This old Disney TV show was drawn to my attention a few months ago by animator Hannah Moss - @BrochJam on Twitter. She said it was quite likely that Disney would take it down from YouTube soon, but at time of writing this it’s still up - if all the links in this post stop working. you’ll know it’s gone. If they don’t, you can find the whole thing here, and if you have 52 minutes to spare, it's well worth watching.
Made in 1957, the programme looks at the history of human thinking about Mars, what scientists in 1957 think it’s really like, and how they think we might one day get there. It’s fascinating on several different levels. First, and most obvious, the wonderful animation. Look at how beautifully the characters in the opening sequence are drawn!
And the wonderful invention on display in these aliens in their winter and summer plumage…
While this plucky space heroine definitely deserves her own franchise…
The sequence about the birth of the solar system is a sort of 2D forerunner of Douglas Trumbull’s massive effects sequence in The Tree of Life, which I mentioned in my last blog.
It’s an interesting glimpse of what Disney’s TV documentaries used to be like, with a long and rather fast-forwardable introduction from Uncle Walt himself and the stately narration. It's also a fascinating snapshot of the most up-to-date 1950s ideas about Mars. The Mars which Ray Bradbury was writing of around the same time, with its ethereal ruined cities and dreaming canals, was more fantasy than science fiction, but it wasn’t yet completely implausible. The idea that the Red Planet might harbour multicellular and perhaps even intelligent life wouldn’t be comprehensively scuppered for another few decades.
It's a little awkward that one of the scientists shown working on a manned mission to Mars is that old villain Wernher von Braun, whose hasty extraction from Nazi Germany and reinvention as an all-American hero left such a nasty stain on the US space programme. Fortunately, that gives me an excuse to link to Tom Lehrer’s excellent song about him - "'If the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,' says Wernher von Braun’.
(Of course, the problem with von Braun’s V2 rockets wasn’t just all the people they killed when they came down, but all the people they killed before they went up. For every victim who perished when a V2 landed on London or Antwerp, at least five slave labourers died in the underground factory at Nordhausen where the things were assembled.)
Made in 1957, the programme looks at the history of human thinking about Mars, what scientists in 1957 think it’s really like, and how they think we might one day get there. It’s fascinating on several different levels. First, and most obvious, the wonderful animation. Look at how beautifully the characters in the opening sequence are drawn!
It's a little awkward that one of the scientists shown working on a manned mission to Mars is that old villain Wernher von Braun, whose hasty extraction from Nazi Germany and reinvention as an all-American hero left such a nasty stain on the US space programme. Fortunately, that gives me an excuse to link to Tom Lehrer’s excellent song about him - "'If the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,' says Wernher von Braun’.
(Of course, the problem with von Braun’s V2 rockets wasn’t just all the people they killed when they came down, but all the people they killed before they went up. For every victim who perished when a V2 landed on London or Antwerp, at least five slave labourers died in the underground factory at Nordhausen where the things were assembled.)
So you might feel inclined to fast-forward through Wernher too, and reach the spectacular final animated sequence. Far less whimsical than the earlier ones, it demonstrates how square-jawed astronauts of the not-to-distant future might travel from Earth to Mars. Their umbrella-shaped atomic-electric spaceships may look quaint to us, but this is clearly a painstaking attempt to put a believable future on the screen.
It reminds me a little of the Blue Danube sequences in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, and to modern eyes it has the same slightly wistful, might-have-been quality. It seemed so nearly in reach, this future. I can remember the promise it still seemed to hold out even in the early ‘70s when I was growing up. But the moonbases and domed cities on Mars turned out to be a fantasy. Instead, we got the internet. But that allows us to watch lost treasures from the Space Age like this one, so it’s not all bad.
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