The Lost Footage From Forbidden Planet (1956) That Was Finally Recovered

[00:00:00]Welcome to Altair 4, gentlemen. I am to transport you to the residence.

[00:00:05]>> You are a robot, aren't you?

[00:00:08]>> That is correct, sir. Will please fasten their seat belts.

[00:00:11]>> Looks after us like a mother.

[00:00:13]>> [music] >> Forbidden Planet wasn't just another 1950s sci-fi picture. It was the film that dragged [music] the entire genre out of the gutter and forced Hollywood to take it seriously. MGM, a studio built on musicals and glamour, >> [music] >> pointed their cameras at the stars and changed everything. A Shakespeare adaptation in a flying saucer.

[00:00:35]A robot that cost more than most houses.

[00:00:38]A monster built by a Disney animator.

[00:00:41]And almost nobody [music] saw it coming.

[00:00:44]One.

[00:00:45]Shakespeare in space.

[00:00:47]Most people think Forbidden Planet is an original story. It isn't.

[00:00:52]The entire film is a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest.

[00:00:57]The isolated genius Dr. Morbius maps directly onto Prospero. His sheltered daughter Altaira is Miranda. And the invisible monster tearing people apart is Caliban.

[00:01:08]Reimagined through Freudian psychology.

[00:01:11]The writers didn't stop there. They layered in the story of Adam and Eve, then buried the whole thing inside a gleaming science fiction package. Nobody in the audience was told they were watching the Bard in a flying saucer.

[00:01:25]Most of them never figured it out.

[00:01:27]That's how well it worked.

[00:01:29]Two.

[00:01:30]MGM's first trip to space.

[00:01:33]By 1956, MGM was the most glamorous studio in Hollywood. Epic musicals, [music] prestige dramas, stars under contract who ate lunch in tailored suits.

[00:01:45]Science fiction was not their world. It was cheap serials and rubber monsters and B pictures nobody was proud of. But MGM committed to Forbidden Planet completely.

[00:01:56]They poured serious money into it.

[00:01:58]Estimates [music] put the budget between two and five million dollars, enormous for the genre at the time.

[00:02:05]They borrowed matte painters, animation talent, [music] and the best technical crew the lot could offer.

[00:02:11]They treated a space movie the way they treated a road show musical.

[00:02:15]That decision alone changed what science fiction films were allowed to be.

[00:02:21]Three.

[00:02:22]A firsts list.

[00:02:24]Like no other.

[00:02:26]No single film from this era collected as many genuine firsts as Forbidden Planet. [music] It was the first science fiction film set entirely on a planet orbiting another star.

[00:02:37]The first to show human beings traveling in [music] a starship of their own construction.

[00:02:42]The first mainstream film scored entirely with electronic instruments.

[00:02:46]The first to build a robot character with a genuine [music] personality, rather than just a prop in a metal suit.

[00:02:53]Each of those would have been enough on its own.

[00:02:57]>> Thank you.

[00:02:58]>> Together, they made Forbidden Planet something the industry had never seen.

[00:03:02]Not a better version of what already existed.

[00:03:06]Something genuinely new.

[00:03:08]Four. Robby the Robot. Cost $125,000.

[00:03:13]Robby the Robot is one of the most iconic [music] figures in science fiction history. He is also one of the most expensive single props ever built for a film up to that point. The price tag was $125,000.

[00:03:27]In today's money, [music] that sits around $1.4 million. For one costume.

[00:03:31]For one costume. One character.

[00:03:35]He was designed by Robert Kinoshita, who went on to become the art director for Lost in Space.

[00:03:42]Take one look at that show's robot and the family resemblance is impossible to miss.

[00:03:47]The glass dome head, the animated chest panel, >> [music] >> the rotating elements.

[00:03:53]Kinoshita's on what a robot was supposed to look like stretched across two [music] decades of science fiction television.

[00:04:00]Five. The five martini robot operator getting Robbie built was only half the problem. Someone had to operate him from inside.

[00:04:09]The first man hired for the job was stuntman [music] Frankie Darro. He was small enough to fit inside the suit and experienced enough to handle the physical demands.

[00:04:19]On paper, it was a solid choice.

[00:04:22]Then he showed up to an early scene having consumed a five martini lunch.

