Forbidden Planet (1956) — "We're all part monsters in our subconscious, so we have laws and religion!"

He were in wait. Mimbo bo bo bo bo Tombo Bombo. Imagine yourself as one of the crew of this faster than light spaceship of the future, sharing their curiosity to know the unknown, their tension, their readiness for inconceivable adventures. Sir, we're being radar scanned United Planet's cruisers C five seven d JJ Adams commanding, who are you, Warbius of the Bleophon, Dr Morbius, My orders are to survey the situation on out air for Commander. If you sat down on this planet, I warn you that I cannot be answerable for the safety of your ship or your crew.

When you reach the Forbidden Planet, you will meet Doctor Morbius played by Walter Pigeon. The doctor is sole owner of this fabulous world. Anne Francis is his alluring daughter Alta, who has never seen a young man till she meets Commander Adams played by talented Leslie Nielson. Marianne and bring my bathing suit? What's a bathing suit?

Murder? You will meet a charming character in the robot able to produce on order ten tons of lead or a slinky evening gown. Always at your service. It must be the loveliest, softest thing you've ever made for, and lick in all the right places with lots of lots of star sapphires. Star sapphires take a week to crystallize properly.

Wo diamond or emeralds too. You explore all the wonders of a vanished civilization. You travel deep down into the heart of the forbidden planet to discover the incredible marbles of this houst genious race. These magnificent scenes in striking Eastman color stagger the imagination. Twenty miles looked out, Just what are you afraid?

Seventy eight hundred elevens, Yet. The wonders of the planet all tear four conceal a strange and evil force, unknown, irresistible. Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Chris Dashu. At least that's what I'm told by the people off stage, and I'm joined by my good friend all the way from West Texas.

Not robbing banks in West Texas, though you might be mistaken. That's what the subject material last couple of podcasts that I've had him on, Your Friend and Mine the Well. He's a professor of media and communications over Texas Tech, Doctor David. Pro Mutter, Oh yeah, thank you, Chris. So, David, I have just kind of turned over programming for you know, when you and I work together, to you and you you sent me a list of things, a very long, I would say, expansive list of many, many different choices.

Though I would say they're all kind of a, you know, all over the place. I don't think I wouldn't even say that there's any one kind of thing that leads me to believe that, like, oh, it's like all sci fi. It's like it's all kind of all over the place. So while you might think, well that we're going to be talking about more sci fi the next time we get together, this is just a sci fi movie we happen to be talking about. But on this episode of the Culture Cast, doctor David Promoter and I are going to be talking about a film from nineteen fifty six that I'd never seen, but I've seen one of the actress who's in it, and a whole lot of other things we're talking about.

Nineteen fifty six is Fred M. Wilcox directed Forbidden Planet. So the film is directed by Fred M. Wilcox, but they screenplay by Cyril Hume. Story by Irving Block and Alan Adler, stars Walter Pigon and Francis but more important stars Frank Dreben himself, Leslie Nielsen, a very young, very pre Shirley pre airplane Leslie Nielsen, and the film is a In the research it says it's a loose adaptation of The Tempest.

I'm going to reveal my ignorance here and say I've never seen or read The Tempest. Up until this point. I now know the basic story of the temp after having watched Forbidden Planet and in the research. But Forbidden Planet is someone to play on the Tempest somewhat not so. A crew of men from the United Planets finds a planet where a ship had been sent twenty years earlier and they stopped getting contact with the ship, and so when they got there, the scientist, doctor Morbius, is the only one left and he has a daughter.

And throughout the film we figure out why the planet is the titular Forbidden Planet. We'll get into it. I'm very curious your thoughts, doctor Promutter. But as I have done in the past when it is just you and I and you were the one picking the movie, please, oh please, inform me as to why, oh why in two twenty twenty six we're talking about nineteen fifty six is Forbidden Planet? Is it?

Appression? Film? Doctor perlmutter Well, I believe that almost all the science fiction that you have been watching in movies and television and video games owes a little bit of a thank you card to Forbidden Planet. It in itself was not radically original. As you said, that's loosely based on a Shakespeare play.

It takes some common motifs and tropes and metaphors and allusions to Freudian psychology, and a lot of science fiction from the thirties, forties and fifties you can find there. But in terms of visual and story, you can see, for example, absolutely Gene Roddenberry watched this. I mean, you can read about the origins of Star Trek. There's no question this was Star Trek one point zero in just a lot of aspects. And in fact, I just watched the first two episodes of The Orville, which is that people say is a good start.

I haven't caught on yet really to it. Somehow, the better version of Star Trek than Star Trek Discovery is what I was. Told, Yes, and I don't see that yet. People tell me it gets better, which is a true of a lot of shows. They take their time to define their groove, but immediately you can see, you know, the Union of Planets is sending a starship with a crew of different people, and there's a mystery and a planet has lost contact.

I mean that's fifty percent of Star Trek episodes of all the Star Trek series is a planet has lost contact or there's something strange going on on a right, So this movie is worth watching just for like, oh wow, this is like the one point zero of a lot of stuff that I have watched. I haven't watched over the entire seventy six seventy years since the it was made, but like, I think it's interesting. Especially when I played clips selective clips for students or referred them to it, they go like, oh wow, was this start? They actually think some of them have not seen the original Star Trek. Like the original series, they've sort of as we talked about, they they have meme knowledge like Kirk screaming, or or Spock and Kirk fighting, or a Horta coming out of the darkness or something like that.

They all know the entire series, but they assume that this was the pilot or this was the movie that star Trek was based on, So so we can learn a lot there. Plus it's a really interesting movie of the time. And it's as we've talked about before, you never watched the same movie twice. Your attitudes can change as you evolved. And also no generation watches the same movie twice, and it's interesting to see what was considered, you know, a level color, big cast, a lot of money on special effects and practical effects of the time.

