3-D Thursday: Gog (1954)

To appreciate a film restoration, it helps to have seen what the movie looked like pre-restoration. Most restorations have a demo showing the movie in poor condition and then showing it looking nice and shiny and almost new. I have always had a hard time connecting with these demos, however, since I have no recollection of seeing the movies in question looking so bad. The Looney Tunes cartoons, for instance, I only ever saw look horrible in bad PD releases. In that sense, if the restoration demo was of Daffy the Commando and not one of the duck season/rabbit season cartoons, I'd have been impressed since I had only seen Daffy the Commando look like garbage.

I mention all of this because one movie I have seen in lesser form that has been restored is 1954's Gog. For decades, the 3-D version of Gog was considered lost to the ages. As Bob Furmanek of the 3-D Film Archive tells it, the color version was gone, too. It would play in 2-D, black and white, and full frame. A color 2-D version surfaced in the 1980s.When the 3D version finally surfaced in 2003, the left eye print was red as a beet while the right eye had color, though not too vibrant. That's the way I saw it in 3D in 2006 at The World 3-D Film Expo II and while not ideal, it was better than not getting to see it in 3D at all.

So imagine my reaction to the new Kino 3D Blu Ray of Gog. I have just three letters to describe this: O.M.G.

You know how great the Warner 3D Blu Rays of House of Wax and Kiss Me Kate look? Yeah, this looks that good. Not only has the color been restored to the red left eye but the color in general is more vibrant. Anyone who has scene this either in it's poorer 3D version or even the TV version that's shown up can tell you that the color was okay but not particularly vibrant. But if you want a good example of improvement, watch the scene where Richard Egan and Herbert Marshall first meet. The chair Egan sits in is practically Technicolor red!

The restoration, of course, is courtesy of the 3-D Film Archive. And for those of you who are gonna groan "here he goes talking about those guys again!", yeah! I am! I thought the 3-D Rarities disc was their crowning achievement. But this---THIS---is nothing short of a miracle. Watching Gog here was like watching it for the first time ever. This is undoubtedly what the movie looked like upon original release. Maybe even better.

Gog is the third--and by all accounts best--of the Ivan Tors Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy. It starts when two scientists--serial fans will recognize them as Aline Towne and Micheal Fox--are murdered in a freeze chamber in an underground base dedicated to the space race. O.S.I investigator David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is called in to investigate by base leader Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall), Van Ness suspects that there's a saboteur on base but can't find him. Sheppard is assisted by Joanna Merritt (Constance Dowling), another OSI agent undercover on the base already. The suspects are many: the slightly perverted Dr. Elzevir (Philip Van Zandt) and his jealous wife (Valerie Vernon; arrogant scientist Dr. Zeitman (John Wengraf), who theoretically controls super computer NOVAC and deadly robots Gog and Magog; Dr. Burden (David Alpert), who is in charge of the computer pile; and Dr. Engle (William Schallert), Dr. Zeitman's assistant all top the list. The real enemies turn out to be the Godless Commies, who built a powerful radio transmitter and receiver into NOVAC during construction and are now using it and the robots to kill various scientists on base, with the ultimate goal of setting off a nuclear reaction that will destroy it.

Gog is an interesting piece of Cold War paranoia, a peek back at a time when the Red Under the Bed was a threat both real and imagined. Zeitman, for instance, so obviously seems to be the saboteur because he's an arrogant foreigner. The movie knows we'll think this and plays it to the hilt.

Surprisingly, the movie's science isn't as dodgy about space travel as many of it's ilk. Indeed, some of what goes on in the movie is even in use today. For instance, there's a sense involving a centrifuge. Okay, so there's a little goofiness--one character suffers from radiation poison, then is later told she's going to be just fine--but overall this is a pretty smart movie with more science fact than fiction.

