MovieChat Forums > Valley of the Dragons Discussion > Fake Morlocks, and other swiped ideas

Fake Morlocks, and other swiped ideas

posted 10 years ago by hobnob53
25 replies | jump to latest

Writer-director Edward Bernds didn't have to stretch himself very much to make the inaptly-named Valley of the Dragons, considering how much stock footage, plot points and sundry other ideas he "borrowed" from other films to paste this one together. Some examples, plus a couple of other fun points....

>>>About half the film seems to consist of stock footage from 1940's One Million B.C.. All the "dinosaurs" (actually poor tortured lizards) and "mastodons" (elephants with shag rugs attached) were originally tortured and shagged for that film. Bernds even made sure to have his caveman actors look like those in OMBC so he could match shots of cave people from the earlier movie with his. (When the old tribal leader with the beard gets picked up by a mastodon you can see it's a totally different guy from the actor sentenced to -- I mean hired for -- Valley of the Dragons.)

>>>Bernds also stole and modified part of the plot line from OMBC, the stuff about one man drifting into the realm of another tribe, getting saved by the tribe's only blond, and eventually helping bring both "normal" tribes together after the usual cataclysm. Of course this time he doubled that plot aspect by having this happen to both male protagonists. Bernds was nothing if not innovative. Okay, don't say it. This plot has been used elsewhere too, as in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), for one.

>>>As many have noted, Bernds swiped a few shots from Rodan in the movie, for no apparent reason other than to insert another monster. All Rodan gets to do is briefly flap around near the beginning, then reappear later peeking bemusedly over a hill, take off and fly back and forth some more, clearly intelligent enough to stay high above the theatrical proceedings below.

>>>On the other hand, Ed Bernds did not steal Morlocks from the previous year's film The Time Machine, as many claim. No. Edward Bernds stole the Morlocks' look from that film and had his make-up man make a fake rip-off of the Morlocks. Note that their faces are more like skulls, not the lumpy countenance of a true Morlock but an imitation anorexic Morlock. Lesslocks?

>>>The most pitiful theft comes at the climactic scene where the cave people are trapped in their homestead by a dinosaur lurking outside -- stolen from one of the most abysmal films of all time, Bert I. Gordon's King Dinosaur (1955). Even for Ed Bernds, that's lowering yourself.

>>>Bernds even stole from himself. The attack on the two heroes over their campfire by "Neanderthals" is directly taken from the "mutates'" attack on the time travelers in Bernds's World Without End (1956). The fight with the pillow spider and one guy getting caught in the web is also taken from WWE (not to mention Bernds had already re-used this in his Queen of Outer Space in 1958). I can't quite tell if the spider is the same puppet. Looks like him, but then again maybe not quite. Perhaps Bernds couldn't retrieve the original and had his otherwise unemployable special effects artists make a dupe. He even calls the blond cave girl "Deena", the same name he gave the servant girl in World Without End. Of course, she was a brunette.

>>>And what about those "Neanderthals" and "Morlocks"? The Neanderthals in their plastic masks attack the boys' camp, get beaten off (as it were), then disappear from the film altogether. Same with the fake Morlocks: they show up in the cave, have their two minutes of fame, then just vanish from the film. They're never even mentioned again. At least the Neanderthals get an offhand reference a couple of times later on. I guess it's because the actors playing them had to get paid, while stock footage is dirt cheap, so Bernds had to limit their screen time.

>>>Then there's all those marvelous bits of miscellany: The landscapes the actors stand in don't match the landscapes in the stock shots. All the guys do half the time is watch tedious scenes of magnified lizards and other critters killing each other, eating each other, falling into holes, getting mangled and crushed, and assorted other animal rights abuses. And just how did that air and volcanoes and water all get swept onto the comet again? Oh, and at the climax when Hector "blows up" the mountain with his gunpowder, the rocks suddenly start to fall but there's no actual explosion. However, when the boulders hit the monster down below, he suddenly explodes. This is not explained.

