 524 - 12 TO THE MOON with short: DESIGN FOR DREAMING
Genre: Low-budget, Dated Sci-Fi (S:
1956, Color;
F: 1959, B&W)
Short: This experiment starts with a short made by General Motors
that’s the strangest thing GM has produced next to the Chevette.
It depicts a “Woman of the Future” (WotF) who dances around, singing in an operatic voice, while a man, who also is singing opera-style, leads her around a bunch of the then-latest cars from GM (and
the WotF gives a bit of a fashion show to boot).
Finally, the WotF is dancing around the Cars of the Future, and she and the man end up driving away in a “future” Firebird that looks a lot like the Batmobile (it even has a fin in the
back!).
This really weird short is a bit reminiscent of Mr. B Natural although the riffing here
isn’t quite as inspired as it was for that classic short.
Synopsis: The feature is another of those
’50s era Sci-Fi films, like
Rocketship XM (ep #201), that attempts to depict the first manned flight to the moon.
A rather large, culturally-diverse crew of twelve board a spacious rocket ship (interestingly named the Lunar Eagle
– which is the only thing this film guesses right)
to take off for the moon, with a couple of cats and some other animals in tow (why they brought them, I do not know).
After some extremely unexciting scenes of peril, the ship lands on the moon.
The first thing we see on the moon is some guy wandering around on the set but he soon gets out of the picture and our astronauts get out and explore.
A man and woman astronaut leave the others and find a cave with air in it, which leads them to rip off their helmets so they can make out.
They go deeper into the cave and a ghostly entity appears and freezes them inside.
The other astronaut also find the cave but cannot get through the ice to the
frozen couple and, after one of them is sucked into some sort of
moon quicksand, the rest give up and head back to the ship.
Back at the ship, they start to receive some strange looking symbols from the Moonians that turns out to be Chinese (after all,
aren’t all strange-looking symbols really Chinese?).
The one Chinese woman on the ship translates the message and it says that, not only are the Moonians going to keep the horny couple to study, but they want the cats too!
So the cats are taken out of the ship and left for the Moonians and the Ship takes off to return to Earth.
But when it gets back to Earth, it turns out the Moonians have decided to put North America in a deep-freeze (I guess they
didn’t like the cats).
Two of the crewmembers need to be selected by drawing straws to fly a dangerous mission to drop an atomic bomb in a volcano to thaw out America.
And the two selected are, of course, the Jewish scientist and the
(repentant) son of the Nazi who killed the Jewish scientist’s family
during WWII.
They are now friends, though, and their mission is a complete success... no, just kidding,
it’s a complete failure and they both die.
But the sacrifice the men made so move the emotionless Moonians (I know, I know, it
doesn’t make sense) that the Moonians change their minds about Earthlings and they de-frost America, allowing the ship to return to Earth.
Don’s Review: This episode started a bit slow but became a lot of fun as it went on.
The riffing was good, especially in the second half, and the host segments were a lot of fun as they dealt with a Woman of the Future
(named Nuveena and played by Bridget Jones) showing up on the SOL and dancing around and singing to Mike (who has to sing back, opera-style).
Although this was an episode I wasn’t too excited about watching, it turned out to be a pretty good one so I definitely recommend seeing it.
Don’s Rating: 
[ S:
F:
]
Related Link:
(1) Bookworm’s
Episode Review
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