"Disneyland" Mars and Beyond (1957)

User Rating:

8.7/10   

Director:

Ward Kimball

Writers:

William Bosche (story) &
John W. Dunn (story) ...

TV Series:

"Disneyland" (1954)

Original Air Date:

4 December 1957 (Season 4, Episode 12)

Genre:

Animation | Action | Adventure | Biography | Drama | Family | Fantasy | Sci-Fi | Western

Plot:

The episode begins with an introduction of Walt Disney and his robot friend Garco, who provide a brief overview of this episode...

Plot Keywords:

Mars | Planet | Space | Science | Solar System

Cast

Paul Frees	...	Narrator
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Walt Disney	...	Himself - Host
E.C. Slipher	...	Himself (as Dr. E.C. Slipher)
Ernst Stuhlinger	...	Himself (as Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger)
Wernher von Braun	...	Himself (as Dr. Wernher von Braun)

Runtime:

53 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound Recording)

Company:

Walt Disney Productions

Trivia:

When the Martians are chasing the Earth woman, Donald Duck can be spotted among the crowd of bizarre monsters.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "The Mouse Factory: Interplanetary Travel (#1.10)" (1972)

Disney TV special with some very unusual sci-fi animation

"Mars and Beyond" was a one-hour TV special originally shown in 1957 as a Tomorrowland episode on ABC's weekly "Disneyland" TV program. It's basically an educational film done in color with very creative animation supervised by Ward Kimball about man's relation to the stars, conditions for life on Mars and options for exploring Mars. This film is now available on DVD as part of the 2-disc set entitled, "Walt Disney Treasures: Tomorrowland: Disney in Space and Beyond." The piece is slow going at first, with a few live educational segments of scientists in offices explaining stuff to viewers. There are a couple of long cartoon sequences filled with gags that will entertain some and irritate others. One shows the history of man's relationship to the stars and another shows typical science fiction renditions of Martian invasion stories. These are done in the limited animation gag cartoon style perfected earlier in the decade by the UPA cartoon studio ("Gerald McBoing-Boing," "Christopher Crumpet," et al). The sense of humor is pretty juvenile (Chuck Jones was doing much funnier Martian-themed cartoons over at Warner Bros.) and the style is all too reminiscent of UPA cartoons and other Disney shorts of the time, such as the Oscar-winning "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom."

However, in the last third of the program, the animation style changes and gets more serious and detailed. One segment shows us what life on Mars might be like if conditions were just a tad improved, so we get to see all kinds of predatory vegetation in action in incredibly imaginative depictions of cold hard plant-eat-plant life on this sandy, cold, arid planet. Then there's a segment offering a proposed operation for a fleet of manned ships to explore and travel the Martian surface. These painted illustrations, while limited in movement, are quite detailed and beautifully rendered. One can only fantasize what an animated science fiction feature at the time done in this style might have looked like.

One jarring element of Disney's space-themed TV programs was the frequent appearance on camera of German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, who'd headed the Nazi military rocket program during WWII and whose V2 rockets showered death and destruction on London. Von Braun, who was brought to the U.S. to work on its space program at the end of the war, once wrote a book called "I Aim at the Stars," which reportedly prompted TV host Dick Cavett to quip, "But I keep hitting London."

Anyway, "Mars and Beyond" will be of great interest to fans of animation and its all-too-rare use, at least by American animators, in the treatment of science fiction concepts.