The alien 'bug monster' (used as worker drones) was the best part of this movie. I wish someone would re-create a colony of him (claws and all) in a new scifi movie.
As possibly the only survivors of planet Meteluna, escaping in another flying saucer before the planet did a melt-down.
Larry
Actually, there was a sequel planned to THIS ISLAND EARTH by Universal, titled ALIENS IN THE SKIES, which was in pre-production for a short time in late 1956, but the project was cancelled by Edward Muhl, the head of production at the studio, because he didn't want to make any expensive science fiction pictures. His concept of sci-fi was low-budget B-black & white monster movies. It wasn't until he left the studio in the mid-1960s that Universal began to develop some real science fiction projects with some depth like THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.
It was 15 years between THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1970) and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), thanks to Ed Muhl. He told his employees at Universal to drop work on ALIENS IN THE SKIES because it sounded expensive, and he refused to spend more than a million dollars on a sci-fi film.
THIS ISLAND EARTH cost only $800,000.00 to make in 1954, but it looks like a million-dollar movie, thanks to all the talent, cast and crew involved.
Franklin Coen, who was brought in to develop the sequel script in 1956, in story conferences, told me in 1987 when I interviewed him that the plot went like this: (credits are those proposed since the film was never made)
ALIENS IN THE SKIES script by Franklin Coen, based on THIS ISLAND EARTH by Raymond F. Jones and the script by Edward G. O'Callaghan and Franklin Coen. Produced by William Alland. Directed by Jack Arnold. Starring Rex Reason and Faith Domergue, with Lance Fuller and the BEMs: the Metaluna Mutants. In Technicolor and CinemaScope.
Cal and Ruth star once again as research associates, now married, at a top secret government atomic research program. A flying saucer lands near the base, releasing several Metaluna Mutants which overpower the guards at the base, stealing some uranium and isotopes and escape. Cal and Ruth are called in to investigate, and when they discover one creature dead, they know where it came from.
Cal is then contacted by Brack via an interocitor he has replicated from the original plans. Brack, who took off from Metaluna aboard another silver saucer before the planet's destruction, has come to Earth with sinister motives, with his cargo of Mutant creatures to wreak havoc on Earth, overpowering us with his advanced weapons and technology.
An aerial battle ensues between the saucer and Air Force jets, and the saucer is damaged and Brack is injured. Meanwhile the Mutants terrorize the town near the base, and Cal and Ruth have their hands full trying to round them up and stop them with the help of police and military.
Brack comes to understand the meaning of human mercy and compassion at the end, and survives to help humanity with the almost-lost advanced technology of Metaluna. Cal and Brack shake hands as the end titles appear.
Dejael
This sounds like a good movie, except possibly the part you mention "An aerial battle ensues between the saucer and Air Force jets, and the saucer is damaged".
I hate it when we humans loose the advanced tech that could get us on to other worlds.
I hope that if anyone ever makes this movie, that the saucer is repairable and duplicatable and that the Bug Monster is salvaged as a species (by cloning or whatever) to be available for sequels. I'd like to see a movie in which the Bug Mosnter takes on The Creature (From The Black Lagoon) on some dark & foggy alien planet.
But if the production would be money-stingy, then forget it. No point in degrading the classics, by producing junk.
Thanks for the info Dejael. I never knew there was even an attempt at a sequel.
Larry
The Bug Monster head was in a " Lost in Space " episode . That sequal
sounds good . I wanted to see "When Worlds Collide " sequal too just
to see how they are living on the new planet and see what those buildings were for at the end.
Fix the error reports on this site
Here it is, nearly nine years later when I read this, after I've expanded on the material left on Cal Meacham's "bio" and written a whole scenario for the aftermath--assuming that we'd seen the last of Metaluna and Zahgon.
If you're still interested, then you might like to read how I worked out that Cal is a former World War Two fighter ace and Berlin Airlift pilot, in addition to a nuclear physicist and electronics engineer. (Why else would Lockheed give or lend him a T-33A?)
I obviously had Brack pegged: more than just Exeter's security chief, he was clearly a Soviet-style Zampolit, ready to rat Exeter out to the Monitor if he thought he could advance that way.
You do know, I trust, that Roland Emmerich has already done this film, as Independence Day (1996)? In that one, modern F-15 and F-16 fighters take on flying serving platters that would easily dwarf Exeter's ship. If Universal had stuck to their plan, they'd have anticipated this.
And Cal would have been perfect as the de facto wing commander. If he really had been a fighter ace during WWII (and I say he'd have to be to know how to fly jets at the time of the first film), he'd have the perfect training mix for the job, *and* those other flyboys would respect him. Yes, this really would have worked.
Except for one thing. I also say the Mutants were half Metalunan insect, and half Zahgon abductee. Metaluna blended the ruling species on Zahgon with their own insect life. And that's why Zahgon got angry enough to erase Metaluna from the sky.
