The 1955 science fiction movie This Island Earth was lauded by critics when it was new, but was later featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Michael J. Nelson said that This Island Earth was chosen to mock because, he felt, "nothing really happens" and "it violates all the rules of classical drama". Kevin Murphy added that the film had many elements that the writing crew liked, such as "A hero who's a big-chinned white-guy scientist with a deep voice. A wormy sidekick guy. Huge-foreheaded aliens who nobody can quite figure out are aliens – there's just 'something different about them'. And a couple of rubber monsters who die on their own without the hero ever doing anything."Yet This Island Earth still has a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I guess you can say it was good compared to the other sci-fi films of its time. Anyway, it has become a classic of its genre.
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I saw This Island Earth so very long ago, and it made a huge impression on me. Here are some things in my memory of it that I've repeated over and over to people on odd occasions when it comes up, that might not be right, but I enjoy not ever checking about either by looking it up or watching the movie again, as well as some miscellanea related to the movie:
1. "I feel like a new toothbrush," says someone on getting out of a suspended-animation tube in a flying saucer. I think that's in This Island Earth (or Forbidden Planet, or both). My mental picture of the female character (in T.I.E.) includes that she had curly dark hair, a heart-shaped face pointed at the bottom, nevertheless with a weird wide mouth that could open in an infinity symbol shape when she's really upset, like Laura Dern's mouth in /Blue Velvet/ when Kyle MacLachlan come to her house with naked Isabella Rosselini, who I think of in the same mental breath as Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio though /they/ are not at all alike one another.
2. The planet Metaluna. I think they filmed the Earth-landscape parts of the movie in Petaluma (CA), and someone on the film crew said /Petaluma Metaluna/ and they all went, Yeah, yeah, that's it. We'll use that.
3. The little late-1950s fighter jet a character flies in at the beginning... My uncle is an architect. When I was little he taught me how to draw in perspective, beginning with a line of skyscraper buildings, and then a jet just like that one, pointed to the left, then right, then coming straight on. I think we had just seen either This Island Earth or the episode of The Outer Limits where a pilot crashed that kind of jet at the exact instant a woman crashed her car, causing time to slow to a crawl for everyone but them, trapping them outside of time until they figured it out and took off and drove away and crashed again to get beck to normal. I still sometimes doodle that kind of jet (and ethereal 7-shapes, and endlessly complicated and increasingly small circles and pluses on circles and pluses), and have that feeling. And were those that the same actor and actress as in This Island Earth? To me, yes.
4. The interociter, a triangular teevee phone on a pole. In my half-memory it can also direct energy blasts at the sky from its corner points. Also, to make it, there were circuit diagrams with vacuum-tube symbols in them, that all circuit diagrams still feel like to me to see.
5. One of the many things my mother did for a living in the 1960s was typing as fast as popping popcorn. There was "a scientist" she typed for once, where we drove out into the desert from L.A. to a fence gate, and she handed off the suitcase of finished papers to a guard (or I sat in the car for a minute while she went into a ranch house). My mental picture of the scientist, who I never saw, is the main cult alien guy in This Island Earth. Also there's a sleazy actual real-life new-age cult guy, very old now, in the power structure of a so-called public radio station I have an ongoing beef with, who looks very like that guy but without the Star Trek-prosthetic forehead and who also creepily steps between facial expressions like flipping a switch. Condescending benevolence - frown - smile - frown - and back to condescending benevolence.
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