12 to the Moon | |
---|---|
Directed by | David Bradley |
Written by | Fred Gebhardt DeWitt Bodeen |
Produced by | Fred Gebhardt |
Starring | Ken Clark Michi Kobi Tom Conway Anna-Lisa |
Cinematography | John Alton |
Edited by | Edward Mann |
Music by | Michael Andersen |
Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 74 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $150,000 |
12 to the Moon is a 1960 independently made American black-and-white science fiction film, produced and written by Fred Gebhardt, directed by David Bradley and starring Ken Clark, Michi Kobi, Tom Conway and Anna-Lisa. The film was distributed in the U.S. by Columbia Pictures as a double feature with either Battle in Outer Space or 13 Ghosts, depending on the local film market.
12 to the Moon was novelized by Fred Gebhardt under the pen name Robert A. Wise and published in 1961.[1] Gebhardt also wrote the film's original story.
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The Moon: Crash Course Astronomy #12
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PROOF That Aliens Were On The Moon 12/28/16
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The Moon Landing Conspiracy - Unexplained Objects
Transcription
This episode of Crash Course is brought to you by Square Space. The Moon is pretty hard to miss when it’s up at night. It’s big and bright and really very pretty. Even cooler, it’s the closest astronomical object in the Universe to us, and arguably, the one we know best. I hate to break it to you, but we humans are pretty egotistical. Even though there are over 160 known moons of decent size in our solar system, we call ours THE Moon, with a capital M, like it’s the only one, or the most important one. And I guess to us it is the most important one. It’s only the fifth largest moon in the solar system in absolute size, but compared to Earth it’s pretty big; fully a quarter of the diameter of the planet. That’s a way bigger ratio than for any other moon orbiting a major planet in the solar system. By the numbers, the Moon is about 3470 kilometers in diameter, and on average about 380,000 kilometers from Earth. That means it looks pretty big in our sky, but probably not as big as you think. When the moon rises, it can look huge and looming on the horizon, like you could fall into it. Ah, but that’s not really the case; it’s easy to show it’s the same size on the horizon as it is high overhead. Yet people think it looks twice as big when it’s on the horizon! This is the well-known Moon Illusion, and it’s due to two factors: how we perceive the sizes of objects, and how we perceive the sky. We don’t really see the sky as a hemisphere over our heads, but more like a flattened bowl, with the horizon farther away than the zenith. So when the Moon’s on the horizon, our brains are convinced it’s farther away. But if it’s farther away, it must be physically bigger to appear that size, right? So our brain interprets the Moon’s size as HUGE. It’s an illusion, but a convincing one. In fact, the Moon is about the same size as a small pill held up at arm’s length! Our satellite is a lot smaller than you think. The internal structure of the Moon is roughly similar to the Earth: It has a solid, iron inner core; a liquid outer core, a thick mantle, and a crust of lighter material on top. The core is small, probably 350 kilometers in radius, and still hot, though not as hot as Earth’s core. The lower mantle may be a thick fluid, but unlike Earth’s mantle the upper part is solid. The easiest part of the moon to observe is its surface, so of course we know the most about that. The near side, the side we see from Earth, is divided into two distinct types of regions: highlands, which are heavily cratered, and maria—Latin for “seas”—which are darker and smoother. The craters in the highlands are from countless impacts over the eons from asteroids and comets. Rocks from these regions have been dated to be well over 4 billion years old — nearly as old as the Moon itself! The maria, on the other hand, don’t have nearly as many craters. They’re younger, but that’s relative; rocks from those areas appear to be roughly 3-3.5 billion years old on average. The maria are made of darker, basaltic material, which means they probably formed from lava flooding older areas. For most of human history, the far side of the Moon was hidden from us, but in 1959 the Soviet Union flew the Luna 3 space probe around the Moon, photographing the far side for the first time. Everyone expected it to look a lot like the near side, but shockingly, it’s vastly different: There were almost no maria! That’s weird; the near side is covered with them. And not only that, observations from subsequent lunar probes showed the crust on the lunar far side is thicker than it is on the near side as well. The Moon is starting to stack up mysteries. Why is it so big compared to Earth? Why are the near and far sides so different? It turns out the composition of the crust has a lot of similarities to Earth, but also a lot of differences as well. Why? It turns out the answers to these questions are all related to how the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago. A lot of ideas have been proposed to figure out how the Moon formed, but the best one going these days is called the Giant Impact hypothesis. When the solar system formed, there were a lot more objects orbiting the Sun than there are now. These ranged in size from grains of dust up to objects the size of planets, and that meant there were lots of collisions. No doubt the Earth suffered many such impacts. But one happened late in Earth’s history, relatively speaking, roughly 50 million years after things started to settle down. A Mars-sized planet, given the unofficial name Theia, slammed into our young planet, but it wasn’t a head-on impact; it was a grazing collision. The impact was colossal, blasting a huge amount of material from both planets into space. Most of it came from the outer layers of the Earth, since the collision was