Forbidden Planet Research Articles

“The Play’s the Thing”: Re-imagining Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Forbidden Planet, Prospero’s Books and Hag-Seed

This paper examines a number of contemporary adaptations of The Tempest – Fred McLeod Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) – which indicate new avenues for exploring the phenomenon of past-and-present re-bonding through re-telling. If adaptation theory suggests, at its best, that an adaptation may encourage the public to read the adapted text, if unfamiliar, as Linda Hutcheon argues, these particular adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, I contend, take a step forward. Not only do they spur their readers/spectators on to (re)- read The Tempest, but they elicit (re)considering the relationships amongst (certain of) Shakespeare’s plays. It is what happened to this author too whilst reading Hag-Seed, even before reaching the page where Atwood’s protagonist – Felix qua Prospero actor and figure – contemplates the opportunity offered by mounting The Tempest to unmask his usurpers. “The play’s the thing”, Felix thinks in Hamletian terms, allowing the readers familiar with Hamlet to complete mentally “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. More than being Shakespeare’s swan song, as typically regarded, The Tempest thus becomes the metatheatrical light on Hamlet’s own metatheatricality – also courtesy of the former’s adaptations.

The Tempest: An examination of varied film adaptations as representative of contemporary socio-cultural ethos

Like all art, movies are a representation of the society and vice versa. Among other things, movies entertain, educate, and inspire us, giving us role models or themes to follow. Accordingly, the ingredients that go into the making of a movie need to agree with and appeal to the cultural ethos of the viewers it is intended for. In book adaptations of movies, the very multiplicity of readings renders a variety of meanings to a text, giving it dimensions that were perhaps not envisaged by the original writer. This paper is an extended discussion and examination of kinds of alterations seen in two adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest: The Forbidden Planet in (1956) as directed by Fred Wilcox, and The Tempest in (2010) as directed by Julie Taymor. These two versions are set apart by almost six decades, yet what brings them in close proximity is their interest with gender roles and their portrayal. These are tackled very differently as where the former tends to stay close to the mores of a male centric American society of 1950s while at the same time giving the viewers a good dose of a newfound love of science fiction, the latter indulges in completely feministic fantasy with a central figure like Prospero being portrayed as a female. Although the two versions can be compared and contrasted on many counts apart from this centrality, for ease of inquiry the current discussion was more focused on the representations of the main characters, Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero and their varied physical characteristics from one film to the other. This study examined the verbal and physical adaptations of these characters as mediums of interaction with the viewers throughout the showing mode. The study finally shines the spotlight on the contemporary political issues that are represented in yet another version of the same play, Prospero’s Books (1991). The study argues that The Tempest, in each of these film versions, represents different cultural agendas.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Original Cast AdventuresDouglasBrode and Shea T.Brode, Editors. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: Original Cast Adventures Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode, Editors. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek looks at the progenitors and influences on Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator and producer, and examines a number of 1950^ and 1960's television series, the American western genre, and other influences on various episodes of the original Star Trek series. editors, Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode, have a broad background in cinema and cultural studies, while the contributors bring expertise in media, politics, theater, American history and culture, physics, rhetoric, philosophy, and animation. Having just reviewed for Journal of American Culture, Star Trek and American Television (2014), which discusses Star Trek's influence on American television in the forty-some years since its premiere, I thought it would be interesting to review a similar book that focuses on influences to the creation of Star Trek.The Introduction provides a detailed background on the train to the stars! motto which Roddenberry originally conceived to sell his sci-fi series to NBC executives in the early 1960s. editors illustrate how the American western genre was portrayed and was popular on American television in the late 1950s to early 1960s and how a particular sci-fi movie from 1956, Forbidden Planet, influenced Roddenberry immediately prior to his retirement from being a police officer to becoming a TV writer and producer. Four pages in the Introduction explain at least seven similarities and borrowings from Forbidden Planet that Roddenberry used and elaborated upon in his Star Trek series. These include hyperdrive, the character of Doc (similar to Leonard McCoy/Bones), the United Planets organization (similar to the United Federation of Planets), and the theme that human beings are emotional and passionate whether it is in the 1950s or in the distant future. editors then take another four pages to discuss the similarities between a number of Twilight Tone episodes (1959-1964) and the original Star Trek series. One standout is Rod Sterling's time warp tale about a wagon train, which is eerily familiar to Roddenberry's Old West time warp where the Enterprise crew members go back in time to re-enact and become the main characters in the O.K. Corral gunfight in nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona. There is also a Twilight Tone episode about a mute that probably influenced Roddenberry's The Empath story. …

Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films

Sex sells movies. It is part of the text we buy, part of what Matthew Fuller terms its ‘memetic buzz’, producing ‘an explosion of activity and ideas’ around the text. That ‘buzz’ is especially apparent in 1950s sf films, when the genre was struggling to find a new identity and an audience. This essay examines an element of that ‘buzz’ in film advertisements for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Tobor the Great (1954), Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Colossus of New York (1958) – all of which linked sex and technology in a fashion that reflected the anxieties and hopes that marked this cinema as it sought to shape its new generic identity.

