Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  There may be cultural nods in the name of the Bellerophon too. In Greek myth Bellerophon stole the winged horse Pegasus and, trying to fly up to heaven, was killed. Alternatively Bellerophon was the ship that took Napoleon to his final exile on the island of St. Helena. Either of these sound like workable metaphors for Morbius, but the reference is never explored in the movie. In contrast to all this mythical stuff, the ship from Earth is utterly utilitarian, with no name at all but a number, and its all-male crew, dressed only in gray, have lust but no romance in their souls: “Nothing to do but throw rocks at tin cans, and we gotta bring the tin cans.”

  So the movie has depth. But it isn’t without faults, such as the utterly leaden humor. Suffice it to say that Robby gets the best lines.

  And then there is Altaira. It’s not uncommon for movies of this period to make uncomfortable viewing regarding their treatment of women, but this one is particularly teeth-curling. Altaira, after all, has been effectively imprisoned by a father who, as is hinted darkly, may lust incestuously after her himself. She has grown up almost feral, never having met another adult save her father, and has a total and supposedly charming naïveté: “What’s a bathing suit?” The salivating men of the C-57D ruthlessly exploit this naïvete in trying to get it on with her. Commander Adams blames her for provoking this behavior, before moving in for the kill himself. The movie’s treatment of Altaira is both creepily exploitative and a missed imaginative opportunity.

  These faults aside, the movie’s dark tone, sophisticated emotional maturity, and multiple meanings have been unpacked by its audiences ever since its release.

  There is humility in Morbius’ encounter with the Krell. Just as conquering Anglo-Saxons once cowered in superstitious awe of ruined Roman cities, so even the starfaring humans of the future are dwarfed compared to the mighty achievements of this vanished race. You might even look for a biblical parallel. Adams is like Adam, and Altaira like Eve, in a planetary Garden of Eden whose equilibrium is ruined by their kiss.

  On another level, perhaps there’s a metaphor even in this expansive movie for the bombs-and-bunkers horror of the Cold War: You meddle with advanced technology at your peril. Shakespeare’s Prospero was a ruler and an intellectual who gave up power but stayed in the world of knowledge. In the 1950s, however, scientists were distrusted; so Morbius’ curiosity about the Krell machinery is foolish arrogance that nearly ends up killing everybody. He’s not the only scientist in sf to have echoes of another literary prototype, Faustus.

  In the end, however, this tale of starships and alien machinery is all about humanity. Adams’ sense of duty is compromised by love, and the id-monster is an embodiment of Morbius’ murky jealousy over his daughter. So it isn’t the Krell machinery that threatens the humans but their own inner flaws. Many sf tales of exploration are extrapolations of the American dream of the frontier: We can put our conflicts behind us if only we can find enough room. But Planet tells us that no matter how far we travel, we can’t leave ourselves behind.

  Fifty years on, Planet remains influential—and not just in the borrowing of its name by Britain’s leading specialist sf chain. The movie’s innovative use of electronic music and striking visuals have found endless echoes; it is impossible to gaze on vistas of vast alien machinery like those in Total Recall (1990) or Babylon 5’s Epsilon 3, for instance, without recalling the chambers of the Krell. Its psychological storyline is often homaged too. The id-monster is echoed in at least one of the theories about the meaning of the current hit TV show Lost—set, of course, on another island.

  Robby remains one of the best-loved robots ever seen in the movies. His inability to harm humans, drawing on the then well-established Laws of Robotics set out in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories, places him light-years away from the usual “kill-all-humans” idiot-robot portrayal much panned in The Simpsons but still, ironically, taken seriously in, for example, ironically, in the movie I, Robot. Robby went on to star in an unrelated kid’s movie called The Invisible Boy (1957). The “Danger, Will Robinson!” robot of the 1960s TV hit Lost in Space wasn’t Robby, but it wasn’t terribly unlike the altruistic avatar of Altair. Robby toys are still produced, and original models are highly prized collectibles.