This is not a junk science fiction, This is not a Grade Z. The monster is pretty scary. You can imagine on a giant screen in a theater or drive in you're taking your date on a Friday night, and it's beautiful CinemaScope and beautiful rich color. I think anyone who complains about the cpization of film and television today can probably appreciate that, just the popping color of this movie. And so I think there's just a lot to take away here.

As well as being I personally find it still to be a fun and interesting plot. So, like you mentioned, it's very interesting in the now of sci fi that and you know I was talking about this with my friend Lindsay when we were watching this yesterday, And funny enough, I watched this yesterday in between watching Prometheus, Alien Covenant, and then Alien. Well it's not called Alien in Paradise, but a fan of both Covenant and Prometheus edited the two films together into one film as a fan edit and called it Paradise. And so I spent yesterday watching Covenant and Prometheus, just because my friend Lindsay had never seen it, just because they're two of my favorite movies. And then we watched Forbidden Planet, and then we watched the edited together kind of milonge of Covenant Prometheus, and so yesterday I spent a lot of time watching sci fi.

And what's very interesting is the juxtaposition of Forbidden Planet, which is of the three sci fi worlds, the Covenant world, the Forbidden Planet world, and the Prometheus world, which are all drastically different in the way that they're presented. Even Prometheus and Covenant, which take place in the same universe, are very different. Of those three, the one that I would love to live in is Forbidden Planet because the design and the look and the world that it creates is so I guess now it's if they were doing it. Now it would be retrofuturism, but then it was us future is. I think that the world of futurism, that that sci fi exists with him is so much more interesting to me as if you were now.

And you know, I mean again, obviously, you know when the film came out, they were probably taking it for granted because and like you've already alluded to, in fifty six, there were tons of Z grade sci fi drek coming out that was you know, and again, like not to drag one specific author in particular, but I'll drag him for a whole host of reasons. L Ron Hubbard is one of those authors who just wrote book after book after book after book after I mean, he was notorious for his prolific his prolific nature of writing, but also his ability to just write like just I mean literally They talk about it in plenty of those Scientology documentary that L. Ron Hubbard was a very prolific writer in terms of his ability to write.

And so, like you said, there was plenty of Z grade junk floating around at the time, just like when Westerns were being written, there was a bunch of junk Westerns coming out as well. Not everything is going to be the level of a Forbidden Planet or of you know, or of a Star Trek even And so what's interesting for me as a film watcher is, as someone who's watching this film in twenty twenty six, far removed from the nineteen fifty six, you know, sixty years later, the world that's created within the world a Forbidden Planet is so much more enticing and appealing than anything created by contemporary filmmakers of the last five to ten, fifteen, twenty years. I would much rather live in Forbidden Planet or the original series of Star Trek than Prometheus or Alien Romulus or Minority Report or anything else where.

There's a level of futurism that is exceeding where we are now. That's meant to make our life easier, but it never seems like it. In sci fi. A lot of the sci fi is like it's meant to make life easier, like, you know, the ability to predict crimes ahead of time should theoretically make life easier, but it's you know, it's the it's the the sci fi twist of it all that it's being abused or manipulated or what have you. And so that's what makes it sci fi?

I mean, again, it is science fiction, but we do have this technology. Now it's more just like taking it and pushing it in a subversive or transgressive way or the way it's being used. So all of that to say, I had a weird juxtaposition watching this movie yesterday with other things that were also sci fi, you know, sci fi, sci fi horror. And I mean as much as I love Covenant and Prometheus, which I do, they are two of my favorite movies. And I know that's you know, sacrilege among alien fans and sacrilege among sci fi fans because neither of those movies were well received when they came out.

This movie, I think, just crafts something that's so like like we've already talked to where like you've already talked about with Star Trek, the original series, like so appealing that someone else came in and was like, let's just do a whole thing of this, and it totally works, and Star Trek works because of this weird nature of like we have technology, but we also have peop people just wearing clothes like in Forbidden Planet. It cracked me up that Leslie Nielsen's just wearing like a shirt. He's not wearing a helmet, He's not any of this. You know, they do the old sci fi trick in the first five minutes of the movie where they're like gravity on the plane at this point eight seventy nine. So just to adjust your thing.

It's just like adjust the thing, so we don't have to do anything in terms of practical effects to address it. Just adjust your things so that you can walk around normal and it'll look normal when we're filming, because that's what we want to do. Like it's that level of just like I don't know, like working with what you have and not trying to not being ashamed that it's just sci fi with people wearing clothes. I like that the sci fi setting is almost secondary to the story that it's telling, because the story that Forbidden Planet is telling, to the Shakespeare of it all, is very Shakespearean in its qualities, Like it's very I would say, hetty and what it's getting at, and not that sci fi is or isn't heady by definition, but like you could have told this story any anyway, like without the like sci fi machinations of like there is a sci fi creature running around, it could just be like the smoke Monster on Lost.

If we're talking about externalizing the it or creating something that's kind of unintelligible but exists within the framework of the narrative we've been presented. You could have done that. I'm glad they didn't. I'm glad they did something a little bit more sci fi trappings. But the story that the film is telling is one that I think is you know, like you and I were talking about privately about Twilight Zone, Like Twilight Zone is amazing because it's timeless in the nature of the stories that it's telling.

The best episodes of the Twilight Zone, this movie's story and theme and kind of nature I think are timeless in what it's asking, in the presentation, in what it's expecting of the audience. And I really enjoyed it. I mean, I understand now why this movie is as well regarded as it is. Yes, it's a movie that has layers, and you can enjoy all the layers or just one, like a cake. You watch it as a movie and just just as a sci fi movie, and that's it.

If you just want to watch a fun adventure, it's there. I mean, there's fear, there's combat, with a monster. There's the handsome guy and the pretty girl love story. There's just they're all the elements of a fun, straightforward story. But there's a lot of depth there.