Gog was the last movie shot with the Natural Vision 3-Dimension camera system by Lothrop Worth.This was the system used on House of Wax. Like that earlier film, the 3-D is spectacular. There's a great sense of depth throughout despite the limits of the sets. There's also some occassionally fun pop-out effects as there always seemed to be in these things.

According to Greg Kintz of the 3-D Film Archive, every single shot needed no less than 7 levels of correction. As I said, the left eye was red and the right eye was faded and damaged. But you wouldn't know it to see the final Blu Ray. It looks every bit as spectacular as other 50s sci-fi films released to Blu Ray like Forbidden Planet. If you want a good idea of what the film looked like before and after, there's a dandy restoration demo on the Blu. There's an even better demo on http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/gog.

If you're a fan of 50s sci-fi, this is a must buy. Even if you've seen it before and casually dismissed it, you should check it out. As any movie buff will tell you, a large part of enjoyment comes from presentation. And the presentation here is nothing shy of spectacular. Gog may be the 3D Film Archive's finest hour yet.

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE 3-D FILM ARCHIVE

3D Classics on Blu Ray: The Bubble (1966)

Poor Arch Oboler. The man absolutely loved 3D movies and was a pioneer in their production, but just couldn't make a truly great one. He did three over the course of 20 years, each one worse than the one that preceded it. The Bubble, from 1966, is the second of his trio and appropriately falls directly in the middle in terms of quality. Not as goofily entertaining as Bwana Devil, the film that kicked off the short-lived 50s craze, nor as mind-numbingly boring as Domo Arigato, The Bubble tries hard but falls short.

The film starts with a plane trapped in a freak storm. The pilot (crooner Johnny Desmond) is forced to land when the couple he's flying (Michael Cole and Deborah Walley) need to get to a hospital. Seems Walley is expecting and in answer to husband Cole's question, no, she can't "just hold it in". Right away something is off: they land on a road and the cab driver who shows up just keeps saying "Cab mister?". After they get to town and the baby is born, things get noticeably weirder. The town itself looks off: an old west style saloon is down the street from the hospital, the street lights look like they're from the early 20th century, and then there's the Roman columns. To add to the weirdness, everybody keeps doing and saying the same things over and over. When Cole, Walley, and Desmond try to leave, they discover that a malignant alien is keeping the town trapped in a giant plastic bubble.

Reading all of that, some of you are no doubt saying either "huh, sounds like a pretty good movie to me" or "hey, that sounds just like Under the Dome!". I won't comment on the latter, but don't fool yourselves, either. This is not a pretty good movie. It is a movie that has been compared to an overlong Twilight Zone episode and that's one of it's main drawbacks. Had it just been a 30 minute TV episode, it would likely be a fairly intense and disturbing tale. But at 90 minutes--and it used to run 112 minutes until it was cut by Oboler in 1967--it goes on too long. It also doesn't help that Cole (and Oboler) feel the necessity to explain every little thing that goes on. It seems like half of Cole's dialogue starts with "I have a theory about that...". This is the type of movie that works better the less you know and it's unfortunate that Oboler chooses to tell instead of show. A little less theorizing and this would be a pretty creepy movie.

It's not that it's a completely rotten movie. It tries to be a pretty cerebral experience, much like a third season episode of Star Trek. The problem is that like a season three Trek episode, the movie starts with a terrific premise then runs out of ways to explore it fairly quickly. It becomes something along the lines of The Great Escape in it's third act with Cole desperately digging away to escape from the bubble. Certainly the actors try their best. Cole was just starting The Mod Squad, so this was a way to show he could carry a movie. But seriously, all the guy does is throw one theory out after another. Walley probably signed on to show she could do more than look good in a bikini, but after a while all she seems to do is fret and fuss. The only truly amusing one of the trio is Desmond, who hams it up, but also disappears for a good chunk of screen time.