[00:04:26]>> [music] >> He nearly toppled the $125,000 prop trying to walk across the set. He was fired almost immediately.

[00:04:34]It became one of those behind-the-scenes stories that nobody talked about publicly for years.

[00:04:39]A reminder that even the most carefully [music] planned productions have moments that could have ended very badly.

[00:04:47]Six.

[00:04:48]Disney came to build the monster.

[00:04:51]The Id monster presented a problem nobody had solved before. It had to be terrifying. [music] It had to feel enormous. And it could not be a man in a rubber suit.

[00:05:02]MGM brought in Joshua Meador on loan directly from Walt Disney Productions to figure it out.

[00:05:08]Meador invented his own technique from scratch. He sketched every [music] frame by hand in black pencil on translucent vellum paper.

[00:05:17]Each page was photographed in high contrast. Then the images were reversed into negative and tinted red.

[00:05:25]The result was a creature that existed as pure outline and energy, visible only in the moments it chose to [music] kill.

[00:05:33]Meador also handled around 29 additional visual effects shots throughout the film.

[00:05:39]Seven.

[00:05:40]The monster had Morbius's beard.

[00:05:43]Hidden inside the Id monster animation is one of the cleverest visual details in 1950 cinema.

[00:05:50]Look closely at the creature during its attack sequences. It has a small goatee beard, the same goatee worn by Dr. Morbius, the only character in the film with that feature.

[00:06:02]The animators placed it there deliberately, [music] a visual signature connecting the monster directly to the man whose subconscious was driving it, a clue buried so deep in the chaos of the attack that most audiences never caught it on first viewing.

[00:06:18]It only registers fully once you already know the ending. Then it changes [music] everything you thought you were watching.

[00:06:26]Eight, the Barrons were found in a nightclub. MGM had already hired composer David Rose [music] to write the score.

[00:06:33]He was a respected professional, orchestral music, light, accomplished work, exactly what you would expect.

[00:06:42]Then producer Dore Schary took a Christmas trip to New York City with his family.

[00:06:47]One evening, he wandered into a beatnik nightclub in Greenwich Village and heard Bebe and Louis Barron performing strange, hypnotic electronic [music] music unlike anything he had encountered before.

[00:06:59]He hired them on the spot.

[00:07:02]Rose was dismissed. The Barrons were handed a complete work print of the film at New Year's 1956 and given exactly 3 months to finish the job.

[00:07:12]Nine, the musicians union blocked them.

[00:07:16]The Barrons delivered something extraordinary, but the music industry immediately moved to contain it.

[00:07:23]Because Bebe and Louis Barron were not members of the musicians union, their work could not legally be called a score.

[00:07:30]They could not be credited as composers.

[00:07:33]MGM invented an entirely new term specifically to get around the problem, electronic tonalities.

[00:07:40]The union still blocked [music] them from any Academy Award consideration.

[00:07:44]Not in the score category, not in sound effects either.

[00:07:49]And the soundtrack didn't receive a proper commercial album release until 1976, >> [music] >> 20 years after the film came out. The Barrons released it themselves on their own label for the film's anniversary.

[00:08:02]10. The fired composer destroyed [music] his tapes. David Rose, the composer replaced by the Barrons, didn't simply move on. He recorded his discarded main title theme and released it as a single on MGM records in 1956.

[00:08:18]One piece of music, the only surviving fragment of what his full score would have been. Then, reportedly, he destroyed the tapes. Every other piece of music he composed for Forbidden Planet was gone.

[00:08:30]Deliberately.

[00:08:32]What motivated that decision has never been fully explained. But the original theatrical trailer contains brief snippets of Rose's work.

[00:08:40]>> [music] >> The only other place his score for this film still exists in any form.

[00:08:46]11.

[00:08:48]The entire film was shot indoors. Altair 4 [music] looks vast. The open sky, the alien terrain, the endless flat desert stretching to the horizon. [music] It feels like a real place on another world.

[00:09:02]None of it was real. None of it was outdoors.

[00:09:05]Every single exterior in the film was created inside MGM's Culver City studio using matte paintings and constructed [music] sets.

[00:09:13]The painted backdrops were considered some of the finest work of their kind ever produced [music] in Hollywood at that point. The entire planet was an illusion built on a sound stage.