Let's let's break down some of the things you've said. Nineteen fifty six is Eisenhower's president. We are in a cold war, but we're also in a time of great optimism. You have we've gone through the apocalypse of World War two, right, and I'm sorry, Chris, I'm getting a lot of feedback. You're good.

We've gone through the apocalypse of World War two, and at least in the United States, people have come home, they've gone, they're going, they've gone to college, and the gi Bill, they've gotten married, they were having the baby boom. We're in the right right there in the baby boom. So there's a lot of hope about technology, all kinds of technology, and nuclear technology. There's hope. You know, we're going to have nuclear roads and cars and and there's a lot of optimism about the future.

And you can see it there like these are this is competence porn of a kind. Like everybody involved from the Krell, the ancient alien race are super competent in fact, there's a moral to that story there that I'll get to you in a moment. But the crew, everybody in the crew does their job, the scientist does his job. It's it's a time where you could you could say that like, okay, well there's not the moral complexity and shades of gray, but actually this is a really brilliant film for bringing out the question of morality and ethics. But in terms of technology, it's futuristic, positive futuristic and also but plausible, right, okay, within what they knew at the time.

There's a famous science fiction writer named John Christopher. He became pretty well known in the sixties and seventies British writer. He was the King of Ya Apocalypse. He wrote the Tripods story which became super famous, influenced a lot of World of War, the World's type other stories, And I remember reading in like a little biographical note he made that he wrote regular science fiction up through the nineteen sixties. But then when we actually started sending probes to other planets in the Solar System, he realized that you couldn't have a civilization on Mars anymore, you know, you couldn't have astronauts hacking their way with machetes through the jungles of Venus anymore that the solar system was pretty much out.

Now there are still movies made, you know. I hope we'll get a chance to watch Europa Report. There's still possibilities, but. They're few and far between now. Yeah, But it's this kind of sci fi is gone in a lot of ways, and I know it's a cultural change in the tastes and tones of the time.

But I do miss this level of sci fi op like. I do miss it because I think it's like looking forward with a level of positivity as opposed to a level of cynicism. I think is important because I don't think that the future with technology is one or the other. It's a balance of both. It's like that, you know, we have the we have the AI is going to kill you movies over and over again, but we haven't had yet recently.

The AI is helpful movie of like solving things like we have the AI Minority Report movie that came out that looks like a movie created by AI mercy that Chris Prattman like it is. It is warning against the the far reaching nature of AI. This movie is warning against the human nature, not the technology of the time being the problem. The human nature is the problem, which is so much more of a like not like like a base level thing that's like they've dug down all the way to get to this. And I always find that more interesting when sci fi is used as a vehicle for something as opposed to just like, the technology is so crazy, we can make robots that can travel back in time to kill you in the past, to stop you from ever existing.

Like yeah, once we get past that as an idea, it kind of falls apart, huh, Like. Now, yes, So that's the level of complexity that you can move up the ladder. Because in a lot of nineteen fifties nineteen sixties low budget science fiction films, there's a scientist who's not quite a mad scientist, but like gets too excited about the science and doesn't see the consequences and ramifications and maybe designs something a robot that goes crazy. That's a pretty familiar plot. He has a beautiful daughter, there's a protagonist hero, So this has some of those elements, but then it has this really interesting level of thought experiment.

Now, again, this is the nineteen fifties, so Freudian psychology permemeates the cinema, right, we have Alfred Hitchcock Spellbound, and if you had a psychological element in the film in the nineteen fifties and sixties, it was something Freudian. So of course they're taking something Freudian here and nixing. That's pretty high level culture, right, mixing Freud and Shakespeare for the nineteen fifties to science fiction movie. And so the question is also is let me just get to the core story a second, to focus on this. So we have this planet where the Orville, the Starstik Discovery, the Sartor Enterprise visits.

There's something wrong. An expedition, scientific expedition went there, not a military expedition, the scientific expedition to wearn new knowledge. And we find this scientist and his daughter are apparently the only survivors of the expedition, and we find that they have discovered something incredible, this city that belonged to what apparently were a extremely advanced civilization, maybe hundreds thousands of years beyond us, maybe millions. They play around with that, but let's just say they're very, very advanced. And by the way, I really like that you don't necessarily see them, right, away.

I mean, there's the apparition monster, which I guess is a version of them interpolated through the human imagination. But for example, they do this, This is a wonderful practical effect. The doors, the passageways are shaped to fit them right, and they're they're sort of it's hard to describe unless you see the movies, but they're they're crab people. They're crab shaped, the crab doors. What the doctor says about the apparatus that he could put on his head, He's like, it's clearly made for something less humanoid than us.

And it's like yeah, because the things are like eight feet in each direction. It's like how big were the heads on these things? Like it's and but they get a lot of mileage out of that, like you know, working within the framework of what you have and not belaboring that you don't have it, but working around it in a way that makes sense. Like you said, showing a doorway that they would have to go through, showing a thing that they would use, like showing the when we finally see the monster, it being kind of what they might be or adjacent to that, Like, you get a lot of mileage out of it, which you know, doesn't cost much compared to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on CGI. Yes, and I really think that that's very important to look at the Krall city there.

I don't know whether this was the first movie that established the trope of advanced aliens don't have guardrails on impossibly high passageways, which goes you know, a Galaxy Quest had fun with that one, but like you know, you've seen all most science fiction. You know, Osha would not approve of the construction there. But the Krell are these super advanced and they all disappeared. So this is great mystery. And of course we're not giving away I hope people watch the movie.

But elementations with spoilers on this show. The show, this movie is sixty years of. The mystery is solved, but it's it's solved not again in the sort of simplistic, stereotypical way that a lot of movies then and a lot of movies now have, which is technology bad. Don't go too far with technology actually saying. They're not saying like advanced technology is bad.