a grazing one. This material rapidly coalesced into the Moon, and that explains why there’s some but not total similarity in composition to Earth; it used to be part of the Earth. But some of it came from the other planet, too. And we may even have some evidence of it; some rocks from the Moon show a peculiar ratio of different kinds of oxygen atoms, called isotopes. It’s possible some of the more exotic isotopes of oxygen came from the other planet. Actually, this idea has been around for a long time, ever since the Apollo missions in the 1970s. There’s a lot of evidence to support it, too. But a new twist on it goes farther. When the Moon formed from the debris of the collision, it was close to Earth, probably 20,000 kilometers away. The collision was so violent that it completely melted the Earth, and the Moon was molten too. Tidal forces rapidly synchronized the Moon’s spin and orbital period, so that one face always pointed toward Earth. If you were on that side of the Moon, the Earth would dominate the sky, appearing 80 times larger than the Moon appears in our sky today. And the Earth was hot. It hung there like blast furnace, and would’ve seriously heated the near side of the Moon. The far side would’ve been much cooler. The material on the near side would’ve vaporized, and a lot of it would have condensed on the far side. Over time, this created the thicker far side crust we see today. Then there was another seriously terrifying event: the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of intense collisions with comets from the outer solar system, probably triggered by the movement of outer planets. This rain of millions of comets left scars on all the inner worlds, including the Moon. That’s when most of the highland cratering occurred. Some of these collisions were massive, carving gigantic craters on the Moon. Later, lava bubbled up through cracks in the Moon’s surface, flooding these craters, creating the maria we see today. Ah, but the far side’s crust was thicker. Impacts there couldn't get as deep, and it was harder for lava to break through and bubble up. That explains why there are so few maria there. This idea that the Earth cooked the Moon and formed the crustal anomaly is pretty new, and is still being argued over. There are also competing hypotheses about this, as well. As we gather more evidence, we’ll eventually get a better understanding of just why the Moon’s crust is so weird. After all that, I have to say: it’s a little unfair to divide the lunar surface today into just highlands and maria. For example, craters are pretty diverse. Some are small and simple bowl shapes. Others are huge, dozens of kilometers across and more, punctuated with a central peak, a mountain in the middle that formed as material from the gigantic impact that formed it splashed back up in the middle. Double craters are common too, probably formed when binary asteroids hit the Moon. There are also crater chains: long lines of small craters that may have formed when a nearby large impact splashed out long streamers of material. Rays are common from big craters, too. These are extremely long “splash marks” pointing radially out from the impacts, probably formed when plumes of material were ejected. Some of the brightest are from the crater Tycho in the Moon’s southern hemisphere, and they stretch for 1500 kilometers. The material is a bit more reflective than the surrounding terrain, so they appear bright in contrast, and are one of the most outstanding features visible near the time of the full Moon. And there’s so much more! Long, sinuous rilles like dry river beds wind their way across the surface, actually the sites of ancient lava flows. There are lava tubes as well, where the top of a lava flow cooled and formed a tunnel through which lava could flow for long distances. Sometimes the roof, as it’s called, collapses and forms a skylight, and we can see into the otherwise hidden tunnel. There are also cliffs, mounds, ancient and quite dead volcanoes, even mountain chains! There’s no tectonic activity on the Moon, but mountain ranges formed at the edges of giant impacts, where the huge forces unleashed pushed up the rocks at the crater rim. And new observations show there’s something else on the Moon, too: Water. Deep craters near the Moon’s poles have floors that never see sunlight. Comet impacts can distribute water all over the Moon, but most of it is destroyed by sunlight. But it can collect in these dark craters, and studies show there could be over a billion tons of water there in the form of ice. That would be a huge boon to colonization; water is heavy and really expensive to transport from Earth. If it’s already on the Moon, that makes it a lot easier to put people there. And that’s in our future, I have no doubt. We’re starting to get serious about going back to the Moon; NASA has plans of returning, and other countries like China and India are looking Moonward as well. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And it could be soon - so soon that, I’d bet, there’s a really good chance the next person to step foot on the Moon is already alive. Perhaps some teenage student in some country is just now taking an interest in science, math, engineering - an interest that will one day will lead to another giant leap for humanity. Today you learned that the capital-M Moon is a lower-case-m-moon. It’s big compared to Earth, and is thought to have formed when a small planet impacted Earth at a grazing angle. It’s heavily cratered, and has huge flood plains on it called maria. There’s water there, too, just waiting for us to thaw it out and drink it. Crash Course Astronomy is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios. Head to their channel to discover more awesome videos. This episode was written by me, Phil Plait. The script was edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant is Dr. Michelle Thaller. It was directed by Nicholas Jenkins, edited by Nicole Sweeney, and the graphics team is Thought Café.