Shipwrecked: disaster and transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the modern world

Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe and the Modern World presents the first comparative study of notable literary shipwrecks from the past 4,000 years, focusing on Homer's Odyssey , Shakespeare's The Tempest , and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . The recurrent treatment of shipwrecks in epic poetry, drama, novels, science fiction, movies, and television demonstrates an enduring fascination with this archetypal scene: a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements. It is remarkable, for example, that the characters in the 2004 television show Lost share so many features with those from Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's The Tempest . When survivors are stuck on an island for some period of time, shipwrecks often present the survivor with the possibility of a change in political and social status--as well as romance and even paradise. In each of the major shipwreck narratives examined, the poet or novelist links the castaways' arrival on a new shore with the possibility of a new sort of life. James V. Morrison also considers the historical context as well as the triggers (such as the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck) that inspired some of these works, and modern responses such as novels (Golding's Lord of the Flies, Coetzee's Foe , and Gordon's First on Mars , a science fiction version of the Crusoe story), movies, television ( Forbidden Planet, Cast Away, and Lost ), and the poetry and plays of Caribbean poets Derek Walcott and Aime Cesaire.

Stellifying Shakespeare: Celestial Imperialism and the Advent of Universal Genius

As astounding as it may sound, the classic 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, which teleports The Tempest to outer space, did not mark the first time Shakespeare left Earth's orbit. In 1852, four years after the publication of The Apotheosis of Shakespeare - a high-water mark of Victorian Bardolatry - Frank Feather Dally's grandiose vision of Shakespeare's ascension to the heavens would come true. As if cued by Dally's poem, John Herschel - the son of William Herschel, the famed discoverer of Uranus - proposed naming the four Uranian satellites then known after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope: Titania, Oberon, Ariel and Umbriel. Since Pope, however, lifted the name Ariel from the ethereal fairy-servant in Shakespeare's Tempest, arguably three of the four are Shakespearean. The tradition would be formally ratified by the International Astronomical Union in 1948, when the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper discovered a fifth moon and elected to name it Miranda after the heroine of The Tempest. Over the past few decades, thanks to the 1986 Voyager 2 mission and the celestial vistas unveiled by the Hubble Telescope, Shakespeare's Uranian progeny have continued to grow. To date, 22 additional Uranian satellites have been discovered; of these, only one (Belinda) has been dubbed after a character in Pope's Rape of the Lock, while the remaining 21 have been christened after the dramatis personae of Shakespeare. And thereby hangs a tale.

Strange Voices: Subjectivity and Gender in Forbidden Planet’s Soundscape of Tomorrow

AbstractAs the first Hollywood film to employ an all-electronic score, Forbidden Planet (1956) helped cement the association of science-fiction films with electronically produced sounds and music. While sounds lacking real-world referents were crucial for representing sonically the nature of fantastic objects and beings, Louis and Bebe Barron's soundscape also had to serve the more conventional musical demands of narrative cinema where music sets mood and atmosphere and creates the illusion of character subjectivity. This double function of their “electronic tonalities,” however, engendered a strange ambiguity in the film's sonic ontology. In this article, I examine how the practical and aesthetic issues arising from this ambiguity forced the Barrons to confront in their score a complex of intertwined musical and cultural messages: how electronic music evokes notions of the exotic Other; how conceptions of vocality and embodiment in their music intersect with other visual and narrative elements to illuminate a gendered divide among envoiced bodies in the film; and how music in the film evolves to illustrate and posit a threat to the male body and, thus, masculinity itself—only in order, ultimately, to restore and reassert conventional patriarchy and the primacy of male subjectivity. As I argue, by using modernist methods and materials to serve a conventionally populist representational form, the Barrons effectively exposed some of the deep underlying tensions and contradictions within modernism itself, even while revisioning fundamental aspects of the Hollywood film score.

