Saturday, February 22, 2014

Let Invasion Commence!


Who Wins When Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956)?

Dig Those Rock and Roll Records as a Giveaway!
Aliens arrive this time not to make nice or promote peace, but to knock over Washington landmarks and colonize Earth. Can Hugh Marlowe stop them? A best reason to watch is Ray Harryhausen's saucer models; they do all but dance in mid-air combat with our puny defenses. I wondered to the end how we'd defeat this force, and was frankly not assured we had, judging by crude and truck-transported rays aimed willy-nilly at better-equipped invaders. Kids were right to be shook up by sci-fi, as overcoming of Martians seemed more dumb luck on our part than superior planning/intellect. Are there fewer claimed saucer sightings now than in the 50's, or do we just hear less about them? These aliens might better have stayed aboard ship, as it's a letdown seeing them emerge in outfits more evocative of Columbia serials from the 40's. Still, it's Harryhausen's show, and there's plethora of his stuff, not just doled out highlights as in other and cheaper sci-fi's he worked on. Did big success of It Came From Beneath The Sea put more budget at RH disposal? Earth vs. The Flying Saucers certainly got trade support, ads being varied and plentiful. Domestic rentals would equal It Came From Beneath The Sea with $1.1 million, Earth's invasion being among most lucrative of budget sci-fi's from a latter half of the 50's.
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3 comments:

  1. Mike Cline11:59 AM

    Saw this at one of our drive-ins when I was five or six the night before we were leaving for D.C. to visit a less-than-impressive aunt and uncle. Needless to say, was terrified and didn't want to go as long as the saucers were still there, even though a week at my aunt and uncle's could wreck move havoc than the space invaders.

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  2. Michael12:08 PM

    It may have had a better budget than its predecessor for Harryhausen, but I remember reading that he had to animate the disaster scenes (e.g., the Washington Monument crumbling) because they wouldn't pay for a stop-motion camera to shoot models crumbling in slo-mo.

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  3. rnigma4:23 PM

    Ray recalled having to painstakingly animate each brick and bit of debris in the scene where the saucer hit the monument.
    I read somewhere that Sam Katzman wanted Harryhausen to do the FX for "The Giant Claw," but apparently his price had gone up (or he had already hooked up with Charlie Schneer), so Sam settled for the cheap, ludicrous puppet that was the film's monster.

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