Only problem with your re-writing my biography of Cal Meacham is that he would have been too young to fly in WW2. He was born in 1928, and so did not become eligible draft age until 1946, the year after the war was over. He could have done service in the Korean War, which makes more sense, but he spent about six years 1948-1952 getting a Ph.D in Physics.
The rest of your scenario sounds plausible, and Raymond F. Jones may have agreed with it, although Metaluna and Zahgon were creations of the screenwriters instead, because in Jones' original novel they were known as the Llana and the Guarra.
Dejael
Well, I didn't recall any dead-certain reference to say that he was born in 1928. (Was that when Rex Reason was born, perhaps?) So I solved the problem you mentioned using three moves:
1. I showed his birth year as 1925, not 1928.
2. I made him out to be "gifted," so gifted that he could go to a preppy boarding school and, by dint of early admission, accelerated course work, or a combination of the two, get his high school diploma at fifteen or sixteen, "two years ahead of schedule."
3. I then said he lied about his age to volunteer for flying school. And by the time the Air Corps figured out the lie, he had already made Ace, and pilots were at a premium, so they didn't dare throw him out.
The Cal Meacham we saw in that film, one who could travel to a war-ravaged world, get a mass of quivering female flesh off that world alive, and get back, without going insane, is just the sort of guy who would lie about his age to train for aerial combat. And that also explains why Lockheed would give him the gift, or loan, or whatever, of a T-33A.
Giving him World War Two and Berlin Airlift service was a way to make him capable of understanding enough German to make out that Adolf Engelborg excused himself from the table by pleading that Mozart didn't agree with him. Mozart, of course, was the key. Exeter gave the game away by calling him "your composer."
I saw your edits to the Cal Meacham bio. I hate to tell you--you left some inconsistencies there. But I went in and found a way around them. I can preserve your 1928 birth date, and transfer Cal's war service to Korea, this time by assuming that the Air Force sent him back to MIT to get his PhD and then had their budget cut in the post-Mac wind-down. (See, I put Cal back at MIT from late 1950-52. Truman fired Mac in April of 1951. So I figure it should still work. In fact, I managed to get some more use out of his "hope you taxpayers don't mind" line that he pitches to those reporters at Andrews.)
I'll take your word that the tiny aircraft at the dirt airstrip was a 1949 Aeronca Chief, not a Piper Cub. I had to repair some other inconsistent listings in the bio, the main synopsis, and in the bios for Ruth and Joe. I also enhanced Exeter's bio to show him buying that aircraft used.
So I had to leave open just how Cal knew enough German to make out what Adolf Engelborg says. Happily, that's not too difficult--because after all, Cal doesn't know nearly enough to make Engelborg understand that he's about to get zapped later on. "Mozart" and "Guten Abend" (German for "Good evening") pretty much give you the gist.
Of course that's all the more reason to show that Ruth Adams could NOT have met Cal in Boston in 1950. Cal barely had his Master's then, and he was off learning how to fly shortly after getting the Master's, and flying over Korea after that. So Cal was right, as she admitted: he met her two years later, at UVM. (And I suggested that the two of them really did take a skinny dip in the Winooski River, though the dialog was ambiguous enough on that point to squeak past the Hays Office. Ruth wouldn't have made such an impression on him had they only talked about going swimming and hadn't done it.)
Hi, thanks for not hating what I did on the edits, but I thought it was inconsistent. I didn't have time to look through the whole thing, which you had expanded quite a lot, due to my busy work schedule, but I caught enough inconsistencies to make it more plausible. Thanks for going through it more thoroughly and updating it.
The airplane is a 1949 Aeronca Chief, used in the movie. The exact same plane was used in the movie TARANTULA! (Universal, 1955) being piloted by John Agar as Dr. Matt Hastings. When I was a kid, I assumed it was a Piper Cub, until I looked into it. If you look online, you can tell the subtle differences between the two airplane makes. They do look very similar.
I used 1928 as his birth year because that is Rex Reason's birth year, and since he was Cal Meacham, I believe he pretty much owns the character, since no other versions exist.
Dejael
Well, ordinarily I wouldn't assume that an actor, and his character, had to have been born in the same year. Actors play characters older, or younger, than themselves all the time. But in the absence of any reliable clues in the script to a character's age, I can well understand that pegging it to the actor's birth year would be as reasonable a guess as any. Especially if an internally consistent back story on the character is feasible with that birth year.
On the other hand, take a movie like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra; with James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains; Columbia Pictures, 1939). Once you work out the State that Jefferson Smith came from (Colorado), you then work out what Senate class was involved, and how long ago Clayton Smith (Jeff Smith's father) died, and how old a person must be before anyone can make him a Senator, and then you pretty much lock yourself in to a specific birth year--no matter how old James Stewart was at the time of the project. So I made Smith out to be born in 1909, or maybe a little earlier.