The Bubble is the first of the single-strip 3D movies. Prior to this, unless a movie was released in anaglyphic (red/blue) 3D, it was released in a dual strip format with two projectors running in synchronization (theoretically). However, the 50s films were often plagued with awful projection problems, including running the films out of sync. It was those projection problems that caused the various headaches audiences complained of and the subsequent death of the process. Oboler and Col. Robert Brenier, the inventor of the single strip system used here (Spacevision), believed that their system could fix the mis-projection issues the 50s films had. I can tell you that while the idea was good, single-strip 3D movies could and were just as poorly projected as the dual strip variety. I saw single strip showings of House of Wax, Dial M For Murder, and Silent Madness that were so incorrectly shown, they made me want to cry.

It's also worth noting that when released in 1966, The Bubble really was a harbinger of the 3D films to come. There's a ton of gimmick shots in the movie, some of which are pretty silly. Some even look pretty obviously just tossed in there. In other words, the very thing that people scoff at 3D for pretty well start with this film. Having said that, some of the gimmick shots are outright spectacular. The floating tray of beer is one of the top twenty gimmick shots of all time.

If you're curious to know what this film looks like, Kino has it on 3D Blu Ray courtesy of the geniuses of the 3D Film Archive. The Archive, the same people behind the restoration of Dragonfly Squadron, has done an astonishing job of restoring The Bubble. I've seen it twice before this Blu Ray and I can tell you it never looked this good. Not only are all alignment issues corrected, but the image is cleaned up and color corrected in a way that makes the film look possibly even better than it did in 1966! Seriously, the restoration on The Bubble makes it look like millions of dollars was spent on it. That's not the case, but it sure looks it.


I suppose your mileage may vary when watching this. I've seen the movie three times now. The first time was on VHS (look it up, youngsters) in a horrible anaglyphic version released by Rhino Home Video in 1999. I spent nearly a year looking for the tape and then was bored out of my brain by it when I finally saw it. It played a little better when I saw it next on the big screen during the World 3-D Film Expo II in 2006 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, but I still wasn't crazy about it. This Blu Ray has nearly made me a true believer. The movie still has storytelling flaws--some of them nearly deadly--but since it looks better and plays so wickedly with 3D gimmick shots, it's a lot more fun to watch. And any vintage 3D movie released on 3D Blu Ray is worth seeking out (he said having not yet gotten up the courage to watch The Flesh and Blood Show). I'd never watch it in 2D myself, but there's not many 3D movies I'd want to watch in 2D anyhow. But if you want to have a 3D party, you could do worse than The Bubble, that's for sure.

Sequels, Remakes, and Reboots Part III: Sequels

Of the three things being discussed in this series, sequels are generally speaking the hardest to come to a vague defense of.  And yet, they've been around for decades to say nothing of centuries. The biggest argument against them is that they seem to be nothing more than a money grab. But, truth to tell, one can say that of almost any commercial endeavor, especially in regards to movies. Movies are a business, after all, something most people forget.

While we like to think of sequels as being of relatively recent vintage, they really aren't. They stretch back to at least the 1910s. But back then, nobody just numbered the films. One of the early examples of a sequel comes, fittingly enough, from the serial format. The first serial was done in 1912, called What Happened to Mary?. It was a success--as well as being one of the early movie tie-ins where a novelization was done in serial format in the newspapers--and inspired a second serial called Who Will Marry Mary?. Admittedly, neither one of those sounds like an edge of your seat cliffhanger, but then again, it took a couple of years for the serial format to really develop into that. That wasn't the only serial from the era to gain a sequel. 1916's Pearl White thriller The Exploits of Elaine got one called The Romance of Elaine.

Of course, I'm just speaking cinematically. You can take it back a lot farther than 1913. In fact, you can take the numbered sequel routine back to a guy whose name may or may not have actually been William Shakespeare. Seems he did a few Part 1 and Part 2 type plays back in the day. In fact, you can take it father back than that to the Greeks, with the Thebes plays by Sophocles and The Illiad and The Odyssey. "Yes, but those are classics" you may be saying. They're classics now, but they were pop entertainment--in particular Shakespeare's work--in their day.