They're saying that human beings have to adjust to learn how to control themselves in relation to the technology, So the analogy would be nuclear power. You know, there are many people I know within the environmental world who say, gosh, you know, nuclear power isn't that bad as long as you don't have accidents. It actually saves a lot of energy compared to some other forms of energy. But the point is, but on the other hand, we have nuclear weapons, right, so the question is what are humans going to do with this? And in terms of relevance, I think some of the issues about this Krell mind expansion device are extremely applicable to the world of AI and what we're going to do with AI and to what extent AI is an extension of humans or dumbs down and degrades humans.

And so this goes back the same time. Yes, that's right. This goes back to something that I've I've brought up a lot about my favorite literary insight by J. R. R.

Tolkien about how good literature is applicable. It's not a question of like, oh, this nineteen fifty movie, they dress a little funny, and their social relations are not necessarily what I approve of necessarily, but a lot of the ideas and situations are applicable to our time today, and frankly, they could have remade this movie. I don't want them to. Well, but they talked about it apparently for quite some time, and we almost got it several times. If not still.

Banding, they're still banding about an idea of to as recently as two years ago, Brian K Vaughn doing a treatment of the script. I'm with you. I think, you know, like you said about Tolkien, and you know, someone like you know, Rod Serling, you know, like to go back to the twilight zone of it all, which I think is a very good example of sci fi being applicable at its most successful. Like, I think it's important that the things that we watch, if you're gonna do something like this, be timeless, because it allows it to transcend the time and place that it exists within. I mean, that's the definition of timeless obviously, but like, as a as a creator, you should want that, and I know that not everybody does.

Know that it's not easy. I know that to hold yourself to that is also not something that can be convenient or that may not even be somebody's you know, reason for doing things. You know. I think of a very famous interview with as recently with Stuart Copeland reacting to Sting saying that Sting didn't like why Stuart Copeland played music and wrote song and Stuart Copeland just played music and wrote songs because he just liked to play music and liked to play like bang on the drums really hard. And Sting is, you know, all the music has to the song has to serve the music and the song.

And I'm like, not saying that's wrong, but two people can do the same thing ostensibly outwardly for different reasons inwardly and very vastly different reasons. And with something like Forbidden Planet, to your point, I don't want to see it remade, because what else is there to say other than punching up the recent the truly topical nature of it. So replacing Robbie the Robot with a nanobot ai cloud or god knows what which, by the way, to go back to the War of the worlds of it all? That War of the World's movie with ice Cube that came out last year, one of the worst movies I've ever seen, one of the worst movies ever made, and one of the one of the best examples of what it means to truly make a lazy film in the time of AI.

I'd like to point out to anyone listening if you have an issue with AI, it's not really AI that you have a problem with. It's people and how they use AI. That's the problem, because AI can't do anything on its own. At the point that it's at now, it is not sky Neet. I know everybody wants it to be Skynet, but it's literally not Skynet.

It's destroying the environment because we are using it. If everybody stopped using it wouldn't destroy the environments because there would be nobody using it for it to happen. And so I don't know if I need a forbidden Planet that's updated to the times, because I can just transpose an idea onto this film without this film having to directly talk about it, which I think is what Tolkien is getting at with Like it's a fplickable in one direction and technically in the other direction, but when it's only applicable in one direction, it becomes very dated. Like to go back to Twilight Zone, the most recent readaptation of the Twilight Zone, which features you know, such great episodes as Adam Scott listening to a podcast on an airplane a lah for nightmare at forty thousand feet and the episode I told you about, which is Jacob Tremblay as a child playing the president.

Hardy, har hard. Don't you get it. You don't have to do that there. You can do it from the other direction and make it timeless in and of itself and apply it forward as opposed to back. And that's what this movie kind of.

I think the age comes to a real issue about when we say we want to do a modern retelling of something. Yeah, well, okay. Shakespeare, who by the way, almost always borrowed his plots from previous you know, either antiquity or histories, myths and legends and so on. Shakespeare borrowed from real life with Caesary, like what was he writing it from literally what happened, But he dramatized it in an interesting way, like he made it made it applicable, which is hard to do. I get.

But it's so much more for me as a creator, rewarding than just making to make That's right. So if I mean, look, let's face it, almost all modern retellings have as one of their motives a cash grab, right, Like there's something associated with a property, and okay, they think they're going to get people to come in the theater. The War of the World was a modern retelling, a very bad modern retelling. But part of the issue there was that what were they telling the story? You know what?

What was the insight that the hundred other versions, the orsin Wells version didn't have. The insight was that ice Cube could in front of a computer for an entire movie and get away with it and get paid. He pulled, you know, to go back to the reason you and I are friends. He pulled a sagal. He's just doing a sagal, a late stage sagal.

He's just sitting on his ass in front of a computer for an hour and a half and getting paid. Steven Sagall made an entire VOD career of just sitting at a table or standing in one place and talking to people and then cutting away like ice Cubes getting paid. I don't know what the point was other than, you know, as we all know, War of the World is you know, open, you know, it's a fair use title, so anybody can adapt it openly and fairly. So that's really what it comes down. The other point here is a takeaway which I could imagine in nineteen fifty six a family going to watch this movie.

Right, you would go there and maybe maybe the dad was in the army and had seen some things right in his service. And I know the mom was in a nursing corps or she was building tanks in Detroit, and they were trying to live a quiet, comfortable life, which you could in the nineteen fifties economically, and they've got some young kids, and hey, let's go watch this fun science fiction movie. And I think they could watch. I mean, there's some scary parts, and maybe you'd cover the kid's eyes at a couple of points, but I think walking out of the theater, the dad and the mom would be going for hamburger and ice cream and saying, you know, kids, that was a fun movie. But there was a point there.