  The movie’s strongest influence is secondary, however, through Star Trek. Explorations in space have always been a key theme in science fiction—for instance, AE van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950). But media folk tend to be influenced primarily by other media products, and Trek creator Gene Roddenberry made no secret of the fact that his thinking was heavily shaped by Planet.

  Planet’s echoes are obvious even in Trek’s original pilot, The Cage. For the United Planets read the United Federation of Planets. As Commander Adams went before him and James T. Kirk would later, brave Captain Pike leads the Enterprise on an adventure of interplanetary discovery. The C-57D, with the Navy-cruiser feel of the Enterprise, is stocked with an earthy doctor and a ship’s engineer of the traditional mold (“All right, it’s impossible. How long will it take?”). Planet has sliding doors, force-field shields, communicators (mounted on the crew’s belts), and a replicator (in Robby’s belly). Just like Adams, Pike finds human survivors on a remote planet. And Pike gets first dibs on the beautiful girl, just like Adams, and just as Kirk would many times.

  To some extent all of Trek’s planetary excursions took place in the shadow of Commander Adams’ sole expedition. Kirk and his successors would frequently find themselves humbled before the titanic achievements of superior races. And Trek often demonstrated its visual debt to the movie—for instance, the Krell underground complex is reminiscent of the interior of a Borg cube.

  Even Planet’s nod to Shakespeare found many echoes in Trek, beginning with the Original Series episode, “Conscience of the King,” which featured a production of Hamlet. Who could forget General Chang, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a movie which actually took its title from a Shakespeare line, taunting Kirk with quotations from the Bard, which always sounded better “in the original Klingon”? In a sense the circle was closed in the Next Generation episode Emergence, in which, in a holodeck production of The Tempest, the robot Data, a distant descendant of Robby, actually gets to play Prospero.

  Trek emulated Planet in mixing interplanetary adventure with strong characterization and at least an attempt at moral complexity. Even if Trek rarely achieved the multilayered depth of Planet, without the movie’s prior demonstration that at least some of the audience could accept such seriousness in sf, Trek would surely never have dared go where no franchise had gone before.

  And, amazingly, Forbidden Planet itself has stayed imaginatively alive. The hilarious 1990s stage musical Return to the Forbidden Planet deconstructs the movie by putting Shakespeare’s lines back in, and by camping up the cheesy 1950s skiffyness—think Troy Tempest-style peaked caps and epaulets, a roller-skating silver robot, and ray guns made from Bakelite hair dryers. This is a homage to the movie that Planet ’s makers could barely have imagined but surely would have loved.

  Forbidden Planet showed that spectacle and seriousness could combine in effective genre movie-making, and it casts a long shadow today. But as is the fate of much of the best sf, maybe it was too smart for its cinema-going audience. While contemporary so-bad-it’s-good B-movie dross like Earth vs. The Flying Saucers raked it in, and Roddenberry’s son-of-Planet behemoth went on to become a multibillion-dollar franchise, Planet itself recouped only half its budget.

  Author and Story Notes

  Stephen Baxter started to read sf in the 1960s, so he was immersed in the culture of the 1950s: Asimov, Clarke, Dick, Sheckley, and the rest—and Forbidden Planet, regularly shown on TV all through his formative years. Not surprisingly, it’s had quite an effect . . . as you can see from the Afterword to this volume.

  Steve is currently working on a series of history-tampering novels called Time’s Tapestry. In addition, he’s continuing the Time Odyssey series in collaboration with Sir Arthur C. Clarke.


  In his introduction, Ray Bradbury has owned up to the fact that, had the plan to have him write the screenplay for this much loved SF movie gone ahead, the first thing he would have done would have been kill off Robby the Robot (or at least severely downgrade his status in the film). The second would have been to make more of the Id. Somewhere, on one of the alleged myriad alternate Earths, that movie was made—now all we need to do is find a way to get there. . . .