[00:09:24]And it was convincing enough that audiences accepted it completely.

[00:09:28]Which was the whole point of doing it that way.

[00:09:32]12.

[00:09:33]Leslie Nielsen called Star Trek to say he loved it. Leslie Nielsen played Commander Adams completely straight. No comedy, no winking at the camera. Just a square-jawed serious leading man in charge of a starship crew.

[00:09:48]10 years later, Star Trek premiered on television.

[00:09:52]Gene Roddenberry had explicitly cited Forbidden Planet [music] as an inspiration and written a memo about it during the show's development.

[00:10:00]Nielsen personally phoned the Star Trek production [music] office at 9:00 a.m.

[00:10:04]to compliment the show.

[00:10:06]A production secretary named D.C.

[00:10:08]Fontana picked up the call. She later described being thrilled.

[00:10:13]Roddenberry wasn't in yet.

[00:10:15]She took the message.

[00:10:17]The man who helped inspire the show had called to tell them they were getting it right.

[00:10:23]13.

[00:10:24]The poster lied.

[00:10:27]The promotional poster for Forbidden Planet is one of the most famous images [music] in science fiction history.

[00:10:33]Robby the Robot looming large, [music] a terrified woman cradled in his arms, menace radiating from every line.

[00:10:40]That scene does not exist [music] in the film.

[00:10:44]Robby is one of the warmest, most helpful characters in the story. [music] He builds things. He protects people. He refuses to harm a human being because his programming won't allow it.

[00:10:56]The poster was pure monster movie marketing with no connection to the actual film.

[00:11:01]It was later ranked fifth on Premiere magazine's list of the 25 best movie posters ever made. A lie that became an [music] icon.

[00:11:11]14. Robby sold for $5.3 million.

[00:11:16]In November 2017, the original Robby the Robot prop went to auction [music] at Bonhams. It sold for $5.3 million including buyer's premium.

[00:11:26]That shattered the existing record for a TCM Bonhams auction.

[00:11:30]>> [music] >> The previous holder had been the Maltese Falcon statuette, which sold for $4 million in 2013.

[00:11:38]At the time of sale, it was the most valuable film prop ever sold at auction anywhere in the world. A single costume.

[00:11:46]Built in 1955 for a genre nobody took seriously.

[00:11:51]Operated by a man who was fired for showing up drunk. Worth more 60 years later than most [music] Hollywood productions cost to make.

[00:12:00]15. The props never stopped working.

[00:12:05]MGM kept everything after filming wrapped. Nothing was retired. Nothing was stored away and forgotten.

[00:12:14]The flying saucer model reappeared in The Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man".

[00:12:19]Robby the Robot turned up in episodes of The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Mork & Mindy, Wonder Woman, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

[00:12:28]among dozens of others across five decades of television.

[00:12:33]Crew uniforms, blaster pistols, set pieces, ship mock-ups, all of it cycled back [music] into production after production on the MGM lot.

[00:12:42]The world of Forbidden Planet didn't end when the [music] cameras stopped. It just kept showing up somewhere new. 16.

[00:12:50]The genre it built. Star Trek is the most obvious heir. Gene Roddenberry said so himself. But the bloodline runs much further. Alien borrowed from [music] it.

[00:13:00]Star Wars borrowed from it. Event Horizon, Serenity, and the architecture of nearly every serious big-budget [music] science fiction film since carries its fingerprints somewhere.

[00:13:11]George R.R. Martin called Forbidden Planet [music] his favorite science fiction film and built a working full-size Robbie the Robot replica for himself.

[00:13:21]The film made $23.5 [music] million on its budget.

[00:13:26]The genre it helped legitimize has made hundreds of billions since.

[00:13:31]Not bad for a glamour studio that had never made a space movie before and decided one afternoon to try.

[00:13:38]Forbidden Planet didn't just survive. It became the foundation everything else was built [music] on. A Shakespeare adaptation in a flying saucer.

[00:13:47]A monster made [music] from pencil sketches on vellum.

[00:13:50]A robot that sold for more than $5 million 60 years after it was built.

[00:13:57]If something in today's video hit differently [music] for you, drop it in the comments below.

[00:14:03]And if you want more stories like this one, the films that changed everything [music] before anyone realized it, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.