Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet is a 1956 science fiction film and a subsequent novelization by W.J. Stuart. The film features a number of spectacular special effects (Oscar nominated), groundbreaking use of an all-electronic music score, and the first screen appearance of the famous Robbie the Robot^[2]. The film's characters and setting were inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest^[1], though the plot is very different. Also notable is its very effective execution and use of well designed sets, props, matte paintings and soundstage scenic paintings.

Select Cast

The cast ^[1] of Forbidden Planet included the following:

• Walter Pidgeon — Dr. Edward Morbius
• Anne Francis — Altaira Morbius
• Leslie Nielsen — Commander John J. Adams
• Jack Kelly — Lt. Jerry Farman
• Warren Stevens — Lt. 'Doc' Ostrow
• Frankie Darro — Robby the Robot (stunt)
• Marvin Miller — Robby the Robot (voice)
• Earl Holliman — Cookie (the Ship's Cook)
• Richard Anderson — Quinn

Plot

In the early 2200s, the United Planets Cruiser C-57D is sent to the planet Altair IV in the Alpha Aquilae (Altair) star system, to find out what happened to the Bellerophon Expedition, sent out some twenty years earlier. As their ship arrives after a year's voyage, the crew detects an immense power source scanning the ship.

They are immediately contacted by Doctor Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) who warns them to leave, but refuses to provide a reason. Upon landing, they are met by Robby the Robot, who takes the Captain, his First Officer and Science Officer to Morbius' home. Morbius explains that a year after the expedition's arrival, some unknown force wiped out nearly everyone in his party and vaporized the Bellerophon as the final survivors tried to take off. Only he, his wife (the former Julia Marston, who later died of natural causes), and infant daughter survived.

Morbius fears that the same fate may await the crew of the C-57D. He and his daughter have remained unharmed, and his house has an interesting array of unknown technology, including Robby, which he states to have "tinkered him together during his first months up here" (with Robby exhibiting advances in technology beyond that currently known), including a home security system which can quickly cover the residence with steel plates.

The C-57D command crew meet Morbius' daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). Altaira is now nineteen years old and has grown distant from any male except her father. She swims naked, wears scanty clothing and is very curious about human relations. The commander is very protective of her but nonetheless competes with his First Officer for the chance to enlighten her on the romantic topics.

Morbius tells the Captain he has been reconstructing the history of the Krell, the long-extinct natives of the planet. They had possessed a technology far in advance of that of the humans, but had all died 200,000 years before in one mysterious night of destruction. The crew are shown a Krell nursery, which includes a "plastic educator" machine that resulted in the captain of the Belerophon's death. Morbius explains that his attempts to use the educator put him into a coma for almost two days, but also resulted in a significantly increased IQ, enabling him to build Robby the Robot and other inventions.

The party leave the nursery and are taken on a tour of the Krell facilities. An underground machine in the shape of a cube 20 miles on a side, powered by 9200 thermonuclear reactors, has been operating, self-repairing and self-maintaining, purpose unknown, since the extinction of the Krell. The effects shots effectively convey images of enormous, miles-deep shafts with huge structures moving up and down, transferring powerful arcs of energy. Power meters indicate the tremendous energy this vast machine could generate, each meter representing 10 times the power of the previous one. Most of the meters are blank, and only one of them indicates any energy usage.

One night, an unknown creature sneaks into the ship and kills the Chief Engineer, tearing his body in the process. In response to the killings, security around the ship is increased including the installation of particle cannons and a defensive force fence. A plaster cast is made from one of the invisible attacker's footprints. Ostrow muses over the improbability of such a creature that doesn't follow evolutionary adaption.

The intruder returns the following night and is found to be invisible. It remains invisible until revealed by special effects: a huge, roaring, leonine biped revealed in outline by the energy neutron-particle-beam guns that flicker over its surface. It kills the ship's First Officer, while in the Krell lab, various power meters come to life as the attack progresses. Morbius, having a nightmare, is awakened by his daughter, also screaming, apparently from the same nightmare. Simultaneously the invisible attacker vanishes and the Krell power meters rapidly fall back to near zero.

Ostrow idly mentions that for the creature to have survived the high energy beams of the cannons it would have to be so dense that it would sink to the center of the planet. The only other explanation is presented as a literal recreation of the creature 'microsecond by microsecond'.

