saucer." "All clear, sir." "Previously, it was always the aliens showed up in flying saucers." "Look at the color of that sky." "It was a serious attempt to represent a completely unique world." "And it wasn't good enough to just say, "It's not the world you know."" "It's gotta be a world that nobody knows and at the same time, everyone recognizes as being alien." "I mean, that whole world was created from scratch." "MGM, during the '50s, was one of the biggest studios around." "They weren't looking for a B picture with this." "They wanted this to be the first science-fiction A film." "At MGM, you're talking about the crown jewel Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio departments were in full steam still, and you look at the polish and shine in those pictures." "And this picture had that MGM you know, magic." "This was new for MGM." "They had done fantasy films, certainly." "The Wizard of Oz, their biggie." "And they had done other fantasy films and horror films, to a degree, but nothing space-oriented." "Cyril Hume was the actual screenwriter of Forbidden Planet." "But Adler and Irving Block both got co-credit because they actually came up with the story." "They modeled a great deal of the film on The Tempest which was à la Shakespeare." "The Tempest involves a man named Prospero." "Perhaps the most powerful magician in the world." "But also had a blind spot." "He was filled with ego." "His evil brother exiled him to a Mediterranean island where he remained, with his daughter, for 12 years." "And then a ship coming and finding them and she falls in love with one of the men on the ship." "So you have definite parallels." "The Tempest asks one fundamental question:" "If you had the power of a god, and you had your enemies right here what would you do with them?" "It was a pretty good adaptation of the play." "And it bears scrutiny as an oddball Shakespeare picture." "There've been so many Shakespearean adaptations and translations and reinterpretations and to do a science-fiction take or an outer-space take on The Tempest is a particularly smart idea." "Well, there's a serious undertone to the film that was simply missing from other science-fiction films of the period and I think the key factor is that the characters believe their roles." " Father." " Alta." "We all, as actors, made it a point, from the very beginning to take the story seriously and to play it for real." "This film was not a kid picture although it certainly had elements that kids adored." "It was far deeper than that." "Fred Wilcox, who was the director discussed the film with everybody working on it and he said, "This is a serious film, and treat it like that."" "Knock that off, Quinn." "It is interesting for today's audiences to see Leslie Nielsen in a straight dramatic, even romantic, lead role." "I was a stalwart, disciplined, obviously, strong leading man who was dealing with this girl who did not know what her endowments actually were." "Ha, ha." "And I did." "Come on in." "Didn't bring my bathing suit." "What's a bathing suit?" "Altaira was the perfect virgin, and the commander was the perfect hero on the white horse." "Anne Francis is sporting, and sporting it very well, miniskirts-.." "...and this was before miniskirts came in, which was the 1960s." "So once again it..." "We're looking into the future, right?" "It's very much a '50s picture." "I mean, you know the wonderful Anne Francis swimming in that naked suit she's wearing." "Ha, ha." "But at the same time, it's dealing with very real issues." "I suppose one day I shall be obliged to make the trip to Earth with her for the sake of her natural development." "I should say fairly soon too." "Altaira has to go through an odd little arc." "She has to not like Adams then fall in love with him." "She has to love her father then begin to mistrust her father and choose Adams over her father." "That alone makes it a masterpiece of space opera." "You'll find the silver in the dining room and my daughter's jewelry on her table." "Walter Pidgeon, at the time, was one of MGM's stars." "He had a great voice." "He had a great look about him." "Nobody could've played Morbius like he did." "Pidgeon gave the picture this feel of seriousness that it was taking itself seriously, while at the same time having fun." "Now, right here is where I do my quick dissolve into a beard and a space suit before I introduce you to Robby the Robot." "Everybody knows who Robby the Robot is." "He was probably the most unique robot ever created for a movie." "I remember that first day." "The crew just stood around and looked at it and wondered, "What the hell is this gonna do?" Ha-ha-ha." "You are a robot, aren't you?" "That is correct, sir." "He said, "We've got the star of this movie."" "What was great about Robby is when he was just standing there doing nothing, he stole the show." "Robby was totally acceptable immediately and also added so tremendously to the believability of everything that you were watching and seeing." "Robots before Forbidden Planet had been of the somewhat clunky variety, where you've got, basically three metal blocks with a head." "Robby could have gone that way." "There were early drawings that could have taken him in that direction." "But the art directors and the people involved really wanted to make