Plot
Earth's International Space Order prepares for its first astronaut landing on the Moon, with the goal of claiming it as "international territory". The crew of Lunar Eagle 1 comprises 12 people from around the world, 10 men and two women, all scientists with different specialties, accompanied by a small menagerie, including two cats. The spaceship is commanded by American John Anderson.
Historical and international tensions flare up during the flight. Russian Feodor Orloff struts about, annoyingly claiming that all scientific advancements were invented by the Soviets. Israeli David Ruskin warns Feodor that the USSR would be unwise to attempt to dominate Israel, as it has done to his native Poland. David admires fellow astronaut Erich Heinrich, unaware that Erich's father was the Nazi responsible for murdering David's family during the Holocaust.
After a dangerous 27-hour flight, Lunar Eagle 1 lands and the crew begin their exploration of the Moon. Sigrid Bomark and Selim Hamid find an air-filled cave and, after shedding their space helmets, they kiss passionately. As they walk hand-in-hand deeper into the cave, its opening is suddenly sealed by impenetrable ice.
The others discover gold and minerals, but when they fire a mortar into a rock formation, liquid begins bubbling out. An excited Feodor rushes over and sticks his hands into the flow, and he is badly burned. On the way back to their spaceship, a crew member sinks to his death in lunar quicksand. John tries unsuccessfully to save him and is almost pulled under.
Inside Lunar Eagle 1, a machine begins printing logograms. Surprisingly, Hideko Murata can read them. It is a message from "The Great Coordinator of the Moon", who orders the crew to leave at once. The message also states that the emotionless Moon-beings live underground and fear that the Earthlings will "contaminate our perfect form of harmony." Sigrid and Salim are being studied because the Moon-beings are unfamiliar with "love". They and "all your kind" will be destroyed "if love turns to evil." The Moon-beings also demand that the expedition's cats, brought as an experiment to see if they could procreate on the Moon, be left behind. They find the cats as interesting as people.
Erich has a heart attack during Lunar Eagle 1's blastoff. As he babbles on half-conscious, David learns that Erich's father was the Nazi who killed David's family. However, when David learns that Erich has disowned his family and devoted his life to trying to make amends for his father's crimes, they become friends.
Near Earth, the crew witnesses "the big freeze", a gigantic freezing cloud controlled from the Moon, which encases all of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico in thick ice.
Erich produces a plan to drop "atomic bomblets" into the volcano Popocatepetl to trigger a huge eruption to thaw out North America. Etienne Martel sabotages the bomblets, revealing himself to be a French communist. He incorrectly assumes that Feodor would also want to keep America frozen in order to advance international communism's quest for world domination. He and Etienne fight, Feodor calls to John for help and when Etienne unfairly pulls out a knife, John knocks the weapon out of his hand while knocking him down. Feodor repairs the bomblets.
Erich and David fly a suicide mission to drop the bomblets from their spaceship's smaller space taxi. Popocatepetl erupts and North America begins to thaw. Another message from the Moon says that the Moon-beings now realize that Earthlings are honorable and peaceful, and that the North Americans were put into suspended animation before the big freeze, so no one has been harmed. Moreover, Earthlings will be welcomed to the Moon whenever they return.