Sequels proliferated in novel format once the printing press was invented. Accordingly, a number of said sequels were essentially repeats of the novel that preceded them. Sound familiar? This was done mostly to assert the author's ownership over the properties.

The point is, this sort of thing has literally gone on for centuries and isn't likely to change any time soon.

Up until about the 1970s, however, sequels--or at least movie sequels--tried to tell somewhat different stories and have completely different titles. The sequel to the 1931 Frankenstein wasn't called Frankenstein 2, it was called The Bride of Frankenstein. While some of the nuts and bolts of the story were similar, it also wasn't a direct repeat of the first movie, either. Not even serials told the same exact story or numbered their sequels.

There were a couple of examples of sequels being numbered prior to the 1970s--Quatermass 2 from 1957 being possibly the earliest example--but starting in that decade, the floodgates started to open. While both The Godfather Part II and The French Connection II were both considered better than their respective first movies, they also seemed to help get the trend of numbering started. The Exorcist II, Rocky II and Jaws 2 followed by the end of the decade. Then came the 1980s.

For reasons that film historians will be debating 100 years from now, if they're not already debating it, the sequel concept really caught fire in the 80s. It mostly seems to have started off with the slasher film. 1981 brought us both Halloween II and Friday the 13th Part 2, both of which were just sucessful enough for the studios to ensure that we'd be spending much of the decade watching their spawn. Sequel after sequel to those and other horror franchises followed and so long as they made a profit, they kept getting made. Comedies--most notably raunchy juvenile comedies like Porky's and Meatballs started getting in on the act as did action movies. The single biggest problem with a large number of these is the fact that they really did simply repeat the first movie--and nowhere near as well. I enjoyed the first two Police Academy films when I was a teenager but quickly abandoned the series after the third film when I realized that not only did it suck, but it simply repeated all the jokes in the first two. Mind you, this is coming from someone who didn't always have the greatest of taste in movies when he was a teenager.

The trend was so bad by 1983 that Siskel and Ebert's "Worst of the Year" show for that year was dedicated to nothing but sequels. I have to admit, there were some pretty wretched sequels unleashed on the public that year. They highlighted such rotten sequels as The Sting II, Staying Alive--the sequel to Saturday Night Fever and the only film on the list of sequels to not have a number--, Smokey and the Bandit 3, Jaws 3-D (which I kinda like even though it is a bad movie), and Amityville 3-D. At the end of the show, they implored audiences to not watch any sequels unless they said so.

I will be fair to the 80s, however. There were some sequels that were very good in that decade, mostly in the science fiction genre. I'm not sure what it is about science fiction, but the sequels to sci-fi movies are rarely dumb repeats. The Star Wars and Star Trek sequels are all fairly decent. Even the "bad" entries in those series are better than most comedy and slasher sequels. I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch the much hated Star Trek V: The Final Frontier than the same numbered Nightmare on Elm Street or Police Academy movies. None of the 80s Indiana Jones movies--even the much maligned Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom--are bad movies either. Continuing with the sci-fi theme, Aliens was also an excellent sequel. We just won't talk about the 90s Alien movies.

Part of the problem, which again goes back to the 70s, is that following the law of diminishing returns, sequels got lower and lower budgets as the series went on. The original Planet of the Apes series is a prime example of this. The excellent make up jobs on all of the apes in the first film gave way to bad Halloween masks in later entries. The diminishing budgets may not be as evident in comedies like the Revenge of the Nerds series, but it comes up front and center in an effects heavy series like Superman. The budget and effects for the notorious Supergirl and Superman IV were so bad that they killed the series until the 2000s.

Lately, however, that doesn't necessarily follow. Movies are trying to put more money into the sequel, to make it bigger and more spectacular than the film that came before. Sometimes that pays off. A fairly surprising source of good sequels nowadays seems to be in the comic book genre. With the exceptions of a few notable missteps like X-Men III--a movie I truly regret seeing--the comic book genre has really stepped up. The latest Thor and Iron Man movies were, if not better than their predecessors, at least as good as. Spider-Man 2 and X2 were also better sequels. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy got better as it went along.  In the coming months we'll have sequels to both Captain America and X-Men that both look like they should be good. Again, like Sci-Fi movies, the thing that these newer comic book movies have going for them is their ability to tell different stories in each film. That helps make the movies at least seem fresher, or at the very least, not make us think "didn't we see this story already?".

Of course, there's a lot of other sequels coming this summer and even more in 2015. The thing is, some of them will be good. They certainly have the capacity and lately haven't been too bad at it. Well, except for comedy sequels. They still haven't figured out that idea. Other sequels--like the forthcoming Dolphin Tail 2--will make us wonder why in God's name a sequel was necessary. Others still just may make us hate humanity for their existence.

So, at the end of the day, should you listen to Siskel & Ebert's advice from 30 years ago? No sequels unless directly told otherwise. Not necessarily. I still watch sequels and in a few weeks will be happily dropping money to see the second Captain America. I'm fairly sure it will make a mint, too. So long as sequels make money, sequels get made no matter how good, bad, or indifferent. That's the way it's always been, that's the way it is, and that's the way it's always going to be.

3D THURSDAY: GRAVITY (2013)

I am of the opinion that there are certain movies you need to see in 3D. Some of them--mostly from the 80s--are pretty pointless without it in fact. Let's be honest here. Nobody watches Comin' At Ya! unless they are watching it in 3D. Other movies stand on their own in 2D but are also very different experiences in 3D. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder is one such example. Surprisingly, Alfonso Cuarron's Gravity is another.

Surprisingly because unlike Dial M which was shot in true 3-D--the only way they could do it in 1954--Gravity is converted from 2-D. Conversions are always a tricky proposition. Even the really well done ones like Marvel's The Avengers don't look as good as real 3-D. The good ones fall just short and the bad ones--I'm looking at you Harry Potter--are spectacular insults to 3-D. They leave you not only wondering why you're wearing 3-D glasses, but why you paid extra to do so.

Gravity, however, doesn't look like a conversion. Part of that is because only 27 of it's 91 minutes were converted. The rest of it is CGI, so the 3-D is real by way of virtual twin cameras. Impressively, it's impossible to tell the difference between the two. Of course, it also helps that the movie seems to have been shot with 3-D in mind instead of just as an afterthought.

Gravity tells a simple story. George Clooney is astronaut Matt Kowalski, on his last space flight. Sandra Bullock is Doctor Ryan Stone, on her first space mission. While making repairs on the Hubble, a destroyed Russian satellite sets off a catastrophic chain reaction of debris that destroys their space shuttle. Trapped in space, the two have to find a way back to Earth by making their way over to the ISS.
After the amazing 17 minute opening shot, once the disaster strikes, the film becomes an incredibly tense ride, more so in 3-D. I saw this in the theater in 3-D and found myself hyperventilating when Bullock first spins out into space. Even at home that scene caused my heart to race, that's how effective it is.

Unfortunately, the effect is lessened in 2-D. This is one of those cases where 3-D gives genuine perspective to what is going on and actually heightens the sense of danger. The last time 3-D was used quite that effectively was in 1953's Inferno with it's deep and dizzying shot of the canyon Robert Ryan is trapped in. This is 3-D as a You-Are-There experience.This is what 3-D is meant for the most and puts the film firmly in the Top Ten of 3-D movies, right alongside the classics of the Golden Age.

The experience is helped along by the cast. Clooney and Bullock truly sell the film. Clooney exudes the confidence of a veteran astronaut while Bullock captivates use with her performance as the rookie who must step up or die. According to interviews with Bullock, it was a rough movie to shoot and she fully deserved her Oscar nomination for it.

In addition, Alfonso Cuarron became the second director in a row to win Best Director at the Academy Awards. Ang Lee previously took the same Oscar for 2012's Life of Pi. The mere fact that 3-D movies are winning major Oscars now shows that the form is gaining legitimacy. It is not unreasonable to think that one day a 3-D movie will take the Best Picture Oscar.

Some people have questioned the science behind the film, but that always seems to happen with a picture like this. Truth to tell, the overall premise of the debris chain reaction is in the realm of theoretical possibility, so the film's science isn't all that shaky. On top of which, it's effects are every bit as groundbreaking as those seen in 2001. Point in fact, I think it's a better movie, too.

At any rate, the next time you wonder what 3-D is good for, I suggest you watch this. Then you may just get it.

3D Thursday: Robot Monster (1953)

Back in 1978, Harry and Michael Medved wrote a book called The 50 Worst Movies of All Time. In it, they listed  1953's infamous Robot Monster as the worst movie of all time. They changed their minds two years later when they wrote The Golden Turkey Awards and gave the title of worst movie to Ed Wood's equally infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space. To not put too fine a point to it and yet still try to sound somewhat diplomatic, the Medveds were wrong.

Let me qualify that. The book ultimately is their opinion of what the 50 worst movies are. All movie criticism is ultimately that. However, the movies in the book, while undeniably bad, really don't deserve that title. Truly bad movies are boring and unwatchable. Try watching something like The Phantom of 42nd Street or The Clutching Hand. Both of those were directed by a man named Albert Hermann. Unless you're a serial geek like me, you've probably never heard of Albert Hermann, and for good reason. Albert Hermann was a man who could take a 60 minute B-movie like The Phantom of 42nd Street and make it feel like it ran for 60 hours. Considering the fact that his serial The Clutching Hand runs over 5 hours, you can extrapolate how long that one feels. Albert Hermann made boring, seemingly never-ending dreck and he did it with shocking consistency.

Robot Monster, if nothing else, is not boring. It can probably best be described as crack cocaine for the brain and eyes. It's a dizzying 66 minutes of "wait, what?" that no mere synopsis could ever do justice to. It's a movie you need to see to believe, you won't believe you've seen, and you'll have to see again just to believe that you've seen it. That, my friends, is Robot Monster.

The plot has the earth invaded by an alien named Ro-Man (George Barrows). Ro-Man is basically a guy in a gorilla suit with something vaguely resembling a space helmet on his head. Ro-Man has managed to destroy all but six hu-mans. Actually, there's eight people still left on the planet, but two of them had common sense enough to not actually appear in the movie. The six are a Scientist (John Mylong), his wife (Selena Royale), his oldest daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett), his two young kids Johnny (Gregory Moffett) and Carla (Pamela Paulson), and his assistant Roy (George Nader). Great Guidance Ro-Man (Barrows again) orders his underling to seek out and destroy the pesky hu-mans. Ro-Man does his best, which is usually pretty inept. He does manage to strangle Carla and pummel Roy, but then he falls for "Al-lice" and kidnaps her instead of killing her. This annoys Great Guidance, who kills Ro-Man and unleashes earthquakes and prehistoric reptiles to kill all who remain. In the film's twist ending, ripped right off of the same year's Invaders From Mars, we find out this was all a dream of Johnny's. Then Ro-Man comes out of a cave.

Actually, the only a dream ending is telegraphed five minutes into the movie. You just have to pay even half-attention to know what's happening. Though that does raise a few questions about what type of kid Johnny is. I mean, seeing as to how his dream involved his younger sister being strangled and his older sister being tied up and almost forced to have sex with a gorilla spaceman, well...

Like I said before, Robot Monster is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good movie. You won't confuse it with the likes of Dial M For Murder. However, it's also not the worst movie ever made (neither is Plan Nine for that matter). It's not even the worst 3D movie ever made, even if you take 3D porn out of the equation. It's not even the worst 3D movie of the 1950s. I can make a pretty strong argument that Flight to Tangier and Jivaro go on far too long and are far more boring for the 50s movies. I can make a better argument that Domo Arigato, Run For Cover, and Camp Blood are all far worse 3D movies.

What it is, however, is excessively entertaining. Once Ro-Man shows up, you just sort of hold on tight and go along for the ride. It's lunacy is an undeniable part of it's charm, too. Lines like "I must--yet I cannot. How do you calculate that? At what point do must and cannot meet on the graph. I cannot--yet I must", "you look like a pooped-out pinwheel!" (!) and "you're so bossy you should be milked before you come home at night" abound. That's bad? No, my friend, that's  brilliant.  Do you know why? Because we know those lines and probably a couple dozen more. Anyone who has ever heard them knows them and is likely to quote them. Truly bad movies like Domo Arigato don't have lines like that. Name me one memorable line from a crapper like Hillbilly Monster. You can't, probably because you've mercifully never heard of Hillbilly Monster and even if you had, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a quotable line from it!

Contrary to popular belief, Robot Monster was shot in 12 days (not four like the Medveds claim) for a budget under $20,000. It was shot with a new, never before (or since) used 3D camera rig called Tru Stereo Three Dimension, mostly in Bronson Canyon. Funny enough, a far worse 3D movie in the 80s was also shot in Bronson Canyon (Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn). Despite these conditions, the cast tries there best, even if they do get defeated by the dialogue sometimes. And stunningly enough, the 3D is actually really, really good. In other words, this isn't the incompetent piece of garbled mess you may have heard it is.

Robot Monster has been a fixture on home video for nearly 30 years. The late, lamented Rhino Video even had a (horrible) anaglyphic videotape release in 1991 that had a couple of looped in joke lines. Mystery Science Theater 3000 did the film. This is a film that won't die. Unfortunately, the greatest crime against the film--besides the Medveds' ill-informed books--comes from the so-called rights holder, one Wade Williams. Whether or not he actually owns the rights to Robot Monster, like almost every film he claims to own the rights to, he doesn't care about any sort of restoration of the movie. He's content to let this and it's spiritual sister movie Cat Women of the Moon rot away instead of preserving them and getting them on 3D Blu Ray. That's a shame, since the 3D is so good, the movie deserves to be released on 3D Blu Ray. It's mind-boggling to me that something like The Flesh and Blood Show will get a 3D Blu Ray release, but not this.

If you truly want to appreciate this movie, see it in a theater in 3D with a packed audience. I've done that three times and outside of a couple of cranky old people, the majority of the audience loved it. They laughed with it.They were entertained by it. And isn't that the ultimate purpose of any movie? To entertain it's audience? 

Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe

Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe is a bit of an oddball. It started life as a proposed TV series from Republic, spun off from their Rocket Man serials, and the first 3 episodes were filmed. The networks turned it down, so nine more episodes were filmed and it was released to theaters in 1953. Then it showed up as a TV series with different music in 1955. So what is it? Is it a serial? Is it a TV show? Is it a semi-connected series of shorts? The world may never know.

The simple answer seems to be that Cody is a serial. It runs the traditional 12 chapters that the majority of Republic serials run. But, every episode is the same length, roughly 30 minutes (the TV version runs 26 minutes an episode). Anyone who knows anything about Republic serials of this timeframe know that the longest episode--the first--ran 20 minutes and all the rest ran 13 minutes 40 seconds. So the Cody episodes are a lot longer than any typical Republic serial. You theoretically have to watch them in order, but there's no cliffhangers. Every episode is a complete stand alone story. In fact, only the last two episodes are really connected. So it's a serial that isn't a serial. Some have defended it as being a serial due to the fact that early silent serials like The Perils of Pauline didn't have cliffhangers, either. But Perils of Pauline was made before serials actually took on the cliffhanger sensibilities. I guess we could call it a miniseries and call it quits at that. Otherwise, we'll be on this entire blog trying to decide what this is.

To make matters more confusing, Cody is intended as a prequel to the 1952 serial Radar Men From the Moon. That serial starred George Wallace as Cody with Aline Towne as his girl Joan Gilbert and William Bakewell as his sidekick Ted Richards. Episode one of Commando Cody has Joan (Towne again) and Ted (William Schallert) getting their jobs working for Cody (Judd Holdren). But Ted drops out of the show after the third episode to be replaced by Dick Preston (Richard Crane). So if Ted quit after episode three, how does he show up in this show's sequel? We might as well skip that question, too.

The overall plot of the series is that an insane alien dictator known as The Ruler (Gregory Gaye) wants to conquer the Earth. He uses some Earth minions and a variety of plans, most of which are calculated to use the maximum amount of stock footage of disasters, to attempt this. Cody and his team hop in their rocket every episode and fairly easily defeat the plan until they get sick of playing this game and capture and ultimately kill him on the planet Mercury.

I admit that I always kind of liked early 50s Sci-Fi, especially when it involved space travel. There was a certain level of imagination to it, mostly due to a complete lack of knowledge of what was out there. A lot of early 50s Sci-Fi that involves space travel got some things hilariously wrong, but were still fun. This particular show, like Radar Men From the Moon before it, gets things wrong left and right. But you have to give them points for imagination and trying. For instance, no matter where you are in space--the moon, for instance--the sky is blue. Or more specifically, there is sky and atmosphere. And clouds. And Mercury is not only inhabited, it has plants and trees. But that's okay. This is from the time when Abbott and Costello discovered that Venus was inhabited by nothing but beautiful women and Victor Jory, Sonny Tufts, and Marie Windsor discovered that the moon had Catwomen on it. It's actually a shame those two things didn't come true. I'd be the first to go if they did and I hate flying.

Okay, so the writers at Republic had no idea about outer space. But is it good? Well, not in the way you would call something good. It is, however, fun. It's certainly better than any of the serials Republic was doing at the same time. It has a bit more zip to it than they do. Not much, but just enough. They also managed to give the episodes great titles like Robot Monster of Mars and Captives of the Zero Hour, even if the episodes themselves didn't full live up to the titles.

Holdren does well as Cody, though he's forced to wear a Domino mask all the time, to keep his identity a secret from everyone--even his co-workers. This is another inconsistency with Radar Men, by the way. Towne doesn't get to do much but look pretty, but at this point, she was probably used to that since that's what most of her serial roles consisted of. The two sidekicks are pretty interchangeable. Not bad, but interchangeable. As for Gregory Gaye, he had previously played another alien bent on destroying the Earth in the serial Flying Disc Man From Mars. He wasn't a particularly intimidating villain there and he isn't here. Fortunately, Lyle Talbot--the first actor to play Commissioner Gordon as well as Lex Luthor onscreen (as well as the only actor to play both)-- pops up in six episodes as one of his Earth agents. Unfortunately, Talbot isn't given much to do and his story goes unresolved as he just disappears from the show in the last two episodes. Gaye was also given his own Pretty Background Scenery, as played by Gloria Pall. She doesn't get to say much--most episodes she just stands there and looks pretty.

Holdren and Towne were supposed to play the characters again in another serial, Zombies of the Stratosphere, best remembered today as the serial Leonard Nimoy made (and doesn't talk about). However, at the 11th hour, Republic changed their minds and changed the names of all the principal characters, even though Holdren is again wearing the Rocket Man outfit and Jetpack. But that's okay. After all, Tris Coffin, the first Rocket Man, played a different character than Cody in King of the Rocketmen in 1949.

Despite the dodgy science and the plot holes you could get Cody's rocket ship through, Commando Cody remains a pleasant and fun little outing, from a time when we didn't really know what was out there, but could dream big about it.