>>>And for a 19th-century military man, Hector seems to be pretty well schooled in pretty much everything, especially astronomy. He knows all the stars (although he did at first mistake the rising Earth for the Moon -- I guess it was seeing Great Britain and Africa and the Atlantic and stuff that tipped him off). He knows exactly how, why and where they ended up. He knows the comet's orbital period (100,000 years). Later he confidently relates that the comet's last glancing blow shifted its orbit so they'll return in only seven years, and doesn't seemed overly concerned at the possibility that that time they might crash into Earth instead of simply being deposited back on it. (Presumably with the cave people, the Neanderthals, the Morlocks, Rodan and all the stock lizards and mastodons, though I noticed he didn't take these problems into consideration.) Plus he knows all about Neanderthals with plastic faces, oh and how to make perfect gunpowder without precise measurements. Not to mention, as Michael admiringly notes, as a Frenchman Hector always manages to find a woman.

>>>This is certainly the only movie ever made that states its source material twice in the opening credits. Not once but twice we read: "Based on the Novel 'Career of a Comet' by Jules Verne". What's that? I missed it the first time reaching for my popcorn. Can you repeat the book it's based on? Wow? Really? Thanks. Honestly, this is really kind of pathetic. Like Ed Bernds just had to hit us over the head by repeating the same credit a second time within about forty seconds, just to make sure we really got that this came from a novel by the same man who provided other filmmakers with the stories for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth and numerous other adventure tales. Granted, Verne's works were in public domain so anyone could use them, but Edward Bernds wasn't about to let questions of cost derail his creative ideas. Well, all right, he was, but at least he got the movie made. A whole week out of his life, you know.

>>>And just a random final thought. What valley? What dragons?

Anyway, it's all mostly fun. A bit slow and repetitive at times, one way or another you've seen most of it before, cheaply done and utterly ridiculous, but it's mostly entertaining and the two leads (Cesare Danova, the future Mayor Carmine DePasto from Animal House and Sean McClory, Major Kibbee of Them!) actually make a good team. And former Playmate Joan Staley would be enough to make any man forget he'd been swept onto a comet and shot out into space. If not enough to forget that he was forced to star in this thing.

[–] CanadianBill 10 years ago

Yes yes, while all that seems mostly valid points in order I get the feeling some of you are overthinking it. In fact much of that occured to me as well even the first time I watched it (I've seen it twice now), but it still isn't enough to dissuade me from the fact that this is just a really great gem of an older sci-fi fantasy flick, from a time when these effects, as snipped and dated as they are now, were quite impressive.

To me the movie asks the viewers to use our imaginations a bit. Yes the spider is rather pitiful, so imagine it done with today's special f/x as a real giant mutated black widow. The pteradactyl looks more like a dinosaur-shaped kite so again, use your inner projector and visualize something real. Same for the so-called "dragons".

The story is what carries the major load here. That and some fairly decent acting turns. Anyone looking for an epic special effects smorgasbord is simply setting themselves up for major disappointment.

Hob, you did finally get it right in the last paragraph though. "All mostly fun, a bit slow and repetitive at times, but mostly entertaining"

Nothing more need be said, except to say to those who have not seen it yet... enjoy.

______________________
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! THIS IS THE WAR ROOM!

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

CD, I think you took what I wrote way too seriously. I wasn't "overthinking" the movie. I was simply having some fun reviewing it, analyzing it, treating it with a mixture of seriousness and spoof.

Now, I have to tell you that you seem to have me all wrong. I grew up with films like this. I first saw it as a kid in the 60s. I much prefer all the great (and some not so great) sci-fi films of the 50s-to-mid-60s.

I really hate it when someone uses the boring and clichéd term "cheesy special effects" because they don't appreciate the efforts that were (and sometimes weren't) taken to create effects in pre-CGI days. Sometimes even low-budget films managed some remarkable effects for their time. I take the effects as they come and don't spend much time thinking about how good or bad they are. In fact I'm quite a lover and defender of 50s special effects of all kinds.

You're most correct when you said, "the movie asks the viewers to use our imaginations a bit." Quite so. This was true of all sci-fi films of the time, because (1) ideas, story and characters mattered as much if not more than special effects; (2) they had to devote time to non-effects scenes because they couldn't afford non-stop effects scenes; and (3) imagination is always better than having things simply thrown at your glazed-over eyes, the way so many s/f films do today.

All that said, while I find Valley of the Dragons amusing and like it well enough (and I have the DVD), to me it's a big stretch to call it a "gem", as you did here and on another thread. I mean, it doesn't have that much going for it, even in a bad-is-good way. I can't agree it was in any way "impressive".