Oppenheimer's Heir: Morbius and Atomic Technology in Forbidden Planet

This article argues that the character of Morbius in Fred Wilcox's 1956 film Forbidden Planet is representative of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who is often referred to as the father of the atomic bomb.

Visions of Science and Technology, Part 2

Just as science and technology have changed the production, styles, and techniques of film, the medium itself has changed the perception of and response to science and technology. Early in the sound era, Arrowsmith (1931) and The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935) celebrated the conquest of disease by modern medicine, and Things to Come (1 936) showed a gleaming technological utopia rising from the ruins of a world ravaged by war. Films released after 1945 continued to tell stories about the power of science and technology to change the world for the better - about robot servants in Forbidden Planet (1956), miracle drugs in Awakenings (1990), and communication with benevolent aliens in Contact (1997) - but they were increasingly outnumbered by more pessimistic visions. The transformations wrought by science and technology in postwar films reflected the anxieties of the age: nuclear holocaust in On The Beach (1959), environmental devastation in Silent Running (1970), machines run amuck in Terminator 2 (1991), and the erosion of privacy and freedom in Minority Report (2002). In this issue of Film ^History, the second in our special volume on Visions of Science and Technology in Film, five articles explore how science and technology, along with the hands and minds that bring them into being, alter - and are altered by - our social, poh ti cal, and moral worlds. Andrew Huebner, in Lost in Space: Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s, looks beyond Cold War fears of nuclear weapons to consider the increasing role of technology in everyday life, asking whether the resulting changes can be reconciled with morality, humanity, and faith. Science -fiction films of the era, populated by unfathomable creatures, fantastic machines, and misguided scientists, dramatized authences' struggles to reconcile post-war disruptions in the balance between nature, religion, and scientific advancement, as innovations transformed reality. Jason Eberl, in I, Clone: How Cloning Is (Mis)Portrayed in Contemporary Cinema, brings questions evoked by cinematic clones into dialogue with philosophical debates on the nature of identity and humanity. Using this framework to illustrate how contemporary films ask authences to consider what it means to be human, the article explores whether our moral and ethical frameworks are robust enough to keep pace with changes in our ability to create sentient life through increasingly sophisticated laboratory techniques. …

Artificial moral agents: saviors or destroyers?

Growing up in the late 1950’s in America, mechanical robots were part of my culture, but certainly not of industry (unless it was the toy industry, which capitalized on the delight young children—mostly boys—took in fictionalized hulking tons of intelligent steel). In film we had, among many instances of cinematic science fiction, the human-friendly Robbie the Robot (in ‘‘Forbidden Planet’’) and the malevolent human-hater in ‘‘Gog’’. In the science fiction literature, Isaac Asimov amazed us with his Foundation trilogy and his Three Laws of Robotics (which were, in ingenious ways, invariably violated). Since that time, robots in culture have become more sophisticated (R2D2 in Star Wars), more human-like (Terminator) and certainly more sinister as they acquire more intelligence and strength. But robots in industry have been mostly drones, capable of performing repetitive mechanical functions far better than humans (and that humans dislike doing): vacuums in the house, conveying bulk goods at Wal-Mart distribution centers, construction of automobiles, and much more. It is clear that robots are with us, both commercially and in our culture, and that as technology advances, their numbers will only increase. A recent issue of New Scientist (Vol. 204, No. 2735, 2009) contains a survey article on robotic surgery (medibots) and shorter articles on robotic arms (for users of wheelchairs to open doors), and robotic gloves (for NASA). Extrapolating into the future, doomsday scenarios of robots taking over and enslaving humans (or exterminating them) have been taken very seriously by those (Bill Joy—’’Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’’, Wired, 2000) who advocate that restrictions now be placed (at both the theoretical and technological levels) on the construction of robots. In particular, the call of the ‘‘doomsters’’ is to severely limit the reasoning capabilities of robots, if not to put a halt to development and construction of them. Should we heed their cautions? In their superb book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen argue that we should not. Indeed, we should provide robots, where technologically possible, with the ability to engage in ethical reasoning and ethical decision-making. (They call such robots ‘‘artificial moral agents’’, or AMAs.) But why? Wouldn’t we, in doing this, be taking undeniable steps toward our assured destruction? Wallach and Allen (hereafter WA JBuechner@gc.cuny.edu

From “The Forbidden Planet”

From “The Forbidden Planet”

Darwin's soldiers: Gender, evolution and warfare in Them! and Forbidden Planet

The classic 1950s sf films Them! (1954) and Forbidden Planet (1956) draw on Darwinist plots of future warfare and sexual selection to represent men as natural soldiers and masters of technology, limiting the roles of women to romantic interests for the military men. However, they differ from other contemporary films in their representation of the roles women should play in the military and in their attitudes toward violent evolutionary masculinity.

