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Forbidden Planet
This nOde
last updated June 10th, 2004 and is permanently morphing...
(8 K'an (Corn) / 7 Zots
(Bat) - 164/260 - 12.19.11.6.4)
Directed by
Fred M. Wilcox
Writing credits
Irving Block (story)
Alan J. Adler
Genre: Sci-Fi
Tagline: Amazing!
Plot Outline: A starship crew goes to investigate
the silence of a planet's colony only to find two survivors and a deadly
secret that one of them has.
Cast overview, first billed only:
 |
Runtime: USA:98
Country: USA
Language:
English
Color: Color (Eastmancolor)
Sound Mix: 4-Track Stereo
Certification: USA:G / UK:U / Finland:K-12
BASIC PLOT: An expedition is sent out from Earth
to the fourth planet of Altair,
a great mainsequence star in constellation Aquilae to find out what happened
to a colony of settlers which landed twenty years before and had not been
heard from since.
THEME: An inferior civilization (namely ours) comes
into contact
with the remains of a greatly advanced alien
civilization, the Krell—200,000 years removed. The "seed" of destruction
from one civilization is being passed on to another, unknowingly at first.
The theme of this movie is very much Good vs. Evil.
Forbidden Planet is a classic 1956 science
fiction film. The film features a number of spectacular special effects
and was the first screen appearance of the famous Robby the Robot.
In the film, a starship from Earth arrives
at a planet of Altair to find out what happened to an expedition to that star
some twenty years previously; on arrival, they find the ship being scanned
by some immense power source, and they are contacted by the sole survivor of
the expedition, Doctor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon). On landing, they are met by
Robby the Robot, who takes them to Morbius' house. Morbius explains that within
a year of the expedition arriving, some unknown force
had wiped them out overnight, except for himself and his infant daughter. He
fears the same may happen to the starship, though he has no fears for himself,
as he and his daughter have been unharmed since then, and his house has an interesting
array of high-tech defences.
The captain Leslie Nielsen queries such technological abilities on the part
of Morbius, whose speciality, as a philologist on the original expedition, had
been in languages.
Morbius shows the captain what he has been working on
for the last twenty years. He had been reconstructing the history, and some
of the minor technologies (such as Robby) of the Krell, the planet's native
race, who had all died in one mysterious night of total destruction, a quarter
of a million years before. He shows tham a Krell nursery; this includes an "education
machine" that instantly killed one person who tried it, and put Morbius
himself into a coma for weeks, though he recovered with an enormously increased
intelligence. Then he shows them the interior of the planet, where a vast underground
machine, powered by tens of thousands of fusion
reactors, has been operating, self-repairing and self-maintaining, for some
unknown purpose, for all the millennia since the death of the Krell. The effects
shots of the Great Machine are well done, showing miles-deep shafts, with huge
and incomprehensible structures moving up and down, and vast energy discharges
passing between them. (The 1990s television series Babylon 5 also had a Great
Machine beneath a planetary surface, and some of the visual effects of that
are plainly done as a homage to the machine in Forbidden Planet.)
Things get interesting for the captain when he meets Morbius'
beautiful but extremely naive daughter Altaira (Anne Francis); now nineteen
years old, she is very curious about human relations, and the captain, establishing
the tradition so avidly followed by James T. Kirk, enlightens her on some aspects
of this. At night, while Morbius sleeps in the Krell nursery, and power meters
all round the walls start going off the scale, the ship comes under attack from
some invisible being made of pure energy. Morbius is awakened by his daughter
screaming from a nightmare; the attacker vanishes and the power meters revert
back to zero
as he wakes up... The starship's doctor sneaks in to use the education machine;
though he dies from its effects, he gasps out his realisation of what killed
the Krell; the huge machine was for the materialisation of any object desired,
making the Krell able to produce anything they wanted at a mere thought. But:
"They forgot one thing, John. Monsters! Monsters from the Id!"
Though the Krell considered themselves civilised, their
unconscious minds also had access to the machineries, and the race was wiped
out in one night of frenzied destruction as the Great Machine enabled the acting
out of their unconscious urges. In the confrontation that follows with Morbius,
he realises that his session with the Educator had attuned his mind to the machinery,
and he (or, rather, his wish to be left alone to study the Krell) had been responsible
for the deaths of the rest of the expedition. Though he realises that his daughter
is of an age where she really should be meeting other people and forming relationships,
other, darker desires of his have control over the machinery, prompting the
attack on the starship that might take his daughter away. The film ends with
Morbius' suicide, as the only means to protect everyone else from destruction
by another Machine-powered monster, and the triggering of the self-destruction
of the Machine as too dangerous to be used by any race without full control
over its mental processes.
Overall, though it preceded the television series by some years, Forbidden Planet is remarkably like one of the better Star Trek episodes: it could easily have been (but never was) adapted as an episode in that series, complete with the starship captain's amorous entanglements with the girl. Gene Roddenberry admitted in his biography "Star Trek Creator" that Forbidden Planet was one of the inspirations for Star Trek.
Robby the Robot was possibly the most expensive film prop
ever constructed at the time:
he also featured in the film The Invisible Boy. He made a cameo appearance in
the 1980s
film Gremlins; he can be seen in the background during a telephone
conversation scene at an inventor's convention.
The animated
sequences used for the special effects (especially the attack of the Id Monster)
were produced by Walt Disney Studios, and animated by Disney
veteran Ub Iwerks.
In the 1990s, a tongue-in-cheek
stage musical adaptation was made, entitled Return to the Forbidden Planet,
which had some success.
Forbidden Planet is also the name of a science fiction and fantasy bookshop in London, England, that began life as a small store and susequently expanded into much larger premises on New Oxford Street, then added a chain of smaller shops across the UK and Ireland. On September 30, 2003 the London branch moved to even bigger premises at the eastern end of Shaftesbury Avenue.
dub
drill & bass track _Terrible Monster Attacking Crew_ MP3
by TRS-80 off of _Mr. Kickass_ on Invisible (2002)8.56
by Shpongle
off of _Tales Of The Inexpressable_ CD on Twisted
(2001) |
 |
release _Soundtrack For The Film Forbidden Planet_ by Louis & Bebe Barron (1954)
First mainstream film to have the music performed entirely
by electronic instruments, including the Theremin,
the soundtrack taking a year to be created. The first Hollywood filmscore to
use electronic music (the first all-electronic soundtrack was for Anais
Nin's _The Bells of Atlantis_
in 1952). Music from cybernetic
(controlled feedback)
circuitry especially designed by the Barrons...music of the Krells, monsters
from the Id. The Barrons also assisted John
Cage in the making of _Williams Mix_ MP3 (160k)
off of _Ohm:
The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music 1948-1980_ CDx3.
Shangri-La
In The Desert Garden With Cuddly Tiger_ MP3Moons_
Shakespeare's
_The Tempest_.
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