CineSavant Column
Hello — a day early, as we will explain next time around …
A YouTube post by Matthew B. Lamont gives us something that’s apparently well-known to Forrest Ackerman’s fans, but that escaped me until now …
… it’s Monsters on the Moon, a 5-minute item that shapes up as a trailer-promo for an unproduced Sci-fi fantasy. The professionally-finished (for 1940) promo combines live action and stop-motion animation. The stop-motion isn’t bad … the effects may be crude, but the table-top moon vistas are potentially more interesting than what could be achieved by Hollywood live action at the time. It apparently never had a chance at attracting big-studio interest. Hollywood in the war years had no use for such ‘trick films’ except maybe as advertising shorts, as Ray Harryhausen learned, before Willis O’Brien hired him.
The promo is essentially silent, with a bunch of professionally lettered text cards. We don’t know if it was originally silent or if it always had this music soundtrack of cues from Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers serials. It’s certainly elaborate, especially for its year. It’s amusing that the invading Martians have robot servant-minions identical to George Lucas’s wastepaper-basket droids.
An impressively thorough background story on the odd little film can be found in a Steve Stanchfield post at Cartoon Research {Scroll down a bit}.
And a new issue of the digital magazine Noir City is out …
Number 43 continues with a gallery of authoritive articles and features, including a piece on David Lynch by Zach Vasquez; I migrate fairly quickly to the Blu-ray reviews of Sean Axmaker.
Subscriptions are aligned with The Film Noir Foundation; the info is all at the link.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson