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Something else a little different today, from Inverse: 70 Years Ago, Forbidden Planet, Flaws and All, Changed Sci-Fi Forever Return to Forbidden Planet. If you dare. Full disclosure up front here: I've never actually seen the whole movie. So I'm not here to discuss the movie; I'm here to discuss the article, which discusses the movie. On March 3 and 4, 1956, at a humble science fiction convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, called SECon II (Southeastern Science Fiction Convention), roughly 30 people got an early screening of what one hardcore enthusiast, at the time, called “the first real s-f film, as fans know science fiction.” Yes, cons have been around for a while. So have huge nerds. And gatekeepers. By which I mean, calling it "the first real s-f film" is rather a matter of opinion. I think it's generally accepted that Le Voyage dans la Lune holds that honor, and that one was made before two brothers from Ohio paid a visit to North Carolina, when even airplanes were the stuff of science fiction. It could be argued, of course, that the Méliès film is more fantasy than science fiction, but sometimes the boundaries blur into insignificance. Consider Star Wars, for example, which is fantasy with SF tropes. He also noted that the people in the audience (again, very small, made of hardcore fans) were “sitting on the edge of their seats,” and “comments following the showing were enthusiastic.” It's easy to sit here in 2026 and scoff at the primitive films of the 20th century. But I believe in taking things in historical context. So, while I dispute the claim of "first real s-f film," I don't deny its impact within its own time period. Again, for context, this was the year before Sputnik turned another SF speculation into reality. Today, this might seem like an understatement, considering the degree to which Forbidden Planet changed pop culture, or at least pioneered a certain kind of mainstream space-oriented science fiction which would dominate mainstream TV and film sci-fi for decades to come. (For what it’s worth, they didn’t call it sci-fi back then, by the way, hence s-f.) I still refuse to call it "sci-fi." Yes, I know that's the official genre label here on WDC, but as a huge nerd and gatekeeper, I hate that particular shortcut. If you're going to shorten something, have the common decency to keep the vowel sounds intact. Forbidden Planet is a beautiful film, way ahead of its time visually and sonically, that now feels slow, poorly paced, and full of concepts that the 1960s Star Trek did much better, and with more joy. Yes, okay, but Star Trek wouldn't ever have existed without three major pillars: Roddenberry (obviously), Lucille Ball (yes, really), and Forbidden Planet. So, I feel like claiming it's a low-class version of Trek is disingenuous; it's an important part of Trek background. In short, in 2026, 70 years after its release, Forbidden Planet isn’t greater than the sum of its robot parts, but some of its parts are not only great, but now woven into the basic fabric of science fiction in general. And FP, in turn, built on SF concepts that preceded it. Mild spoilers ahead. For fuck's sake, the movie is 70 years old. Hey guys, spoiler alert: Rosebud was his sled! Hume’s rewrite of the movie injected a more intellectual angle, which, today, scans as almost a rough draft for the original Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry screened Forbidden Planet to his Star Trek collaborators in 1964 to get a sense for the vibe he was going for. "More intellectual" should not be parsed as "highbrow art." Not that I care about brows. Just managing expectations, here. Like Star Trek — at least early 1960s Star Trek — Forbidden Planet presents a story about a spacecraft crewed by people who behave in a roughly navalist way, assigned to check on the status of an older Earth spaceship, the Bellerophon, which was lost on the planet Altair IV years prior. (Both Star Trek pilot episodes in 1964 and 1954 find the crew searching for clues about a lost Earth mission, too.) So, fact check here: 1) There was no early 1960s Star Trek; the best one can say is that it began in 1964, which I'd call mid-sixties, when the first pilot episode (The Cage) was made, and even then, it wasn't ready until early '65. 2) "1954?" Gotta be a mistype. The second Trek pilot was in 1966, though it was the third episode aired: Where No Man Has Gone Before. You don't have to be a hardcore Trek fan to know that The Cage eventually got folded into the series, with a framing story involving Kirk and Spock, a two-parter called The Menagerie. Why does this detail matter? Well, at the time, having a science fiction movie that presented interstellar space travel as an established fact, rather than a gee-wiz new invention, was somewhat novel. And this is why context matters. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that in literature, such stories already existed, but SF had a really bad reputation (partially deserved) at the time, so the stories didn't reach a mass audience the way movies did. There are probably more words written about Robby the Robot — the most expensive movie prop ever built up until that time — than there are about any other aspect of Forbidden Planet. But what makes the movie worth watching, or, perhaps, worth studying, isn’t the robot. It’s the tone. The whole trope of the robot companion, brilliantly parodied by Douglas Adams and turned on its head by Battlestar: Galactica, may be the most lingering echo of FP. Consider the droids in Star Wars, the computer HAL9000 in 2001, the entirety of Lost in Space, the freakin' Jetsons, etc. Oddly, it was the one thing Trek never really dabbled in: there was The Computer, which probably wasn't sentient like HAL, and of course the character of Data in TNG, but he was presented as a fully sentient being, not a robot pal. In short, what makes Forbidden Planet less than brilliant today is threefold: The prevalence of sexism in its first act is extremely distracting, by both 1956 standards and today. The plotting is poorly paced, with everything great crammed into the last 15 minutes. And, finally, let’s face it, Star Trek did it better a decade later. Okay, well, I'm going to leave it to the article to make these cases. I'll present a different point of view here. Sexism: Look, pretty much every movie from the 1950s is cringeworthy on this front today. As I have not seen FP, I don't have a personal opinion about it. But having read a great deal of SF from that era, it doesn't sound out of line with what one expected from SF in the 1950s. There was no secret that the principal audience of SF at the time was young men, and the writers wrote what they thought young men at the time wanted, which included manly men who are also huge nerds blasting at space aliens and getting the girl in the end. I'm not saying it was right, mind you. Just that I have my doubts about it being distracting "by 1956 standards." One of the more brilliant things George Lucas ever did was making Luke and Leia (SPOILER ALERT) siblings, which neatly sidestepped that trope. And then leaned into it again with Han Solo, but that's beside my point. As for the plotting, again, I haven't seen it, but if what the article's author wrote is true, that is indeed a damning indictment. At least if you care about the writing. I'm assuming everyone here would, because, well. The third point there, the one about Trek, may also be true. But I think it's irrelevant, because, as I noted (and the article seems to agree), Trek wouldn't exist without FP. Where Forbidden Planet introduces these themes with Shakespeare-esque gravitas, Star Trek smartly always made those kinds of conflicts deeply personal as well as philosophical, especially in its first two pilot episodes. There is one other major difference: Star Trek has moments of real comedy. Comedy was even a plot point in the aired pilot. The scene where Scotty defeats a far superior alien by getting him completely and totally schloshed is one of the greatest TV show moments of all time, and that was in the pilot. Comedy is, in fact, baked into Trek's DNA. But that should come as no surprise, considering who finally greenlit the show. Thanks, Lucy. |
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