For me, a low-budget sci-fi gem of the 50s-60s would be a movie like Rocketship X-M, Lost Continent, The Man From Planet X, Invaders From Mars, Kronos, The Atomic Submarine and a number of others. One of my very favorite films of the period is Ed Bernds's own World Without End, which I would also regard as a hidden "gem". Valley of the Dragons I'd call fun, but never a gem. It's not original enough or well enough handled to be a true gem.

Still, I understand where you're coming from. Basically it's a matter of personal preference, how much a particular picture grabs you.

One last thing. At the end you said, "Hob, you did finally get it right in the last paragraph though." But at the start you'd written, "Yes yes, while all that seems mostly valid points in order I get the feeling some of you are overthinking it. In fact much of that occurred to me as well even the first time I watched it...." Hey, I can't be "valid" all the way through yet only be "right" at the end. Even you say a lot of it occurred to you the first time you watched it...and surely you were right throughout.

So I'll just take it that I'm right about everything -- except for our slightly differing personal evaluations of this gem/non-gem of a movie!

[–] namaGemo 10 years ago

Gem or not, after waiting to see this since I saw pics in famous monsters magazine when I was a kid in the early seventies, I actually enjoyed it despite how much was ripped off from OM B.C..

I can't claim gem myself, but I did like the premise, despite how ridiculous the plot points were.

[–] CanadianBill 10 years ago

I say and maintain it's a gem because when considered collectively with the hundreds of other mostly lower budget science fiction productions of that era this one is, in my opinion, among the above average half of the group. And since these movies are in limited supply I'd say that qualifies me to say this is a gem. Notice please I did not say "rare gem". I reserve that term for only the select few.

But it's not every day one of these films came along that had a great story as well as decent acting supported by otherwise good direction and passable dialogue writing. Many films out of that era are downright painful to watch, this one isn't. It's interesting, and fun. It has an understated sensual and sexual mystique about it as well. To me that says gem. It doesn't mean it's a polished gem though. :)

Happy movie viewing everyone. I'm encouraged to find there are still several of us 50's & 60's sci-fi movie lovers out there. I wish TCM would run some films other than just the usual stock ones they've been running the past few years. "Forbidden Planet" has been shown on there at least half a dozen times in recent years.

I'd love to again see a few like Angry Red Planet (1959), The Flying Saucer (1950), or if they could track it down, the english-dubbed version of 1973's Fantastic Planet. Several that Hob cited in his post would do also.

Come on TCM, show some love for us old nerds.

______________________
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! THIS IS THE WAR ROOM!

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

Well, on the subject, I took offense at this article:

http://listverse.com/2014/07/03/the-10-worst-giant-movie-monsters/

...for reasons you entered on this thread. I think you would like reading this guy's take on some of those old movies that people like myself have come to love and protect.

Now, Valley of the Dinosaurs was left out of the list and who know why. Maybe because it copped the monsters from other films as noted by HOB. OK, fair enough.

Enjoy. Or not.

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] CanadianBill 10 years ago

I wouldn't say I take offense to that article. Take issue with some of it, yes. But everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if the opinion is flat-out wrong.

You have to admit he/she is right though. Some of the so-called 'monsters' were pretty poorly or very cheesily done. Like I said earlier, many of these movies ask the viewer to take it the rest of the way by using the imagination, although for some films that's really asking a lot. Sometimes too much in fact, and thus people who paid money to see it might definitely want their twenty-five cent admission price back.

I simply love this genre of movie because, as a child growing up in the 60's, we had a regular Friday night black & white movie feature (everything was B&W back then as few people I knew had color tv's yet) called "Chiller-Thriller". Some channels around N America called it "Creature Feature" or the like.

I and my siblings would gather in front of the old box every week with huge bowls of popcorn (made on the stovetop in a pot, covered in real butter and not overly salted) and we'd watch all these awesome sci-fi/horror films unfold.

"The beast from..." this or "Attack of the..." that. From alien invasions to giant mutates, it was all incredibly fascinating to us, myself in particular as I was the wide-eyed youngest of the bunch.

And there are plenty of those films that I remember seeing as a kid back then that I would LOVE to see again. The Space channel showed several of them years ago in their opening months after they launched but then quickly forgot the oldies in favor of the more modern fare they obsess on now, most of it new-age horror content that has little if anything to do with science fiction.

So that leaves TCM, and they are content to feed us only tastes and scraps lately. But every so often they run anywhere from three to six of these types of movies in a row, and sometimes the selection does include one or two that haven't been seen in a long while. I keep my DVR ready for such occasions and tend to record ALL of them, just in case one happens to be one of those "gems" I've been talking about.

I hope that explains a little bit further as to why I hold these old sci-fi fantasy/horror/thrillers in such high regard.

______________________
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! THIS IS THE WAR ROOM!

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

CD, it seems we're pretty much on the same page as far as these great 50s and 60s sci-fi flicks go. Our main disagreement here seems to be whether to classify Valley of the Dragons as a "gem" or not. I did note, though, you took care to clarify that you didn't deem it a "polished" gem!

I don't rely on TCM or other broadcasters to see such films, though when they're on I watch them if I can. I prefer owning copies of the films I like...though granted, some still aren't available on home video. (I'm still waiting, with less and less hope, for Riders to the Stars and From the Earth to the Moon, for two.)

But it sounds like we are both about the same age and grew up with the same old "Chiller/Supernatural/Creature" feature programs on local TV. I don't know where you were raised, but here in New York we certainly had a lot to choose from back then in terms of sci-fi movies on TV. So I got exposed to lots of this stuff, week after week...for better or worse!

[–] CanadianBill 10 years ago

Back then we (I'm from Winnipeg, Canada, btw) only had 4 channels to choose from, and one of them was French. There were two Canadian channels, and one from North Dakota. It was that then-U.S. station that ran the Chiller-Thriller movie feature every Friday night.

Btw, TCM showed From the Earth to the moon not all that long ago, only a few weeks ago in fact. And a few months before that it was shown as well. I'm sure it will be run again soon, they tend to do that with certain ones of these films.

My DVR has a fairly massive storage capacity, it can hold hundreds of movies for as long as I care to keep them on there. Plus, I pay extra for several movie channel packages, including TCM, Silver Screen, REWIND, and Encore Avenue. I'm not interested in collecting movies, but I definitely do love watching them. It's become kind of a game of sorts to wait them out and spot them as they show up in the listings.

And believe me, I am dilligent when it comes to scanning the channels for these classic gems. No, dilligent doesn't quite say it. Meticulous? Closer, but still not quite there. How about LETHALLY METICULOUS? ha ha. Yes, that describes my movie channel scanning habits fairly accurately.

______________________
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! THIS IS THE WAR ROOM!

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

No, I did not rend my garments over the article. My feelings for those old movies are much like those of you and HOB. I actually appreciated the article because it has film clips from some favorites (including Giant from the Unknown in it's entirety).

I'm more like "Hey! -- Leave the kid alone!" Those old movies are what they are and though some are very poor in many respects, they were products of their time, made on a shoestring. But they actually did the job -- they were fun, even as one of you said previously.

I recall Ernestine Wade saying about the Amos n' Andy TV series, "It's not a documentary!. It was a fun and mostly hilarious program.

And so it is with these old buzz bombs. They had a couple of bits of real science tossed in and a whole bunch on mumbo-jumbo.

Anyway, I can't write as it is a bit toasty today and I'm very tired. But I do have fun reading these posts submitted by fellow travelers.

Thanks, CDSmith63 and HOB.

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

I think these movies are great. I never look down on them at all. I may make fun of them at times but no more so than I would the so-called "serious" films that were their contemporaries. I've always accepted them and liked them as they are (or didn't like them, but not because of their effects) and never thought much about their flaws, at least not as their being flaws.

However, it seems we're all in the same spaceship when it comes to these films, so God bless us everyone!

Say, esc old pal, you made a huge, gigantic, enormous, immense, titanic minor error in your previous post. You accidentally called this movie "Valley of the Dinosaurs". Dragons! Dragons! I'll have to make sure you get a copy so you never commit such a dragonesque faux pas again!

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

Is my face RED!

Idiot!

Thanks for pointing out my blunders ---yet again!

"DRAGONS!" "DRAGONS!" "DRAGONS!"

If only I had...

AAARRRGGGHHH...!

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

Is my face RED!

I give up. Is it?

Idiot!

Not as long as I'm around!

Thanks for pointing out my blunders ---yet again!

"Again"? Hah!

"DRAGONS!" "DRAGONS!" "DRAGONS!"

VALLEY OF THE! VALLEY OF THE! VALLEY OF THE!

If only I had...

Been awake? Seen the movie? Had the good sense to avoid this board altogether?

AAARRRGGGHHH...!

Oh, if only you'd aaarrrggghhhed. I see. So you saw a pirated version of this movie.

Please, please, please, my dear friend escalera-2. Reproach yourself no further. An understandable, if unforgivable, mistake. Don't give it another thought. If I may use the word "thought" in connection with this film.

After all, no sense in draggin' this thing out any longer.

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

You should be ashamed of yourself, man. We'll move on...

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

(truth be told I have not seen this picture but I am always fascinated by the sources for movies because many movies swipe from other movies or ideas. I like spotting the space craft from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Forbidden Planet in the original The Twilight Zone series, for example, or nods to Disney flicks in Steven Spielberg's movies. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge. That sort of thing. For me, such uses do not necessarily rob me of any enjoyment)

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

Oh, I'm with you there too. I love seeing other films' effects padding another movie's scenes out. Even a movie like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers has shots lifted from The Day the Earth Stood Still as well as other stock footage. Columbia's B unit lifted a lot of stuff from other films. The Giant Claw padded its effects with shots from EVTFS and a few other films. Hey, they had to do something to improve the quality of the film's effects.

They recycled shots of the Forbidden Planet spaceship in a couple of Twilight Zones. "Third From the Sun" was one. And I may be mistaken about the episode, but I believe it's at the end of "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" that they inserted a brief shot of the FP saucer in space, but upside-down! Ooooo, I'd never recognize it! The Outer Limits even borrowed the saucer prop from MGM to use it in its episode "The Zanti Misfits". I actually remember reading in TV Guide in 1963 a joking reference to this being an example of inter-studio cooperation.

Better still are those deliberate references (in dialogue as well as visually) to other films people stick into their own movies. The remake of Invaders From Mars was awful but did have a few nods to the original (casting the kid in the '53 film, Jimmy Hunt, as the police chief, sticking the 1953 model of the Martian ruler in his glass bowl on top of an old cabinet in the school basement). Kevin McCarthy reprised his "They're here already! You're next!" scene from 1956 in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And so on.

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

Yes, and I don't really mind such filching if it helps move things along, are not overused and helps keep inside restrained budgets.

I had read how Stanley Kubrick ordered all the props, models and wardrobe destroyed after wrapping 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) so they would not be recycled and turn up in a B-movie titled Lobster Man from Mars or something.

Still I expect to someday see portions from 2001 featuring the good space-ship Discovery flipped upside-down on screen filling in as the vessel for some Zap Captain of the Universe.

It's kind of fun to keep score.

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

Never heard that about Kubrick. That's really pretty terrible, even though I understand his reasoning. It's like the Martian war machines from George Pal's The War of the Worlds -- all three models melted down and scrapped by Paramount's effects department. What a loss!

I guess Ed Bernds had no such worries when he made this picture. Except maybe how to put the spider puppet out of its misery.

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

There's that scene in Tim Burton's celluloid paean to friendship (or Bad film and film making in general), viz., Ed Wood (1998) where the Wood character played by Johnny Depp stands over the shoulder of his friend in the studio library as they stare into the flicker of a Movieola unspooling some stock footage.

Wood: "Why, if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage...."

Now, I know this isn't the right page, but recently I caught Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and later read that the alien spaceships were recycled from War of the Worlds' (1953). I wonder if it was merely the design that was re-used or if one of the models from ...World was spared (it looks like they only need one as it the images could be easily processed).

http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/images/robinson_crusoe_on_mars_4_x.j pg

I recall a photo of Forrest J. Ackerman straddling one of the War Machines in his private collection.

http://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Forrest-J-Ackerman -Starlog-19781.jpg

I wonder if that was borrowed from Forrie.

Anyway, apologies to Valley of the Dragons.

