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Forbidden Planet Celebrates 50th Anniversary

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By GustavoLeao / 06:36, 29 March 2006 / General Genre/SciFi

The seminal science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, starring Leslie Nielsen as starship Commander Adams and Anne Francis as Altaira, premiered on the big screen in March 1956 and celebrates its 50th Anniversary this month. In the movie, the crew of the United Planets starship C-57D goes to investigate the silence of a planet's colony only to find two survivors and a deadly secret that one of them has.



Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry often credited Forbidden Planet for its influence on Star Trek. "Roddenberry spoke with me about how he had lifted a number of things from Forbidden Planet," Francis says, "like the hologram and beam me up, Scotty."

"Forbidden Planet could have been the pilot film for Star Trek," Nielsen says, adding with a laugh, "And maybe it was."

"The '50s are famous for a proliferation of science-fiction movies, most of them intended to be cheap entertainment," says M. Keith Booker, author of Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture "Forbidden Planet had the highest budget (an estimated $1.9 million) to date of any science-fiction film. It has Technicolor and widescreen. It was a conscious effort to make a quality film. It had predecessors like The Day the Earth Stood Still, but Forbidden Planet is much more of an exploration of the artistic possibilities."

The original article can be found here.



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RE: All hail FORBIDDEN PLANET!!! | Report this post to moderator
By: GustavoLeao (Odo's file, contact, web site) @ 05:48:28 on Mar 30, 2006

Agree. Forbidden Planet could really be the true Trek prequel and the saucer-shaped C-57D could be the first Federation starship. And the art direction in this movie is just beatiful. I am a big fan of the movie since I saw it on television in the late seventies, before I became a Trek fan.

Gustavo

--------

TrekWeb.com Supervising Editor

gl2000@uol.com.br

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RE: All hail FORBIDDEN PLANET!!! | Report this post to moderator
By: Daisy (Odo's file, contact) @ 18:00:43 on Mar 30, 2006

Glad to hear my opinon so well voiced. I have thought for years that "Forbidden Planet" was really an early Starfleet adventure. While it is true that there are no women or minorities on this starship, that doesn't mean they are not there. We may not be seeing the entire crew and we certainly aren't seeing everyone in the fleet. Not every group of people is necessarily made up of a variety of people, and that would smack of tokenism. I like to think that the women and minorities are there somewhere, and we just don't see them.

But now I am running off into areas I did't really want to go into, because I am not a political person. The issue here is Starfleet, and I imagine this is how it would have looked toward the end of the 21st century. The look of Forbidden Planet is also carried over into two episodes of the original "Twilight Zone" as well, since the same ship and uniforms were used - to my delight.

If you don't know which episodes I mean, I've forgotten the titles, but one was about a small away team that crash-landed on a planet and the crewmen were actually dead, but didn't realize it, and were doomed to repeat their actions over and over again until they all recognized they were dead. It was truly a ghost ship. The second episode, which was much more Trek-like, was about a colony on a hostile asteroid which the starship was sent to rescue. The leader of the colony, however, had gotten used to being revered by his people and refused to leave. The Starship ended up having to leave him behind.

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