And we just went through something about a decade ago called World War Two, where we found out the depths that human beings can go in their destructiveness, completely out of their mind in the sense of like creating these visualizations of horror and then making them happen. I thought this movie was a great metaphor for World War Two, where you have in the nineteen thirties, politicians, leaders talking about bombing cities, talking about destroying entire countries, talking about just you know, conquering nations and so on. And then in the early nineteen forties or late nineteen thirties, early nineteen forties, they set out to do it at xology. Yeah, I mean World War II sort of started it. In the late nineteen thirties, Japan invaded China, and the crimes committed by Japan in China rival those committed by Germany in Europe in terms of the horrors that they perpetuate.

So it was like this horrible dream where crazy evil people had machines, bombers, tanks, machine guns, airplane battleships, and they made the horrors come to life. So I would have thought think a nineteen fifties family would would come away entertained, and like Robbie, the robot was fun. It was a fun what a great nineteen fifties conception of a robot, And of course that that model was used again and again and became the model for the robot, not the exact one, but the same, very similar mannerisms and voice. You've got also the robot, it has the whole Asimov's Laws right, the program not to Kill. So like there's there's a huge inheritance there in every movie where there's an intelligent computer or a robot or something like that.

So it really is a masterpiece in my mind of combining entertainment and thoughtfulness. And you can you could be multiple audiences coming to that. Grandma and a seven year old could go to that movie and come away with something besides just you know, the time passed really well. And so in terms of a modern retelling, if you can't say that, if you can't say people will be entertained for an hour and forty five minutes by a really great story and interesting characters, and they'll come away with something to think about, which I should add shouldn't be a clunking hammer blow. To the head of get it, get it, don't you get it?

You don't want. The other thing is that this film is a masterclass in how to do things without overstating them right. Within the framework of the filmic language. I think, with utilizing the language of cinema without utilizing dialogue direct and I think that you know, like you mentioned, by the end of this movie, you know you could take this movie in like eight different directions in terms of how you can apply it to something. You know.

The thing that I would say, you know, applicable wise in terms of another direction to go is the idea, you know, and we've mentioned it already. It is a ship full of men that have been on a year's journey that have no women on the ship, that come across a father and daughter on a planet, and this is the first woman that they've seen in however many years for some of them. That is a direction. You could go down there and take that and see where that takes you and see what the you know, the text and subtext of the of the medium and what they've done. Like I love that there's no in a David Lynch sort of way.

And I'm not saying that this is Lynchian in its tone or message, but Lynchian and that just like, take from this what you will. I'm not going to give you what my thoughts are upfront. I will give you plenty of avenues to go down. You go down those avenues, any of them are fine by me because I don't have to tell you what it's about. I can just give you all the roads to go down.

Knowing that any of those roads you go down, I, in my mind have assumed is a fair interpretation of the Soorceman. And for most things, there's like eight million different ways you can go down, so you know, there's like four or five ones that I think are kind of overwhelmingly obvious. But for me, it's just this idea of you know, like you said, like we we can have something interesting to say without clubbing you over the head with it repeatedly. And the best sci fi doesn't. The best sci fi doesn't make you feel dumb, like you know, having to repeat things eight million times doesn't make the viewer seem smart.

It feels like you don't trust the views. Yes, this is also a film that you know, you've seen the following in movies a lot where it just always bothers me. You've got a room full of scientists at NASA and they're describing a scientific phenomenon and one of them says, give that to me in English or you know, explain it to me, and I personally like, and what did this recently and very well was the opening seven or eight minutes of the Pluribis television series where you have not the first seven or events you have nothing but scientists talking. Scientists talk, and they make no compromise to like the ordinary audience, but you catch on where they're going. This goes to the discussion that we had about the movie Iceman, where I'm a big fan of and this has been done in a number of properties, including and Or and others.

I'm a big fan of not translating when no translation is needed. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so this film, it's simple and it's mechanics. So again, if you just told the plot to somebody, you go, they'd say, well, that's a pretty simple plot. But the point is that it gets a story across that and the moral, the ethical questions, the love story, the adventure, just it.

It does everything a movie can do. And how many movies today really have multi generational appeal, you know, multi multi ideological appeal, Like I mean, I don't care what your politics are. I think you'd enjoyed this movie. Now, there are some things like you know, the the daughter is very nineteen fifties young young woman, and the crew of the ship are yep, they're all white and they're all male. And you know, they did have problems back then sort of projecting diversity in the future.

But as I always say to my students, ask yourself, you know, what were their choices at the time, And then ask yourself, maybe if we watch our movies one hundred years from now, what are they going to say, Like, wait a minute, the cat is enslaved. You know, the cat doesn't have its freedom of independence, and it's a citizen, you know, voting citizen or something. What I mean, there's all sorts of things which maybe the future will critique in us. That doesn't mean we can't recognize some of the issues. But I don't like it when people just say dismiss a property and say, oh, you know, it has this bad thing from the nineteen fifties.

It has a lot of good things which are still applicable today. The Jazz Singer is a Al Jolson film where he wears black black face that came out what twenty thirty years before this film did. Like that doesn't discount the quality or nature of that movie. And I think that it's, like you said, it's important to understand when like the context of when things were made is important. And you know, I was talking about this recently with Richard HadAM and Mike White over on rank and on Bond where we were talking about Ian Fleming's books, and recently Ian Fleming's books have been edited for now, I guess.

And it really irritated Richard, and it irritates me as well, because if it's that big of a deal, which I'm not saying it's not for some people, it's not for me because I can understand context and intention and time and space when things were written. If it's that big of a deal, just put a warning in the book. Don't change things. Don't go in and retroactively change things to prove a point or to better suit the narrative of the way things are done now. Because at one point blackface was acceptable as an art.