  Ray is currently being fêted by a number of independent specialist presses—the editor’s own PS Publishing included—all of them hell-bent on reissuing those classic Bradbury story collections and novels from days gone by. Meanwhile, despite having clocked up eighty-six years, Ray is still working feverishly on a dizzying number of projects.

  Peter Crowther drives his wife, Nicky, to distraction by tuning into any TV channel that’s showing Forbidden Planet, no matter how long the movie has been running. “It’s one of those films,” he says, wistfully and without apology, “that I could watch over and over again. It’s the whole mythos of the Krell . . . those colossal tunnels—both vertical and horizontal—of equipment and the incredible poignancy of that wonderfully superior race doomed to extinction because of its own progress. Highly relevant today, me-thinks. But relevance aside, it’s just a marvellous movie . . . and when I realized that this year was its fiftieth anniversary, I just knew we had to commemorate that in some way. And, with this book, I think we’ve done exactly that . . . in spades! My thanks go to all the contributors as well as to Marty Greenberg and the gang at Tekno Books and, of course, our friends at DAW Books.”

  This year (2006) saw the appearance of Dark Times, Pete’s fifth collection, with another at the planning stages. The long-awaited second part of his Forever Twilight cycle and a separate short SF novel, Kings of Infinite Space are scheduled for a spring 2007 publication, to tie in with Pete’s appearance as a Guest of Honor at the World Horror Convention in Toronto.

  Paul Di Filippo wanted to play with the archetypical structure of the kind of tale in which the hero dashes off on a rescue mission to a mysterious world and succeeds in toppling the hidden empire or conspiracy or potentate thereon. But the author sounds a cautionary note. “In my story, the hero is misguided, and the nexus of mystery triumphs, as it should, since it has access to a higher level of understanding than the limited protagonist.”

  This year sees the publication of Paul’s new collection, Shuteye for the Timebroker and his Creature from the Black Lagoon novel, Time’s Black Lagoon. He lives in Providence, RI, where he and his long-time partner, Deborah, occasionally take pity on visiting British writer/editors, driving them out to see Lovecraft’s final resting place and taking them for burgers in aluminium diners straight out of Will Eisner’s Spirit comic-strips.

  You will easily be able to deduce the oldest possible age Scott Edelman could have been when he first saw Forbidden Planet by his admission that, at least at that initial viewing, he was far more interested in the shiny surface of Robby the Robot than in the somewhat softer surface of Anne Francis.

  Being born in 1955 makes Scott one year older than Forbidden Planet, and he didn’t actually get to see it until ten years later . . . and then the next day, and the next one, and the one after that; it was in constant rotation on something called The Million Dollar Movie, aired multiple times weekly by WPIX in New York. “For them, it was a money-saving operation,” Scott says, “but for me, it was indoctrination. I’m sure that Forbidden Planet, with its robot, rocket ship, and creature from the Id was one of the reasons I fell in love with science fiction.”

  The novelization of the film was also meaningful to young Edelman. “I remember being in the Boy Scouts not too long after having overdosed on the film,” Scott recalls, “and discovering the book as my troop paused at a newsstand just as we were about to go on a field trip. We walked across the George Washington Bridge, and as we hiked for six miles across New Jersey, and my fellow scouts learned to tie knots, reproduce bird calls, and properly identify trees, I ignored the real world for outer space, reading as I walked, constantly tripping over my feet, but never losing my place. Which I guess says as much about me as does my preference for Robby the Robot over Anne Francis.”

  Scott Edelman the editor currently edits both Science Fiction Weekly, the Internet magazine of news, reviews, and interviews, and SCI FI, the official print magazine of the SCI FI Channel. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run, and he has also edited Sci-Fi Entertainment for almost four years, as well as two other SF media magazines, Sci-Fi Universe and Sci-Fi Flix. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.

  Scott the writer has published more than fifty short stories in magazines such as The Twilight Zone, Absolute Magnitude, and Science Fiction Review, and in anthologies such as Crossroads: Southern Tales of the Fantastic, Men Writing SF as Women, and MetaHorror, as well as in two of Forbidden Planets’ predecessors, Moon Shots and Mars Probes. He has twice been a Stoker Award finalist in the category of Short Story.