Commander Adams and Doc Ostrow go to Morbius' home to confront him about their latest findings. Ostrow sneaks in to use the Krell educator machine. Before he dies from its effects, he gasps out his revelation: the huge machine was designed to let the Krell materialize anything they wanted at a mere thought. "But the Krell forgot one thing, John. Monsters! Monsters from the id!" Though the Krell considered themselves civilized, their subconscious minds were unleashed by the almost limitless power of the Machine. The race was wiped out in a single night of frenzied destruction, as the machine acted out their darkest urges.

With this revelation, the commander realises that Morbius' sessions with the educator had attuned his mind to the machinery. Although Morbius' conscious mind was not strong enough to control the machine, his subconscious could and did, directing the attacks first against the Bellerophon party when they voted to return to Earth, and now the rescue ship. His deepest desire is simply to be left alone to study the Krell, and his subconscious is using the machine to fulfill that wish. Ultimately, Altaira declares her love for the commander and chooses to leave the planet with him, despite the risks posed by this defiance of her father.

In the climactic attack, the monster breaks into the Krell nursery to which the remaining principals have fled. Morbius, finally accepting the awful truth that the enemy is his own subconscious, throws himself between the monster and his daughter. He is mortally injured, and simultaneously the monster disappears. As he lies dying, he directs Adams to put the Krell machine into overload to initiate the destruction of the planet. He has realized that the machine is far too dangerous to be used by any race that cannot fully control its subconscious desires. Altaira and the surviving crew members escape to a safe distance where they witness the destruction of the planet, and then prepare for the trip to Earth.

Notes

• For modern viewers, some of the technologies featured on the saucer-design starship are interesting, both in their relationship to how human technology has actually developed, and in terms of their influence on later science fiction. In this film, "quantum mechanic" is a job description. The starship has a "quanto-gravitetic" drive system that allows travel over the 16 light year journey distance in about a year. The crew must place themselves in "DC Stations" as the ship comes out of light speed -- a form of restraint in order to avoid injury or death from such braking forces. By contrast, the ship is controlled at least partly manually — at the film's conclusion, the fact that Robby can navigate the ship is considered a novelty (obviously the ship itself does not have a complete autopilot). Approximately a half-century later, faster-than-light travel seems as impossible as ever, but the idea of requiring manual calculations or manual labor to navigate a ship is badly dated.

• This was the first film in which Humans constructed a flying saucer and used it to travel in outer space.

• For the film, a full-size mockup of three quarters of the C-57D was built to suggest its full width of 170 ft (51 meters).

• Robby the Robot was possibly the most expensive film prop ever constructed at the time ($125,000);^[3] he also featured in the film The Invisible Boy. He also made two separate appearances, playing different characters in the TV series Lost in Space ^[4]. He made a cameo appearance in the 1984 film Gremlins; he can be seen in the background during a telephone conversation scene at an inventors' convention repeating select lines from Forbidden Planet.

• The adamantine steel of the Krell which was used by Morbius to create protection for his residence shares a common etymological origin with the fictional metal adamantium, although the word "adamantine" itself is from an old word for "of diamond" or "diamond-like" and in modern mineralogy denotes a form of the gem corundum.

• The original 1952 screen treatment was titled "Fatal Planet" by Irving Block and Allen Adler; the screenplay by Cyril Hume was retitled "Forbidden Planet" which was felt to have more box-office appeal^[5].

• Block and Adler's treatment took place in the year 1976 on the planet Mercury. An expedition headed by John Grant is sent to the planet to retrieve Dr. Adams and his daughter Dorianne who have been stranded there for twenty years. The plot is roughly the same as the final film, though Grant is able to rescue both Adams and his daughter and escape the invisible monster stalking them.

• Forbidden Planet was released on DVD in 1999 on Warner Brothers, catalogue number 65059. It comes with both standard and widescreen format visuals and English, French and Spanish soundtrack and subtitle options. This was followed by a release of the 50th Anniversary and the Ultimate Collector's Edition DVDs in November 2006 ^[6]

• Forbidden Planet was released on HD-DVD on 28th November 2006. In honour of its fiftieth anniversary, the film was restored by the Warner Bros. reconstruction crew^[7]

• The animated sequences used for the special effects (especially the attack of the Id Monster) were animated by veteran FX animator, Joshua Meador who was loaned to MGM from Walt Disney Pictures for the film. Curiously, shots showing the shape of the invisible Id Monster outlined in the blaster beams were evidently removed from some prints shown on TV — presumably because its monstrous appearance was considered too terrifying for younger viewers — and it was many years before these shots were restored. The Id Monster vaguely resembles the Looney Tunes character "Gossamer". Interestingly, however, a close look at the Id Monster shows it to have a small goatee beard, suggesting that it is the product of the deep psychology of Dr. Morbius, the only other figure in the movie with this feature.