It's not now. It's a historical document, right, And the question is are the historical denying history at that point? I mean, I mean, whose side are you on when you deny history? Especially since we will have I mean, if we edit everything, then like a couple of years from now, we'll have a generation of people who will not know that anything bad ever happened, or anything wrong ever happened because they I've never seen it. How can you decry you know, negative race relations in the nineteen thirties, and and you know, laws of pressing black people if nobody ever learns about them because they never see them in at least in an entertainment form, or they're not allowed to look at historical documents that actual historical documents that use offensive language today.

What is offensive language today? I mean, Tommy Abraham Lincoln. You know, Abraham Lincoln didn't not use politically acceptable language today. Okay, right now, Pians of the time idea, we should never read Lincoln. And that's it's and again it's a it's a very slippery slope with stuff like this, and I always you know, I know people roll their eyes at that, but it's you can't apply the same rules to everything.

And I think that, you know, to go back and look at something like Forbidden Planet, it's very interesting you mentioned the kind of lack of people of color. Well, you know, it's but then, but then contrast that with the thing that you've already mentioned that this inspired, which is Star Trek. And what was one of Gene Roddenberry's like literal points with that show was to show that the future in sci fi is going to be democratic in the way it's everybody. It's literally everybody. It's George d Kay, a man of Asian descent, Walter Kanik, a man who can you know, do a laughable Russian accent, but a Russian accent nonetheless, you know Yvette Nicol or not even Jesus, oh god, what's her name?

The actress Nicole Nicol, the woman who plays Ahura like I mean again, even someone like I mean Spock made to look like something else but in a crew of humans. James doing is Scottish, like you have all of this in Star Trek, almost as a response to Forbidden Planet, as like Forbidden Planet was just a ship of white men going to a planet with white people. And yes, you know there are people that die, they just happen to be the white men, because that's the only people in the movie that there are. There is no one else. And it's interesting because Star Trek is a direct repudiation of that, which I think is interesting.

Forbidden Planet sets a sets the table well for a direction of the future to take, and then Star Trek goes. But yes, in the future, people would stop being racist, hopefully and stop caring about the color of each other's skin and worry about the moral and the conduct of each other's characters like, and that's what Star Trek preaches. Like Star Trek has always preached that, from having a vult on a human ship to having people of color on a ship when a time in place is being it's being made in where it is a primarily white driven culture, like those are things that sci fi is hoping for. But in the irony of it all, in creating content that is hoping for that, it affects that in turn. And that's what's so important about Beside.

The famous story of Nicole Nichols, I think I'm getting her name right, Yeah, I hope so, the great Nicole Nichols at one point thinking about not being on Star Trek and who talks her into staying on Star Trek Martin Luther King Junior, right, because he got it. We need we need you up there on the screen being efficient and competent and part of the crew and getting along and solving problems, you know, together. We need that. And and by the way, just to go a little further on Star Trek something else. It doesn't get as much attention, but Jean Runberry snuck in and I I think the show changed the networks, right because the networks were very uncomfortable.

There was basically there was this belief that, especially in parts of the country, if you had a mixed cast, that you would get either lower attendance, lower viewership, or you would get protests or something like that. Right, Okay, And that lasted through the sixties at least, maybe even beyond there. I mean, but a Little Mermaid film that cast a black actress got you know, backlash because they cast a black actress. So I think it's died down a lot, but it's still there. It still exists in pockets.

It's just died down so much that I think it's the only people that are doing and now are considered fringe, you know what I mean, like off in a direction that it's like sci fi. Sci fi has been preaching this for sixty years, like stop stop fighting, something that sci fi has been ahead of. Yeah, well, let's talk about that in a second, because I think there's this there's a I guess a spin on that that I want to discuss. But I just want to point out Geene Runberry did something else which he doesn't get as much attention to. At one point, there's a black admiral.

The current answers to right, and I thought, well, you know that's what And again, I watched Star Trek in the nineteen seventies as a kid, right, So, so already there were a lot of TV shows, The Jeffersons, they worked black cops, black detectives, black mayors on TV. So there was a change occurring already. But that was really interesting to have a black boss. I don't know whether somebody who's a better television historian will have to tell me, was that the first time in a movie or at a TV show that a white man answered to a black boss or not? Was that a breakthrough or not.

I can't believe it's the first, but it's possible. It's possible. I mean, television took a while to catch up just to go on what you were saying there and again. And this is where I always encourage our students to just it really feels good to criticize other people and people in the past for not being with it or up to. Date culturally sensitive by our approximation, but it.

Is also worth asking what are we going to be criticized for many years in the future. So I think there are critiques that are legitimate when this is what gets me sometimes is you'll see a cast well I mean, okay, so the retconning of diversity into historical situations where there wasn't right right, which is. A very weird. I wouldn't say weird, but it's like it's a thing now that we're kind of like contending with, which I think is being done to subversive and transgressive effect, but also to just like what the hell are we doing? What the hell are we doing?

Like what is going on? He yah? And I understand, and I my friends in history departments will say, well, the past was a little bit more diverse than our stereotypes of the past, like for example, there were you know, there were black people in medieval England and things like that. It isn't it isn't. It's not beyond the realm of possibility.

Yeah, but when it's obviously done and then no one notices within the story space and it's not dealt with as something, then you wonder whether again there's this issue of like they're covering up the past, They're they're making the past uh you know white, they're whitewashing literally the past, of saying that like well, why why didn't why would it be actually unlikely that mister Darcy would be a black man or something like that in Jane Austen, Well, let's talk about why that would be unlikely. I mean to me, discussing the the unhappy things from the past is part of discussing the past, and entertainment should not be pretending those didn't exist. But going back to this movie, just I want to maybe with this is where we're wrapping up or not.