him unique." "I designed it so that he can do practically anything." "And especially emphasized, uh, his strength and all you know, being a mechanical thing." "You could see where his joints worked." "You could see he had gyroscopes inside of his dome, going around, to keep him upright." "There was all kinds of stuff that could easily be thought of as being real technology." "That was the big difference between Robby and every movie robot before that." "Robby looked like he might work." "The idea that you would have a robot who would be a friend instead of an enemy certainly was a novel one." "This, again, comes from respect for the genre." "The character of Robby the Robot follows all of the basic laws of robotics." "Turn around here." "Asimov's Three Laws of robotics start off:" "One, the robot cannot harm a human being." "Fire." "Two, a robot must obey all orders except where they would conflict with the First Law." " Would 60 gallons be sufficient?" " Gallons?" "And the Third Law is a robot must protect its own existence except where it would be interfering with the First or Second Laws." "Order canceled." "And clearly, the people who wrote Forbidden Planet were aware of these laws." "When MGM made Forbidden Planet they were smart because they went to Caltech to get a lot of the science for it and so it was very state-of-the-art of the time." "They thought if they were gonna do a science-fiction film they had to do it big." "So the Art Department and the Special Effects Department they did a little more than they were supposed to do in putting this thing together." "Cedric Gibbons, the head of all the art directors at the studio he left Arthur Lonergan alone to be the art director on the film and Lonergan really grabbed a hold of it and said this is a great opportunity to make something really cool." "One of the things that he did was he actually had sets built that were way bigger than what they had in the budget and was able to get them about half built before the Budget Department came down on him." "So they built all these really elaborate sets and had to finish them because they were half done." "They threw major resources behind the film." "They had built this spaceship and it came down like a giant mushroom with this pillar down the center and it had to be 40 or 50 feet across, up at the top." "When we, as actors, first walked in, and they showed us the flying saucer and everything around us we were extremely impressed by it." "Loved it." "Loved it." "Hey, what's this dust coming?" "They had the entire stage with a big 350-foot cyclorama down at one end and when you stood at the other end the sense of depth and perspective was incredible." "They knew that audiences had never seen anything presented quite like this." "Not at this scale." "Not in a movie." "The effects were handled by Arnold Gillespie." "He'd done Wizard of Oz, a lot of other films." "It was great." "He wasn't a technician doing effects, he was an artist." "That flying saucer was the best spaceship really until 2001, many years later." "It's an incredibly clear and crisp and sharp and indelible image." "All the effects were done with really tried-and-true methods developed since the dawn of cinema." "It was all matte paintings and miniatures and animation." "There wasn't anything startling in terms of new technology but it was a very creative use of it." "And I think that film was a touchstone for the concept that the effects weren't the attraction." "The effects were in support of the story." "My favorite scene, and possibly the favorite scene of everybody who had read science fiction, is the world of the Krell." "One of the brilliant things of the story is not showing you the Krell at all." "You got the feeling of the Krell." "They show you their doorway so evidently they were very, very wide, but not real tall." "You don't know if they're insect people or what they are." "This is just one of their laboratories." "It's quite smart not to show them, and these hints are all very evocative." "Now, you can see that this headset was designed for something much bulkier than my human cranium." "When Pidgeon's showing the mind thing, you can see how big these heads were." "But you never got to see an image of them, which I thought was great because my own mind created this pretty weird-looking thing." "The Krell underground, at one point, they go through this big shaft which is really interesting." "It looks bottomless." "It's an attempt to show science that's beyond anything we can imagine." "Since Fritz Lang's Metropolis, nobody had ever attempted scale in science fiction before." "And that kind of scale was simply boggling." "Then you get to see these amazing miniature sets with little tiny people walking through these just vast networks of machinery that is still alive." "They built a model of this sort of shaft." "See, we shot horizontally with the camera probably on its side." "They had them going from one end of the stage which was the largest stage on the MGM lot down to the very end on the other side." "It's as long as a football field." "They put that tremendous matte shot on it afterwards." "That was what impressed me most in the picture." "There's a moment when they're walking inside the planet and Walter Pidgeon points and he says:" "Seventy-eight hundred