Comments | beamjockey: LIFE Discovered on Moon!

beamjockey

LIFE Discovered on Moon!

Feb 01, 2009 23:35

Rummaging again through the Google archive of Life, whl and I have found over two hundred photos depicting the filming of Destination Moon, the 1950 film for which Robert Heinlein collaborated on the screenplay, and served as technical advisor ( Read more... )

sf, space, destination moon, los angeles, life, pal, google, science fiction, allan grant, dance, eagle lion, moon, ballet, bonestell, fegte, grant, heinlein, hollywood

Comments 18

charlie_meadows July 13 2011, 22:55:32 UTC

I'm pretty sure I saw this movie sometime in the mid-'60s at a 50-cent Saturday matinee. I think a good part of my '50s SF B-movie education came out of that time...

The lunar dancers are great! (I'm hearing a newsreel announcer telling me, "Here on the moon, a jete can take over a second to complete. A performance of 'Swan Lake' requires over *three hours*!")

The fellow on the phone at the desk is likely busy selling the Moon...

I remember those "cracked mud" landscapes in any number of depictions of the surface from those days, when we weren't hearing about dust you'd sink into like quicksand. It's hard to recall just how much our experiences in the following 25 years changed our thinking about moons and planets. ("I've seen regolith you people wouldn't believe...")

beamjockey July 19 2011, 23:03:00 UTC

The designer, Ernst Fegte, knew darn well that cracked mud was not an accurate appearance for the floor of crater Harpalus. But he overruled Chesley Bonestell, because the cracks were vital in creating the forced-perspective illusion of a much larger set.

Browse the Life shots and you can get a pretty good idea of the layout of this wonderful set.

Here are Bonestell and Fegte in a TV interview conducted on the set.

( ... )

charlie_meadows July 20 2011, 05:44:14 UTC

On riffling through the images on Google for space art from the Fifties, I am beginning to suspect that the "cracked mud" surfaces I recall seeing as a young'un were either images that came from this film or from artwork (evidently not Bonestell's) where the artist used this set as a reference (though I haven't located anything of that sort posted presently).

I can quite understand Fegte's concerns for taking artistic license with likely scientific fact (since no one really knew then what the lunar surface is like). I imagine a lot of readers here are familiar with the problems that arise in judging distances on Luna...

I *did* find this pic while rooting around -- a friend will help you move your furniture*, but a *real* friend will go a bit out of their way to help with it: http://www.plan59.com/decor/decor036.htm

* I've also heard a useful variation on this sentiment, but it's not space-related