  Matthew Hughes thinks he first saw Forbidden Planet on a black-and-white TV in the late fifties before he was even into double digits. “So the film might well have been my introduction to the idea that the psyche contains different levels, components, rooms to visit and maybe get stuck in,” he says, “and thus has had an effect on my work that I haven’t even begun to gauge.”

  Matt has produced four novels and a short-story collection and is currently partway through a series of novels following the career of Henghis Hapthorn, foremost freelance discriminator of the Archonate on a far-future Old Earth.

  “From the initial conceit of Forbidden Planet to the motivating idea behind my story is a short distance,”

  Alex Irvine writes. “In the movie, remnant technology brings the psychodrama to a head, while in this story the planet itself is the technology. This was interesting to me because it adds an interesting subtext to the question of the psychological effects of space exploration, which I’ve written about in other stories, i.e., to what extent does the pure experience of another world become its own psychological minefield? Perhaps that’s enough to destabilize anyone, without the added complications of winsome refugees or arcane technologies.

  “The inner space of the human mind is more interesting than the scenery of outer space for its own sake, as the makers of the film surely knew. In the film, though, the turmoil of this inner space is manifested by the device of the energy monster that assaults Dr. Morbius’s compound. I wanted to see what kind of effect it was possible to achieve with a subtler, more introspective take on the same dynamic. What if the manifestation of the character’s emotional imbalance were not a placeholder like the energy monster but a subtle rebellion of the planet itself against the laws of reality the other characters need to understand their phenomenal world?”

  Alex also skipped the romantic interaction, which, he says, “although it was apparently inspiring to Gene Roddenberry, doesn’t move me. The Shakespearean roots of the story were impossible to ignore, and although Robby the Robot is usually pegged as Ariel whenever someone bothers to draw up a schema comparing Forbidden Planet to The Tempest, I always wanted Robby to be more of a Caliban figure . . . thus my own title, and the nod to Caliban’s dream soliloquy in the story.”

  Alex is the author of the novels A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, and The Narrows. Much of his published short fiction is collected in Unintended Consequences and the forthcoming Pictures from an Expedition. In addition to the Locus, Crawford, and International Horror Guild awards for his fiction, he has won a New England Press Association award for investigative journalism. He is assistant professor of English at the University of Maine, where he teaches fiction writing.

  Jay Lake grew up without television or movies, living in the Third World in the era before satellite television or VCRs. So at an age when most protowriters are staring at late night horror movies (or whatever the equival
ent for their generation), he always had his nose in books. Jay’s first exposure to Forbidden Planet was actually in the theme song to Rocky Horror Picture Show, to which he lost many, many evenings in college. For years Lake confused Robby the Robot with Will Robinson’s robot from Lost in Space. So though he grew up reading science fiction, he reluctantly confesses that he’d never seen Forbidden Planet until he was preparing for this project. Jay knew from researching the movie that it was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He knew from hanging around art directors’ offices what Robby looked like and talked like. And he certainly knew about Anne Francis.

  Watching the movie, Jay realized how profound its influence was on everything from the original Star Trek to New British Space Opera. While this is a truism that was surely obvious to everyone else in the genre, Jay must own his naïvete with some pride. It brought him fresh at the age of forty-one to this film, which is among the great wellsprings of our fictional culture. Jay watched the movie, brushed up his Shakespeare, and decided that King Lear was more interesting for his purposes. The result, of course, is left to the judgment of the reader.

  Jay lives in Portland, Oregon, with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. His next novel, Trial of Flowers, will be available in the fall of 2006.

  The creators of Forbidden Planet made no secret of the fact that they’d borrowed and updated the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “In the same spirit,” says Paul McAuley, “I hope that no one minds that my little homage to this marvelous film borrows and updates its robots, monsters, and supertechnology hidden in an underground alien city.”