But the Krell are very interesting because. We've barely talked about the subsuming thing of this movie that I wanted to talk about, which I'm sure you have as well. Well, you know, part of the challenge that television and I watched these first two episodes of The Orville and the way that television was. The Star Trek was famously given this tiny budget. I think by the time the show was canceled, they had only like seventy thousand dollars an episode, which even in the nineteen sixties was just pitiful.

And so yeah, most aliens were humans with a probuscus prosthetic, you know, or they had a green dye job, or like a little horn or husk or something like that. And it's only later with CGI sometimes that we can have more different interesting aliens. These aliens were really alien, you know how we complain sometimes that like aliens in movies are just us right with a costume on, physically or mentally right, like their their motivations don't seem to be any different than the average Canadian, right, even though they're from another galaxy. But these aliens cases are from France, truly alien and that's a big deal. Well, and that's and what I love about it is it's twofold.

They're clearly like alien in the way that they are portrayed through the environment on screen, because again we never see them, but they're also alien. They're alien in external presentation, but they're still very human adjacent in their motivations and their they're machinations. And you know, you you talked about watching the Orville, you know, to go back to Covenant and Prometheus. In those films, the creatures look human and have human machinations. I don't think they needed to look human to have human imaginations.

They clearly thought that that needed to be the case. But you don't have to have something look human to have human machinations, to have the machinations of someone that is greedy or spiteful or wants power or any of these things is understandable because I don't think that's purely a human thing. I think that is a characteristic of sentient beings, is to want to go into business for yourself or to help others, or take advantage of a situation as an opportunist or not. Like, I'm not sure that that's human and as much as that's just our ability to understand it through our own lens of interpretation. But I love that the Krell in this movie, the entire point of their existence is they are so technologically advanced that they did they Ian Malcolm themselves and didn't ask if they should.

They just did, And in not asking if they should and only doing, they created something that they could not contain, which is a machine that puts the id into reality, which, as we all know, you know, the idea of killing the ego is so wife important, especially as a creative it's important. But I think if you're teaching, or if you're teaching or leading or in charge of people, I think it's important to not have an ego. I think it's important to lead without an ego and to understand that having an ego can be really detrimental to progress and other things. And the ID is such a big like it's part and parcel with that. And to see in this movie the Krell were brought down by their own essentially like animalistic super id is.

I think it's so insane to me because I was not expecting that with this movie at all. But then to have them be like, well, they made such technological advances that it advanced past their ability to contain it, and it advanced past their understanding of their own situation, which is you've turned thought into reality. I love that that is the one of the themes and directions that you could take another hour two hours of this conversation down, because that, for me was the interesting conversation that he's having is your ego and your manifestation of your wants and desires, uncontrolled, unchecked, taking over and harming and destroying things. It's like, what an interesting idea for a film. Of course, it's a sci fi movie that's doing it, you know, like sci fi is the playground for these kinds of things.

Horror movies are now, uh sci fi movies used to be. It's interesting that they've kind of flip flopped. Horror movies used to not be a place where we would have interesting, heady discussions about things, but and it was sci fi. Now it's flopped, like, you know, maybe Project Hail Mary might be a step in the right direction for sci fi in terms of it returning to a loftier, positive, more optimistic goal. But now it's like horror movies are where we can have these interesting conversations about human ego or big emotional questions.

And that wasn't the case for the longest time. It was almost like sci fi was the genre to take those ideas and run an often interesting, entertaining way. Yes, and let me maybe this is where I want to wrap up, But let me quote mister Spock. You mentioned mister Spock, right, and this chain of associations, and we can say Robbie the Robot led to a lot of robots, including C three PO and R two D two. But we can also say this idea about the mind, the mind of any creature and technology, the relationship of the two.

And I was watching something the other day. I certainly am old enough to remember when I saw Star Trek the new generation that I this cube being came along and I was going like, wait a minute, wasn't that the same? And there's been a fan theory about this for a long time, and it's turned out to be one of the things where actually there was a connection. The original Star Trek series had the Squire of Gothos, who was this being who could just using his mind and it turns out, Surprised there's a machine behind the wall, using the machine to make whatever was in his mind come into reality. One of my favorite episodes of the original series, by the way, literally one.

That I've seen a million times, and anyone who wants to can go look at the story of like how Q came from that? But there's a fantastic quote which again you're thinking in nineteen sixties science fiction producing such depth of intellectual insight and really things to think about as a young person watching the show, because the Star Trek original generation, just like today, a lot of young kids watching, a lot of older people watching. Spock says to the Squire of Gothos, this child who has a lot of power and is like using it for humiliating people or destroying things. Spock says, I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline.

I object to power without constructive purpose and what a beautiful insight which really could be the moral of Forbidden Planet, but has carried to the present day about our relationship with technology and also our relationship with power within the story space of everything, including science fiction, and so that idea of intellect must be coupled with discipline and must be for a positive purpose. The Krell, no matter how advanced they were, missed that the film was about humans being reminded of it and then like, what would they do with that knowledge? Will they use it effectively or not? And what's interesting is where the film leaves us is, Oh, by the way, humanity will get here too. And it's like and what I find to be interesting is you can read that one of two ways.

You can read it as humanity will get to the point with with the where the crawl did where they just wipe themselves out by unchecked power being used in an unchecked way, or humanity will get there too, or like your Earth will get here too, as in they will get to the point where they understand this and are able to do something with it as opposed to just letting it run rampant. The movie I think leaves it up to interpretation as to where it things things are going to go. I mean, just to go to like you said, how modern day times have evolved, like the need for checks and balances and corrections on power, overwhelming power and absolute power I think are important and I think you know this movie shows that again in a world of unchecked balances, things that often you know, one small thing, one small missed detail that you know.