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

The Robinson Crusoe On Mars ships were loosely modeled after the ships from TWOTW (same studio, Paramount), but they were not the same ones, re-dressed. I don't even believe they were actual models in the way Pal's ships were. They look to me like illustrations, not physical models, but in any case they were certainly very different from the ships in TWOTW, though there were some vague similarities. They did use the same sound effect for the ships' ray guns for both films -- again, not surprising since they came from the same studio. The two films also shared the same director, the great Byron Haskin.

I love Ed Wood -- 1994, not '98, my ever-suffering-at-my-hands friend -- sorry, sorry! -- and like that scene at the movieola because he's looking at the buffalo stampede footage he inexplicably included in Glen or Glenda?. Okay, in that film it wasn't the same buffalo footage the real Ed used in GOG (not to be confused with Gog), but when you've seen one buffalo stampede over scenes of transvestites and exploding atom bombs, you've seen them all.

Come to think of it, I believe Valley of the Dragons could have used a good old-fashioned buffalo stampede to add that last necessary touch of reality.

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

For all the borrowing done to make Valley of the Dragons and I've made it clear in previous posts that I don't really mind such tactics, I should like to see this title for one reason and that is because the line from the IMDb synopsis which reads:

"...Two men, Michael Denning and Hector Servadac are having a duel with one another when a comet goes past the earth at low altitude..."

Now, that alone takes me away and back to when I was a youngster and would go to the local branch of the public library to find Jules Verne's tales of the fantastic. I'd heard of his Off On a Comet but it was not on the shelves and being unaware that I could have requested it and I did not get to read it then. Well, that's the way it goes...

Nonplussed, I got my hands of the Classic Illustrated version and after reading it wished I could also be swept away by a passing comet and whisked off to into space.

http://jv.gilead.org.il/CI/149/images/00.jpg

That the original title of Verne's book was Hector Servadac; Or the Career of a Comet so I see the connection here.

(I still haven't found nor read the book!)

http://budsartbooks.com/prod_images/150/ci149_2.jpg

OK. I've paid tribute to Valley of the Dinosaurs so I believe I've bought some time with that to say that Tim Burton's Ed Wood (from any year!) is a choice look at old time, get-it-done guerilla film-making. It's great. And on the subject of 'great', the other terrific film on film-making is Steve Martin's wonderfully, goofy, wonderfully hilarious send-up Bowfinger (1999).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6RCnrd6F6g

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

I'm of a divided mind on borrowing footage from other movies. On the one hand as a cinephile it's kind of fun to see such things and identify them as scenes from a previous film or films. On the other hand it is a pretty chintzy thing to do, pathetically trying to pad your own movie out with other people's work. This also goes for re-using music from earlier films. (Even major films did this.)

Valley of the Dragons is generally entertaining enough that the relentless insertion of stock shots from One Million B.C. eventually becomes so normal that it loses its impact. In this sense it may be better that they used basically nothing but stock footage instead of a mix of new and old scenes, which points up the padding more glaringly. Many mid-level sci-fi films did the latter, which in my view comes off worse than if they'd used nothing but stock.

Then there's the matter of using stock shots, not made for other movies, but newsreel or other real footage that many movies used to stick into their films to pad out sequences or save money by not having to film the event depicted. This was quite common too, in sci-fi and elsewhere. I recall that the venerated Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, for all Ray Harryhausen's genius, relied on both scenes from other movies as well as actual shots blended into the action in the film (like real missiles launched at matted-in saucers, or a saucer firing on a passing plane, which suddenly becomes a WWII shot of a bomber exploding in mid-air while the saucer is rather too obviously matted in nearby). Footage of real events never matches the quality of studio-made film.

You know I've never read Verne; reading science fiction has never interested me, despite the fact it's my favorite film genre. As I wrote in my OP the credits on this movie state not once but twice that the film is based on Verne's novel Career of a Comet, a.k.a. Off on a Comet; maybe Ed Bernds chose "Career of" because it sounds more elegant and interesting than the simple and basically descriptive "Off on". Like any Verne (or Wells) novel a film adaptation needs a decent budget to do justice to the source. But I suppose this story was more adaptable to the limitations of bottom-budget filmmaking than most of Verne's works.

But two last comments, both on your final paragraph, esc:

OK. I've paid tribute to Valley of the Dinosaurs so I believe I've bought some time with that to say that Tim Burton's Ed Wood (from any year!) is a choice look at old time, get-it-done guerilla film-making. It's great. And on the subject of 'great', the other terrific film on film-making is Steve Martin's wonderfully, goofy, wonderfully hilarious send-up Bowfinger (1999).