100 Shakespeare films

From Oscar-winning British classics to Hollywood musicals and Westerns, from Soviet epics to Bollywood thrillers, has inspired an almost infinite variety of films. Directors as diverse as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor have transferred Shakespeare's plays from stage to screen with unforgettable results. Spanning a century of cinema, from a silent short of The Tempest (1907) to Kenneth Branagh's You Like It (2006), Daniel Rosenthal's up-to-date selection takes in the most important, inventive and unusual films ever made. Half are British and American productions that retain Shakespeare's language, including key works such as Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, Welles' Othello and Chimes at Midnight, Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet, Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and Taymor's Titus. Alongside these original-text films are more than 30 genre adaptations: titles that aim for a wider audience by using modernized dialogue and settings and customizing Shakespeare's plots and characters, transforming into a pistol-packing gangster (Joe Macbeth and Maqbool) or reimagining Othello as a jazz musician (All Night Long). There are Shakesepeare-based Westerns (Broken Lance, King of Texas), musicals (West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate), high-school comedies (10 Things I Hate About You, She's the Man), even a sci-fi adventure (Forbidden Planet). There are also films dominated by the performance of a Shakespearean play (In the Bleak Midwinter, Shakespeare in Love). Rosenthal emphasises the global nature of Shakespearean cinema, with entries on more than 20 foreign-language titles, including Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran, Grigori Kozintsev's Russian Hamlet and King Lear, and little-known features from as far afield as Madagascar and Venezuela, some never released in Britain or the US. He considers the films' production and box-office history and examines the film-makers' key interpretive decisions in comparison to their Shakespearean sources, focusing on cinematography, landscape, music, performance, production design, textual alterations and omissions. As cinema plays an increasingly important role in the study of at schools and universities, this is a wide-ranging, entertaining and accessible guide for teachers, students and enthusiasts.

Just a Few Computational Principles Generate a Realistic Model of the Brain's Visual System

In the1950s science-fiction cult classic Forbidden Planet, Robby the Robot talks, cleans, learns new tasks, and understands the commands of his masters. Scientists are not at the point where they can produce Robby knockoffs with computer-driven cognition, but they are learning to use robots to probe the structure and function of the human brain. In a new study, Reto Wyss, Peter Konig, and Paul Verschure use a data-collecting, ambulatory robot to test a model of visual perception based on two computational functions. When exposed to visual stimuli, neurons in the visual cortex respond to salient properties in the visual environment to create an internal representation of the world. Visual inputs are collected by the retina, sent to the thalamus, and then travel through a series of subcortical and cortical structures before reaching higher cognitive structures in the ventral visual system, including the hippocampus. In this “feed-forward” model of visual processing, neurons at different points in this visual-processing hierarchy learn to acquire increasingly complex, refined, and specific responses to these signals—even though they inhabit anatomically similar structures. There also seems to be some crossover in job duties, with evidence that the functions of specialized areas can be assumed by other regions. How the different regions of the brain acquire their specialized functions remains an open question. Is specialization an inherent trait, with each cortical region following unique computational principles? Or does each region follow the same principles and learn its specialized tasks based on its different position and input? Theoretical neuroscientists investigate such questions by creating models to simulate the computational tasks performed by different brain structures. Such approaches have identified statistical measures called “objective functions” that can describe the computational principles of the primary visual cortex, which processes signals from the retina. For example, a statistical property that optimizes sparse representations corresponds to neurons called simple cells, while optimally stable representations correspond to complex cells. Wyss et al. asked whether objective functions could also describe the computational principles that govern the integration of visual stimuli across cortical regions. To investigate this question, the researchers used a mobile robot programmed to navigate its environment while collecting visual inputs through a camera embedded in its circuitry. The camera provides ongoing inputs to the researcher's visual system model, which includes connections both within and between five computational units in the visual hierarchy. The model includes an unsupervised learning algorithm to optimize the stability of visual representations in feed-forward connections in conjunction with ongoing independent neuron interactions within each level—representing local memory—simulating stimulus-driven learning. The feed-forward connections also show increasing convergence, akin to that reported in the primate visual pathway. How did the model respond to the robot-collected input? After nearly three days, all the computational levels achieved stable representations, with higher levels reaching stability only after lower levels had done so. At this point, the computational units exhibited selectivity in their response properties. Lower-level units responded to features visible from many different positions within the robot's environment and had large responsive areas that depended on the robot's orientation. Intermediate units responded to landmarks—particular views from a small region—and were highly selective for the robot's orientation. The higher units learned to link nearby landmarks, relying on small responsive regions. And the highest unit grouped these landmarks into a more complex system for representing external space—a place field—which was highly dependent on the robot's position. The researchers used the responses of the different levels to reconstruct the position of the robot, and found that responses from the highest computational unit produced the most accurate reconstruction—in keeping with reconstructions based on the responses of rat hippocampal place cells. These results indicate that just a few general computational principles, temporal stability and local memory, can produce specialized functions in different cortical areas. Specialization is not an intrinsic feature of these cortical areas but comes from the complex visual properties of the environment. This model of functional organization likely applies to other sensory systems, Wyss et al. conclude. If it turns out that just a few computational principles underlie higher cognitive functions as well, a real-life Robby may not be so far-fetched after all.