Oh, by the way, your supercomputer can tap into the subconscious id oops, like it can make everything real, including your thoughts and notion can be turned real. And then those thoughts and notions can not only be turned real, but then can be at the hands of the controls. Is again like go back to having you know you talked about Star Trek, to go back to the you know, Covenant and Prometheus of it all. We have a movie about creators creating a creation that is then yearning to create as well, which puts into the universe problems of reasons for creation and intention behind creation and need to create an ego. And if you just don't allow the thing that you've created to create, you can cut that off completely and it's never a problem.

But again, to go back to the idea of forbidden Planet, where we forget the one thing, or we overlook the one thing it contributes to the entire downfall. And in Covenant, I want to say, Walter, one of the two characters David or Michael Fassbender plays, says, you know, in a symphony, one discordant tone will overtime ruin the entire melody. And it's like, that's true, because one discordant tone is the only thing you can focus on, and in that by definition, destroys your ability to in enjoy it at all, because that's all you're focusing on. And it's that same thing here. They overlooked the one thing they should have been focusing on, which is their own egos.

And I don't think they need to remake this movie, just like you know, another movie, because you'd send me a list of things to talk about. One of the other movies on this list is The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I would contend also did not need to read for the same reason that this one doesn't. It can be applicable forwards and backwards, and I think that that is truly the sign of a timeless piece of film or TV, or literature or music. That transcends all capable rational thought and cements itself as something worth talking about in nineteen sixty six, nineteen seventy six, nineteen eighty six, nineteen ninety six, and so on. And every time you reappraise it, the way you reappraise it will probably change just a bit, if not a lot, oftentimes depending on you, but sometimes it's depending on the world you're in, because the questions and comments that this film is having are always going to be applicable to any time and place, because what they're asking and talking about is just human emotions at the core of it.

Even though the Krell are aliens and we see that they're aliens, they still have a human emotion or what we perceive is human emotion at the core of it. Though I think we, you know, uniquely having our hands on emotions, I think is kind of amusing Star Trek shows, as that's clearly not the case. You know, the Vulcans don't have human emotions, but the Klingons have all kinds of emotions, So are those Klingon emotions or human emotions. I really appreciate, doctor Parromutter, that you have ReLit the fire underneath me to watch more sci fi because I feel like it's one of those things where it's like, you know, an old friend. I'm coming back to it, you know.

I mentioned to you my dad growing up would give me Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov and Peers Anthony books, which is like of a certain kind of sci fi and of a certain time and place in sci fi. That's a very high watermark. And this movie, I think think is similarly a very high watermark for a very specific kind of sci fi, which is to say, well made sci fi. Thank you for introducing me to this movie and also for pushing me back kind of into the realm of sci fi, because it's not something I had been really watching for a very long time, but the needle's been swinging back towards it a lot, and there have been a couple people pushing in that direction, and you're one of them. So thank you, well, thank you.

I think, as going back to what you said originally, I have my favorite genres and subgenres, but I'm willing to watch anything and ask questions about its intentions, its successes, its methods, and all movies are television, show, digital games, books, I guess whatever media we have in the future are of interest because they're the best like this one. We can take away these applicable, not necessarily lessons. It's not necessarily like and so this is what we must do in these situation relations. It's questions we should be asking ourselves. The Krell destroyed themselves because they weren't stopping to say, now we can do this, should we do it?

Let's let's, as you said, let's think about this. What are the scenarios where this could go wrong? Do we know ourselves as much as we should know ourselves? So asking good questions is what movies do besides providing answers, And I think science fiction has always served as this template for asking questions about what would society be like if we change this, or if we did that, or if we. Had if we had unchecked access to scientific marvels that we could only at this time dream of.

And now we're you know, so far past where this is, you know, in a lot of ways, but still nowhere near where this wants us to be, which I think Star Trek and the best kind of sci fi really preaches, like, when we have access to all this technology, why aren't we using it to make things? Better, why are we using it for other things? And it's like, well, because human beings are involved in human beings are complex, and human beings are multifaceted, and that everybody has a different reason for doing things, whether or not they tell you is a different story. And like you said, unchecked power, if you sit there and you don't ask questions, and if you're not being introspective about things, you can forget the minorist of details and the minerst of details.

You know, sometimes that's enough. So thank you, doctor Promutter for introducing me to this film. I really enjoyed it. You know, we could probably talk for another two or three hours about it. You know, maybe down the road when they remake it, maybe we can cover their remake and we can get Richard on here and the three of us can bemoan how the remake is all of a sudden an allegory about what was the daily authors stood still ended up being about like green change, climate change, So whatever.

I don't know what the the the idea DuJour would be uh for this one at the time. Whenever they remake it, you know, maybe it'll probably will be ai little. Yeah, the aliens are going to come and tell you know, don't destroy your world with data centers. That's right, that's right. So but as always, thank you so much for programming this episode, Doctor Promoter.

I've obviously enjoyed it. If you want to hear more of doctor Promutter and I talking not exclusively just he and I, but so far it's been he and I and a couple of guests from time to time heading over to the culture Cast where he joins me from time to time to talk about movies and maybe Aaron TV show in the future. Maybe we can do like a Patreon thing, because I know you keep there are trees that you keep barking up that you want me to climb, So maybe I'll climb them. We just have to incentivize people to listen to it in a financial way. Speaking of the financial way of incentivizing people listen to things, patreon dot com slash culture Cast is where you can go to do that.

Five dollars or more gets you access to bonus episodes, and ten dollars and more gets you access to ranking on Bond, which is me and Richard HadAM and Mike White. Yes, I know I used to poor grammar talking about James Bond movies and we're almost done. We're like literally like one or two movies from the end. So that's the thing you're into. Go do that.

Otherwise, culturecast dot com and Weirdingwaymedia dot com is where you can go and find this show and so many other shows. So go do that. Doctor Parmutter, thank you so much for joining me. This has been fun as always, and as always, we'll catch it on the next episode.