levels." "It really is awesome." "Wow." "It was just huge." "It was this huge underground place." "You almost..." "Looking back, it's almost like the inverse of the Death Star." "They go into another area and it looks like super hydroelectric power." "It's science fiction and it's futuristic, but it's got that technology of the '50s creeping in." "It gave you a sense of the power and the scope of what the aliens had created." "Yes, a single machine." "A cube 20 miles on each side." "The idea of the Krell reaching a level of sophistication and technological accomplishment where their thoughts become real they're instantly realized, and of course they destroyed themselves." "Ninety-two hundred thermonuclear reactors in tandem." "The harnessed power of an exploding planetary system." "In that respect, you could say it has political overtones because everybody was very concerned in those days about nuclear weaponry." "To think that that entire race is gone, that civilization is gone is very poignant, and adds a real melancholy to the entire film." "All of these little details go to make up good science fiction whether it's written science fiction or filmed science fiction." "So when they came to making each decision, they made the right one all the way up to even the music and how to do the music." "Louis and Bebe Barron created a soundtrack that was like no other soundtrack that had ever existed before and they invented electronic music that you know today." "There were not even half a dozen people who were doing electronic music at that point." "And there wasn't any commercial equipment so Louis had to build everything." "They had a lot of oscillators, electronic circuits which generate tones and tonalities." "It's the precursor to the music synthesizer." "They were kids with these pieces of equipment and good Lord, I mean, it's a classic, classic score." "The thought was they were going to do what amounted to sound effects and somebody else would do the score overall." "It took us about eight months to just do the raw sounds of Forbidden Planet." "Believe it or not they loved what we came up with and gave us the whole film to score." "The fact that a major studio would make the decision on their big spectacle science-fiction movie to put this weird music you can't realize what that was like in the '50s." "It was difficult." "Ha-ha-ha." "It was a very hard way to make music." "It took us forever to do anything." "It was sort of like an impromptu work, because they had so many loops going they had vacuum tubes." "It was a truly experimental score and I've heard nothing like it in any movie." "Certainly, the strongest part of the movie for me is the sounds of the id monster." "It was terrifying to hear that when I was a child." "Your imagination was fuelled by the sound of that creature." " Joe." " What?" " Do you hear something?" " Like what?" "Like a son of big breathing." "When you hear those, boom, boom, starting with the id and stuff, man, it was chilling." "I mean, people shivered in fright and people would come up and say to us, "Your music for the id..." ""...sounds just like dreams that I have all the time."" "And it was like their subconscious." "So that's, of course, what we liked best to hear:" ""You're expressing our subconscious."" "The genius of the score is the fact that the score plays as music and sound effects at the same time." "And they carry a mood and tone every bit as much as if it was a full orchestra." "Unfortunately, we had to contend with the musicians' union." "This was the only feature film released from a studio that had a score that involved no musicians." "Since they weren't using traditional instruments, they couldn't take the credit of being musicians." "So they made them take a credit of electronic tonalities." "It prevented them from being even nominated for an Academy Award." "The one thing that kids really wanted from their space movies in the '50s was they wanted monsters." "Forbidden Planet used one of the techniques that really accomplished horror filmmakers and horror writers do-.." "...which is you don't show all of the monster." "You let people's imaginations fill it in." "Here's this invisible monster sneaking up to the ship you see the footprints down in the sands." "It was unbelievable." "When you saw the stairway that went up to go into the spaceship and all of a sudden you saw the stair going:" "Dreadful fellow." "Ha-ha-ha." "The brilliance of Forbidden Planet is this whole idea of the Freudian monster, the monster from the id which was a really cool, weird idea at the time." "It's still one of the best science-fiction ideas ever." "Freud's theories on psychology was that there was an id that was between the ego and the superego." "And the id was where all of our primitive side resided." "You're talking about Freud meeting outer space." "So you had the character portrayed by Walter Pidgeon you know, who doesn't even realize that he's doing this." "Made you wonder, who is the villain in this story?" "And where was all of this coming from?" "Nice and creepy." "The monster from the id wasn't intended to be something that you saw but they realized somewhere during the shooting... .