Peggy webber mst3k7/31/2023 ![]() ![]() More specifically, it's whatever the hell this thing is supposed to be. It is -and you'd feel outright cheated if it weren't -an alien being. Investigating later, they find out the cause of that light, and what is a surprise to them probably isn't to anybody watching this in 1958 nor in 2014. Air Force colonel, the Thunderer is a nuclear-armed killer satellite, and -hopefully -the Other Side doesn't have one yet.īut the kids spy something strange as the station wagon approaches Eagle Point, a light in the sky. As we're told twice in a row, in largely the same terms, by a child and by a U.S. Patriarch Dave Brewster has just been reassigned by his engineering firm to the site of their most lucrative and important defense contract: Eagle Point, base of the Thunderer, which is either a weapon to end wars or to begin them, depending upon whom you ask. None of them are terribly pleased about it, since their new house is, in point of fact, not a house, but a government trailer with barely enough space for the four of them to sleep and eat. We do eventually exit the stargate, and we find our friends, the Brewsters, on their way to a new home. But we oughtn't be too hard on what is, in all fairness, a pretty bitchin' credits sequence. He must have recognized the kind of picture it was, and called upon the only man who might have saved it.Īnd from the first images, a Jack Arnold movie is evident indeed I doubt it's any kind of accident that his new sci-fi picture begins with galactic vistas so strikingly similar to the end of his last super-hit. Though planned and executed as the mere B-feature to the more expensive (and generally superior) The Colossus of New York, the canny Alland wasn't ready to give it up for dead. Producer William Alland jumped from Universal to Paramount in 1958, and Children was one-half of his double-feature debut at his new studio. But it would prove to be the last time Arnold worked with one of his most esteemed collaborators, and one may draw some inferences from that. Still, it is a little telling that the only two Jack Arnold pictures to make their way up to the Satellite of Love are Revenge of the Creature, a effort both shoddy and soulless, and The Space Children, which -well, it's the furthest thing there is from soulless, anyway. It is sometimes remembered fondly now, but it is best known as a season 9 episode of -you guessed it - Mystery Science Theater 3000.Īs noted before, the MST3K treatment is suggestive but not quite dispositive of any film's intrinsic worth aside from the butchered Sandy Frank revisions of a Gamera classic or two, there's perhaps a half-dozen movies that are firmly entrenched on this side of good -or at least entertaining in their own right -like Phase IV, Moon Zero Two and Danger: Diabolik. This is something that strikes me as a disservice to everyone involved, but according to Joe Dante the movie was popular at the time. With Science Fiction Theatre gone by 1957, and no SF anthology to replace it until The Twilight Zone in 1959, one supposes there was simply no place for an emphatically made-for-TV work like The Space Children but real, actual theaters.
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