Following the great thaw, Lunar Eagle 1's triumphant crew prepare to land.
Cast
- Ken Clark as Capt. John Anderson
- Michi Kobi as Dr. Hideko Murata
- Tom Conway as Dr. Feodor Orloff
- Anthony Dexter as Dr. Luis Vargas
- John Wengraf as Dr. Erich Heinrich
- Robert Montgomery Jr. as Dr. Rod Murdock
- Phillip Baird as Dr. William Rochester
- Richard Weber as Dr. David Ruskin
- Muzaffer Tema as Dr. Selim Hamid (as Tema Bey)
- Roger Til as Dr. Etienne Martel
- Cory Devlin as Dr. Asmara Markonen
- Anna-Lisa as Dr. Sigrid Bomark
- Francis X. Bushman as Secretary General of the International Space Order
Production
12 to the Moon was in production from April through June 1959 at Hollywood's California Studios.[2] The actual filming took seven or eight days, and the entire film was budgeted at $150,000.[3][4] Although the film was not released theatrically for another year, the American Film Institute notes that "According to an Oct 1959 HR [The Hollywood Reporter] news item, Columbia purchased the independent production in Aug 1959, intending to rush it into release to capitalize on the topicality of a space launch."[2] Director David Bradley fought over the reediting of the film.[5]
Release
12 to the Moon premiered in Los Angeles on June 22, 1960. Columbia Pictures handled the theatrical release in the US and the UK during the same year. It opened in Mexico on February 23, 1961 and was also shown in Australia.[2][6][7][8]
The film was syndicated to American television in September 1963, as part of Screen Gems' "X" package of horror and science fiction films.[9]
Reception
Contemporary film critics generally found the film to be, in the words of British film critic Phil Hardy, "a decidedly minor offering, the presence of [DeWitt] Bodeen (writer of Cat People, 1942) and [John] Alton, one of Hollywood's unsung cinematographic geniuses, notwithstanding".[10] "Kobe", writing in the June 22, 1960 issue of Variety, praised Alton's camerawork but called 12 to the Moon a "[l]ower-half science-fantasy item in which a dozen good eggs from earth tangle with some righteous, but misdirected, lunatics. Timely, but crude and cliché-ridden"[11] An anonymous reviewer in BoxOffice referred to the film as "[a] modest science fiction programmer [which] will satisfy the youngsters and the action fans who delight in stories of rocketships to the moon." The magazine awarded the film a rating of "fair".[12][13] According to science-fiction film critic and historian Bill Warren, the Monthly Film Review said that the film was a "juvenile piece of hokum" with "only its special effects and weird lunar landscape to recommend it", although Kinematograph Weekly in the UK found more merit, calling 12 to the Moon "extravagant and intriguing [with a] fascinating subject, sound acting [and] resourceful technical presentation."[3]
Modern-day critics have called the film "extremely strange and unpredictable".[4] American film critic Gary Westphal points out that the "unusually large crew of twelve [is] said to represent twelve different countries", which indicates that the journey is motivated primarily by a desire "to prevent national disputes arising over the moon in particular and, one infers, other subjects in general."[14] However, as Warren points out, "each person acts in accordance with national stereotypes and has virtually no other characterization."[3]
Modern critics have criticized the film's special effects. For example, Westphal writes that the space helmets have no visors, but each is instead equipped with an "invisible electromagnetic ray screen" that protects the astronauts' faces. He speculates that the obviously missing visors were perhaps not noticed until late in the filming and that a scene that explains the ray screens was inserted prior to the film's release before audiences could wonder about it.[14] Critic Bryan Senn notes that "[t]he effects are minimal and substandard, consisting mainly of the same shot of a rocket traveling through space used over and over again (and it's not even a convincing shot - the stars shine right through the transparent-looking ship)", although he calls the Moon set "eerie and effectively alien, with its cracks, weird shadows, and smoke seeping from mysterious holes."[15] Warren points out that the Earth-saving eruption of Popocatepetl is "depicted by stock footage of solar prominences"[3] that bear little resemblance to real volcanic eruptions.