-.that they really needed to see something." "Activate main batteries." "MGM said, "Look, we're going for terror." "This thing has got to be a nightmare." "It's gotta be all the things that a good character has." "It's gotta be mobile..." ""...it's gotta be scary, it's gotta look menacing."" "They went through concepts of what it could look like." "Some were almost comical to something really kind of gruesome, like a worm-looking thing." "It was kind of hideous." "The creepiest one is, since it's Walter Pidgeon it's Walter Pidgeon's head on this two-legged biped thing." "Really hideous-looking." "I mean, that would have scared people, I think." "There was worries about how to do the id monster." "Do it with some son of stop-motion system like a Ray Harryhausen thing, and I think that may have looked too solid." "But they went with an animation approach." "MGM had an Optical Department, had a Matte Department had a Special Effects Department." "The only thing they didn't have at that time was an Effects Animation Department." "So MGM called up Walt Disney Studios and asked if they could borrow Josh Meador, who was an animator." "He was like their premier animator at Disney Studios." "In Fantasia, he came up with most of the really great concepts." "The dinosaur fights and stuff like that." "He was great at doing, like, lava flows." "I mean, the guy was probably one of their best animators." "Well, Josh Meador not only did, of course, the id monster but he also did, like, the beam that you see coming off the flying saucer as it's landing." "Robby shorting out when you see the electrical arcing across his head and all that stuff, and the ray-gun blasts." "All of that sort of work." "When they were doing the id drawings, he gave me a bunch of them and they're like CinemaScope proportion but they're in pencil, and I said, "Well, where are the cels?"" "And he said they didn't really do cels this time." "But he said they just took that, they shot it on a high-con film reversed the polarity, did it in negative, and then it was sort of a red tint that went to it and yellow eyes and it was really pretty neat." "And by shooting them in reverse you could see through it, which is kind of cool." "As far as I know, it might be one of the first times they didn't actually use cel animation." "Fire!" "Skipper, the blasted thing's invisible." "And that you only see the monster from the id in the outline of their laser gun, the way that's done, it's fabulous." "It's got those massive shoulders up there that make it look enormous and powerful." "And the head below coming right at you as opposed to the head above, and it's got this great mouth with the teeth and the eyes." "And it was really scary." "I remember hiding behind the seat in our car." "We were watching that movie at the drive-in." "I had grown up seeing all the old films on television, and I knew that Dracula was just a guy in a cape." "And I knew that Frankenstein was just a guy in funny makeup." "But the monster from the id, in Forbidden Planet was not a guy in funny makeup." "And it scared the bejesus out of me." "When this film was released in 1956, Forbidden Planet was one of those flukes that didn't make it the first time but over the years got its audience." "Forbidden Planet really was the movie." "It really is heads above every other science-fiction film that was made in that era." "And I think influenced everything after that." "Everybody knew what written science fiction could show you but nobody until Forbidden Planet, I think, had seen what filmed science fiction could really do." "Forbidden Planet could very easily have been a pilot film for Star Trek." "I had met with Gene Roddenberry a couple times and he had mentioned that Forbidden Planet was what he wanted to do." "He wanted to take that and make it into a TV series." "Even Star Wars can be attributed to Forbidden Planet." "R2D2 is sort of a Robby the Robot kind of character and in Star Wars they talk about your common blasters..." "Fire." "...which is right out of Forbidden Planet." "And the way that Princess Leia appears it's exactly the way Anne Francis appears." "The stuff that they proposed has sort of come into being now." "Like where they had these little communicators with the video cameras on them." "It was some pretty advanced ideas." "I can play back every scene, every frame, practically in my head, from every shot in it, because I've seen it so many times." "This movie influenced an awful lot of us from when we were really young." "The Lord sure makes some beautiful worlds." "Forbidden Planet is a great film for my childhood and my memories and me falling in love with cinema." "Batteries, fire." "It was one of the movies that I saw that made me want to be a director." "It's a movie of ideas and that's really why the film has become the classic that it is." "It's good to be in a picture that people still talk about 50 years later." "Each new generation that comes along sort of rediscovers it." "I got a phone call just recently from my grandson, saying:" ""Grandma, Grandma, I just saw you on television."" "And it was Forbidden Planet." "Ha, ha." " Just once more." "Do you mind?" " Oh, not at all." "A lot of things become old-fashioned and for something to remain that interesting and that fresh..." "In its category, it's the granddaddy." "Forbidden Planet's the first film that is not just science fiction but super science fiction."