1. You know, I've never seen Bowfinger. I have to put that on my list. Thanks!

2. Valley of the WHAT now?

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

Ha! The needle to the end, eh, Holmes!

Yes, of course, I got my reptilian friends mixed up again.

I, too like to play the Match Game when musical cues or scenes are recycled. I was amused to hear entire bolts from Diamonds Are Forever (1971) used in Disney's The Black Hole (1979), the late John Barry being composer of both.

I also recognized snatches of music from, of all things, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) used in Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground. Bernard Herrmann being the composer credited on both films.

There are others, but I don't remember them now.

Jules Verne was pretty much a writer of very exciting (for his time)travelogues, almost as if he held a copy of National Geographic in one hand and wrote with the other.

Today his stuff may seem a bit drawn out as he had to describe with many words underwater kingdoms and views of the Earth from above the clouds.

There is the Wilhelm Scream and the sound of ricocheting rifle fire that seemed to turn up in many a jungle pot-boiler and oaters. I suppose there must now be a web-site that lists the uses.

There is nothing new under the sun.

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] hobnob53 10 years ago

The aye! of the needle!

You've hit another recycling issue, music. Once again picking on Columbia, it was very common in the 50s for them to re-use music from major films in their B stuff. I've heard Max Steiner's theme from The Caine Mutiny recycled several times. There are many other examples, meaning I can't think of them offhand but know they're there. The tip-off is that on such films there's never a credit for "Music by". The closest you get is "Music conducted by Mischa Bakaleinikoff". If I spelled his name right.

Same with Universal: "Music Supervision by Joseph Gershenson" to cover pasted-together music passages that turned out to have been composed by up-and-coming composers such as Henry Mancini!

But I always hear composers stealing from themselves. Bernard Herrmann was perhaps the best exemplar of this. You mentioned his score for On Dangerous Ground. Did you know he considered it his favorite of all his scores? That surprised me because while it is of course good he was in my opinion much more imaginative in other films. But aside from the cues you mentioned you can very plainly hear several sections he would lift absolutely unchanged and intact for North by Northwest seven years later. And he re-used other themes as well: re-used for that movie, or re-used original themes from that film later on.

Once you hear enough of their work it's exceedingly easy to spot the individual traits, instrument preferences, styles and so forth of all the classic film composers: Herrmann, Mancini, Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Malcolm Arnold (all his scores sound the same to me), Alex North (to an extent), Alfred Newman, John Williams, and many others.

I just got a DVD with two films: Sam Goldwyn's 1943 pro-Soviet propaganda film The North Star, about the German attack on pleasant, prosperous, freedom-loving Soviet Ukraine, and its 1957 reworked-for-television anti-Communist variant, Armored Attack...which for some inexplicable reason is the primary film on the DVD, with the original an extra. But they're both so rare that it's great to have them finally available in good prints. (TNS is in the public domain and has been seen only in very bad prints.) Anyway, I started to watch Armored Attack, which I hadn't seen in over 40 years, and after the original music by Aaron Copland ended, they looped in some of the opening music from 1951's Lost Continent! Music by the underrated Paul Dunlap.

As for the Wilhelm scream, well, you still hear that today. You can also always tell which studio an older film came from by its distinct sound -- and sound effects. The howling wind sound used by Warner Bros. is my favorite, used over and over and over.

[–] escalera-2 10 years ago

Thanks for the tutorial,HOB. I never gave much thought to the wording used on credits but that makes sense. I saw some Keebler crackers on sale at a very low price at a retail store but the color of the packaging seemed a bit off to me so I examined a box. Nowhere does it say "Baked by Keebler, USA", instead states, "Distributed by Keebler, USA." or something along that line.

Who knows where they were actually manufactured.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJa5wZd63RY

Yes, no doubt the Morlocks were pretty much ripped off. Strangely enough...

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me7u2ePw4R1qac9iz.png

...they brought one of these guys to mind...

http://top50sf.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/they-live-lady.jpg

"Please use elevator, stairs stuck between floors."

[–] darkness_surroundz 8 years ago

hope-they turned up in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

[–] 8 years ago

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