Some modern critics find fault with the film's narrative development. Westphal says that "[f]ew films ... begin as soberly, and end as absurdly, as 12 to the Moon. The film's first thirty minutes promise an internationalized update of Destination Moon [1950], while later events rival a Flash Gordon serial."[14] Senn agrees that the film is disappointing, noting that "[w]hat starts out as a fairly intelligent and progressive space-travel film ... quickly degenerates into a juvenile, simplistic space opera. Admittedly, space operas have their place, but 12 to the Moon fails to deliver even a single aria, much less the whole opera."[15]
Home media
12 to the Moon was released in 2010 on Region 1 DVD by Sony Home Entertainment. Mill Creek Entertainment released it again in 2015 on Region 1 DVD as part of its Vintage Sci-Fi 6 Movie Collection. Shout! Factory also released on DVD the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode lampooning the film.[6][16]
Mystery Science Theater 3000
12 to the Moon was featured in episode #524 of Mystery Science Theater 3000, along with the short Design for Dreaming. The episode debuted on February 5, 1994 on Comedy Central.[17] The episode's interstitial host segments feature Nuveena, the Woman of the Future, played by Bridget Jones, taken from Design for Dreaming.[18]
12 to the Moon did not make the MST3K fan-voted top-100 list,[19] but writer Jim Vogel ranks the episode #34 of the 191 total MST3K episodes. Vogel was entertained by 12 to the Moon's shortcomings, saying, "The crew of 12 international astronauts are wonderfully stupid, in a way that only movie astronauts can be. ... It's so earnestly stupid that it's impossible to not be charmed by it."[20]
12 to the Moon was included as part of the Mystery Science Theater 3000, Volume XXXV DVD collection, released by Shout! Factory on March 29, 2016. The collection includes a documentary on the making of the film, You Are There: Launching 12 to the Moon, narrated by film historian Jeff Burr.[21] The other episodes in the four-disc set include Teenage Caveman (episode #315), Being from Another Planet (episode #405) and Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell (episode #703).[22]
References
- ^ "Authors : Wise, Robert A : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia".
- ^ a b c "Detail View". American Film Institute.
- ^ a b c d Warren, Bill (2010). Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, the 21st Century Edition. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co. Inc. pp. 808–811. ISBN 9781476666181.
- ^ a b "TCM This Month". Turner Classic Movies.
- ^ "Archivist Bradley was a true Hollywood classic | Interviews | Roger Ebert".
- ^ a b "Company Credits". Internet Movie Data Base.
- ^ "Release Information". Internet Movie Data Base.
- ^ "Australian Film Poster". Moviemen.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Heffernan, Kevin (2004). Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968. Durham NC: Duke University Press. p. 251. ISBN 9780822385554.
- ^ Hardy, Phil, ed. (1995). The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction. Woodstock NY: The Overlook Press. p. 205. ISBN 0879516267.
- ^ Wills, Don, ed. (1985). Variety's Complete Science Fiction Reviews. NY: Garland Publishing Inc. pp. 149–150. ISBN 0824087127.
- ^ "Feature Review". BoxOffice Magazine.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Review Digest". BoxOffice Magazine.[permanent dead link]
- ^ a b c Westphal, Gary (2012). The Spacesuit Film: A History, 1918-1969. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co. Inc. pp. 109–113. ISBN 9780786442676.
- ^ a b Senn, Bryan (2007). A Year of Fear: A Day-to-Day Guide to 366 Horror Films. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co. Inc. p. 356. ISBN 9780786431960.
- ^ "Programme Information". MST3K Info. Archived from the original on 2017-09-13.
- ^ Episode guide: 524- 12 to the Moon (with short: ‘Design for Dreaming'). Satellite News. Retrieved on 2018-07-06.
- ^ Trace Beaulieu; et al. (1996). The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide (1st ed.). New York: Bantam Books. p. 13. ISBN 9780553377835.
- ^ Bring Back Mystery Science Theater 3000 Update #41. Kickstarter. Retrieved on 2018-07-06
- ^ Ranking Every MST3K Episode, From Worst to Best. Vorel, Jim. Paste Magazine. April 13, 2017. Retrieved on 2018-07-06.
- ^ Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXV DVD Review Erwin, Todd. Home Theater Forum. Retrieved on 2019-02-09.
- ^ MST3K: Volume XXXV Shout! Factory. Retrieved on 2018-07-07.