• After the movie came out, there followed a novelization by W.J. Stuart. The book delves further into the mystery of the vanished Krell, and Morbius's relationship to them. In the novel Morbius repeatedly exposes himself to the Krell mind machine, which (as suggested in the film) increases his brain power far beyond human intelligence. Unfortunately, Morbius retains enough of his imperfect human nature to be afflicted with hubris (his contempt for humanity, not to mention military command structure, is obvious). Not recognizing his own limitations is Morbius' downfall, as it had been for the Krell.

Mythic precursors

The use of the name "Bellerophon" ties in with Morbius's character in several ways:

• The mythical Greek hero Bellerophon was struck down by the gods for the crime of hubris in trying to reach Olympian heights.
• One of Bellerophon's greatest feats was his victory over the Chimera, a monster with mismatched body parts appropriate to many other animals. When the ship's doctor tries to reconstruct the Monster from the Id based on a cast of its footprint, he is puzzled by its having attributes appropriate to many different and incompatible animals.
• Morbius was taken to his unintended exile by a ship sharing the same name as the ship that transported Napoleon Bonaparte to his final exile, the HMS Bellerophon.

Morbius tells Adams and Farman to view the Krell thermonuclear reactions only in the mirror: "Man does not behold the face of the Gorgon and live."

While not stated explicitly in the film, the novelization compared Altaira's ability to tame the tiger (until her sexual awakening) to the medieval myth of a unicorn being tamable only by a virgin woman.

As mentioned, the film was influenced by Shakespeare's The Tempest, though the plot of the film only superficially resembles the plot of the play. Some of the characters can more clearly be opposed:

• Prospero = Morbius
• Miranda = Altaira
• Ariel = Robby (or alternately, Monster from the Id)
• Caliban = Monster from the Id (or alternately, Robby the Robot).

However, although the identification of Ferdinand with Commander Adams, Stephano and Trinculo with Cookie, and Gonzalo with "Doc" Ostrow is tempting, the characters do not really match up. There are no further identifications for important characters such as Alonso, Antonio, or Sebastian.

Robby the Robot can be identified with Caliban -- he's clumsy; he does the housework, he gets drunk with the ship's crew; "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine," Prospero says in The Tempest. The "monsters from the Id" represent the spirits, in addition to Ariel, who were invisible and controlled by Prospero. Alternately, most critical sources (see The Tempest) have identified the libidinous Caliban with the Id Monster, and the sexless Robby with Ariel, despite Robby's corporality. This is probably because Robby is entirely in Morbius' control, and because Robby, like Ariel, cannot be used to do harmful acts, going into lockup in somewhat the same way as Ariel when commanded to do "abhorred" acts by the witch Sycorax. Robby acts in accordance with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and is unable even to act against the Id Monster, which actually would require the killing of Morbius.

The title of the film surely alludes to forbidden fruit, as some critics have noted,^[8] reminding us that The Tempest itself is a version of the "Eden lost" story, in which isolated islands seem Brave New Worlds full of innocent people and different kinds of Serpents. Altaira, with her garden of tame animals and her ignorance of the meaning of nakedness, represents the innocence which is soon to be brought down by the forbidden fruit of knowledge, here represented both by the starship full of ordinary men, and by the re-awakening of the slumbering technologies of the Krell.

Unlike Prospero, the wizardly character Dr. Morbius is not in full command of the magic of the technology he discovers, and like the Krell he is ultimately destroyed by the combination of power and what Commander Adams calls "the secret devil of every soul on the planet." As the loser in a pact with technology and hidden desires, Dr. Morbius has something in common with Dr. Faustus, and this film of the post-atomic age also is keeping with the warnings of the Faust mythos.