Transforming the screen, 1950-1959

Completing the landmark, award-winning, ten-volume series on the first century of American film, The Fifties covers a particularly tumultuous period. Peter Lev explores the divorce of movie studios from their theater chains; the panic of the blacklist era; the explosive emergence of science fiction as the dominant genre (The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds); the rise of television and Hollywood's response to the new medium, as seen in widescreen spectacles (The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur) and mature Westerns (High Noon, Shane, The Searchers). The richly detailed text elucidates a number of emerging trends as Hollywood, with its familiar stars and genres, reached out as an industry to the newly acknowledged teenage generation with rock and roll films, and movies as diverse as Rebel Without a Cause and Gidget.

Garbage: The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: Response to Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William L. Rathje

Garbage appears in science fiction cinema with notable frequency, whether in the retrofitted future Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982) or the post-Holocaust bricolage of the Mad Max films or The Bed Sitting Room (1969). Whole cities can appear in ruins in the "future archaic" subgenre; think Logan's Run (1976), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), or the more recent A. I. (2001). These futures give us a tingle. In the future, the past, our present, will exist only as stubborn traces, debris that doesn't quite disappear. It was not always thus: in Things to Come (1936), scripted by H. G. Wells, the future-archaic Everytown is simply bulldozed in an unparalleled paean to the technological sublimity of its gleaming white city. A city, we note, without a trash can in sight (perhaps they use disintegrator beams, like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet [1956], or Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century [1953]). This white city points back to the mock permanence of the White City at the heart of the 1893 World Colombian Exposition in Chicago, monumental halls whose stolid presence denied the fragility of the stuff in which they were clad.

Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines

The concept of the machine circulates in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in highly abstracted terms, yet they frequently maintained that it was not to be understood as a metaphor. This paper draws on the example of the film Forbidden Planet to explore the potential for cinematic representation to convey the terms under which Deleuze and Guattari ask us to imagine the machinic complex.

Machine

Machine

Rocketships, Rayguns and UFOs

Rocketships, Rayguns and UFOs

Apocalypse Then: Benefits of the Bomb in Fifties Science Fiction Films

To be at all familiar with science fiction cinema is to observe how commonly the genre rehearses traditional religious themes and motifs.1 One thinks immediately of the theological implications of the mysterious, omnipotent alien presence as the agent of human evolution in 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel, 2010; of the Christ-like attributes of E.T. and of the alien visitor in Starman; of the godlike, benevolent aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cocoon, and even the vaguely Eastern religiosity reflected in the centrality of Force in the Star Wars cycle. Such religious resonances are not, of course, confined to relatively recent films. As has often been noted, the invasion/catastrophe narratives of the fifties quite often employed what is perhaps the most common religious motif in science fiction film: that of apocalypse. The prevalence of this motif in films of the period is hardly surprising. Following the demonstrations in 1944 of the devastating potential of atomic weaponry and the augmentation of international tension produced by Soviet nuclear testing, science fiction films quite often deplored the world threatening capacities unleashed by modern science. In Them (1954), rampaging, monstrous ants, the result of mutations caused by atomic testing, threaten human civilization.2 In Forbidden Planet (1956), advanced technology, prematurely wedded to the human mind still enmeshed in primitive, unconscious impulses and aggressions, leads to the destruction of an entire world.3 One could, of course cite numerous other examples of this tendency, but I wish to direct attention to other films, those that seek in the apocalyptic climate of the period the possibility of an ultimately beneficent outcome.