Forbidden Planet follows Aristotle's rules for tragedy. A great man is brought down by a single tragic flaw — his belief in his moral superiority, which supposedly follows his intellectual superiority. The same flaw destroyed the "noble Krell" as well. And, as Aristotle preferred, the story takes place over 20 years, yet is told almost entirely through exposition.

Soundtrack

The movie's innovative electronic music score (credited as Electronic Tonalities partly to avoid having to pay movie industry music guild fees) was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron. Their score is widely credited with being the first completely electronic film score, and helped open the door for electronic music in film. The synthesized sounds of "bleats, burps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums and screeches" that comprise the sound track contained carefully developed themes and motifs, while supporting the general atmosphere of the various scenes^[3].

Using the equations presented in the 1948 book, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by mathematician Norbert Wiener, Louis Barron constructed the electronic circuits which he used to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated using a circuit called a ring modulator. After recording the base sounds, Louis and Bebe Barron further manipulated the material by adding effects: such as reverb and delay, and reversing or changing the speed of certain sounds.^[9] The soundtrack for Forbidden Planet preceded the Moog synthesizer of 1964 by almost a decade.

The innovative soundtrack was released on a vinyl LP album and, later, on a music CD: with a six-page colour booklet containing images from Forbidden Planet plus liner notes from the composers, Louis & Bebe Barron, and Bill Malone. ^[9]

Track list

The following is a list of compositions on the CD:^[9]

1. Main Titles (Overture)
2. Deceleration
3. Once Around Altair
4. The Landing
5. Flurry Of Dust - A Robot Approaches
6. A Shangri-La In The Desert / Garden With Cuddly Tiger
7. Graveyard - A Night With Two Moons
8. "Robby, Make Me A Gown"
9. An Invisible Monster Approaches
10. Robby Arranges Flowers, Zaps Monkey
11. Love At The Swimming Hole
12. Morbius' Study
13. Ancient Krell Music
14. The Mind Booster - Creation Of Matter
15. Krell Shuttle Ride And Power Station
16. Giant Footprints In The Sand
17. "Nothing Like This Claw Found In Nature!"
18. Robby, The Cook, And 60 Gallons Of Booze
19. Battle With The Invisible Monster
20. "Come Back To Earth With Me"
21. The Monster Pursues - Morbius Is Overcome
22. The Homecoming
23. Overture (Reprise)

Influences

A number of similarities between Forbidden Planet and later science fiction movies and TV shows have been noted by observers. Star Trek is mentioned particularly often, both in its general structure and in the plots and details of various episodes. Indeed, Gene Roddenberry noted in his biography Star Trek Creator that Forbidden Planet was one of the inspirations for Star Trek^[10].

The Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah" shows many similarities to Forbidden Planet, as it is also based on The Tempest.

In Serenity, the movie finale to the TV show Firefly, the plot revelation is made on the planet Miranda, which itself contains several references, including uses of the number C-57D.^[11]

Trivia

In the movie Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Laurie Strode, has Forbidden Planet playing on the television while she babysits. Curtis and Planet star Leslie Nielsen would later appear together in the 1980 film Prom Night.

In Babylon 5 one particular shot of the Great Machine of Epsilon 3 (as seen in the episode "A Voice in the Wilderness") bears a strong resemblance to the bridge through the Great Machine of the Krell in Forbidden Planet. (Babylon 5's producer claims that this similarity was clear at the time of production but the form the shot took was due to production requirements, and was not a deliberate reference to the film.)^[12]

In the musical The Rocky Horror Show, and its film adaptation, the opening song Science Fiction/Double Feature references many classic SF films; one line is "Anne Francis stars in (ooo, ooo, ooo) Forbidden Planet"

In the classic sci-fi film The Blob, the poster for Forbidden Planet is seen on the theater that is playing the midnight "spook show" (which is the theater that the Blob later on invades).

Robby, the C-57D as well as Robby's vehicle were used in a few of the original Twilight Zone episodes, including "To Serve Man", Robby appeared in "Uncle Simon" and "On Thursday We Leave for Home", the latter of which also reused the crew's uniforms.

Robby appeared on the TV series "Lost in Space" as the evil robot in "War of the Robots" Season 1, episode 20.

The "Klystron frequency modulator", which appears as a coil of copper piping was used as a prop in Star Trek: First Contact as a component that Barclay used to repair the Phoenix.

References

Wikipedia information about Forbidden Planet This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Forbidden Planet". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.