Exercises like these character bios are like practice for me. I'm trying to break into novel writing. In the meantime I enjoy writing stories from different characters' POV. For this project--following your lead, actually--I did something a little different, as you no doubt caught: the bios of the still-living characters, and some of the dead ones, too, are from the POV of a hypothetical researcher. In this case, I throw myself into the story in the present day, as if I were an investigator-columnist for the house organ of MUFON.
This lets me air my favorite theory of how the Metaluna-Zahgon War started. That theory actually came from my late wife. When I first screened TIE for her, to show her the sort of entertainment I grew up with, she asked me, "I wonder what made the Zahgonians so angry with the Metalunans. Could it have had anything to do with the Metalunans' arrogance? And could the Mutants have anything to do with it?" To understand why she'd think of something like that, you need to know that she, being of Irish descent, developed an intense dislike for the ancient Romans--because, during the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar cut down several groves of oak trees as a psy-op against the Gallic tribes that later united under Vercingetorix. So she saw Metaluna as Rome, and Zahgon as--well, maybe another Gaul, or perhaps the Visigoth Kingdom. So you see, she taught me not to "root for" one side in a war just because that was the first side that the story introduces. We never meet a Zahgonian, so we never get their side of it.
Furthermore, maybe you noticed, as I did, that Zahgon tactics are mighty peculiar. They would be equivalent to our launching missiles and *also* launching piloted rocket aircraft in high-arc trajectories to guide each missile to its target and pull up at the last instant. Again, that's what US Navy Dive Bombers did. Now do we really believe that Zahgon couldn't build a smart bomb? Unless--maybe a Metalunan interociter could have commandeered any of those meteor missiles and thrown it right back at Zahgon if they didn't use their tactic of guiding them in with piloted spacecraft (the flying wedges). Or at least thrown it way off target.
But you can't put that kind of thing into a story synopsis. But into a bio that reads like a story that an investigative journalist wrote up from an interview with the subject--you can.
Finally--one thing about the character pages. I don't know whether you noticed, but someone--I don't know who--tried to create character pages for the Mutant(s) and for the Metalunan crew-woman who runs the conversion console. And those pages have never appeared. Something's gone wrong with the processing. Have you any idea whom we should contact in imDB support to get that logjam cleared? (I also tried to change the "Dinner Guest" character to "Dr. Borfield." I put that change in more than a week ago. No joy. WIGO, do you suppose?)
Why are they important? Because I can discuss the origin of the Mutants far more completely in the "bio" for the Mutant (actually more than one) than in the bio for any given character. There I can say definitively what a Mutant is, and give details of the operation by which Metaluna acquired the first--er--stock. As to the crew-woman, I can discuss the "conversion technique," the development of which I credit to Exeter. (And if you look up the bio for the "Pilot," you see how I discuss the combined Helm/Weapons and Observer stations, and how these stations cross-connect, because interociters, as their name implies, lend themselves to such cross-connectivity and function sharing. They must cross-connect, or else Exeter would have had to fly blind to get off Metaluna with himself as captain, Helm/Weps, and Observer rolled into one.)
I never did ask you, did I, what you meant by "the rest of my scenario."
I wanted you to understand just how much work I did on it.
Here is the bio of "Dr. Marie Pitchener":
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0163155/bio
You will note that I changed her name, in the biography. I suggest here that "Marie Pitchener" is an obvious misnomer and alias--because "Marie" is French but "Pitchener" might be English, *if* any English family uses that surname. (I'm not as familiar with ancient surnamed families of Europe as I'd like to be--and most writers use existing surnames and do not make them up out of the whole cloth, as Charles Dickens did.)
Then, too, consider the actress that Universal-International hired to portray her. Lisalotta Valesca was *not* an Englishwoman, nor an American. She spoke with a Slavic accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.
So I hit upon the idea of making "Marie Pitchener" Polish, as Marie Curie was.
Marie Curie's original Polish given name is spelled "Marja" and probably pronounced "Maria." I rendered "Pitchener" as "Pisznera" to make it a Polish name.
Now all I had to do was to give her a background that would make her more likely to join "The Club" when Exeter came to call. (In fact, I suggested that Exeter sent that same crew-woman whom we see running the "conversion" console during the flight to Metaluna.) In deciding to make her a Jewess and Holocaust ("Shoah" in Hebrew) survivor, I yielded to a sense of irony: a Holocaust survivor goes to work, without ever knowing it, for a race guilty of an even *worse* holocaust--the blending of Zahgonian and insect to produce a bipedal arthropod "for menial work."
I should also reveal: I trained in pathology, and so am familiar with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The name of Edward Southern is famous in academic circles for the development of the "blotting" techniques for matching strands of DNA (Southern Blot), RNA (Northern Blot), and long-chain proteins (Western Blot).
I am LOVING this conversation.... the idea of using IMDB to hone writing skills is great. I actually sometimes take part in 'net debate to help with 'argument' for grad papers.
shareI'm 44 years old and love this movie. I've loved it since I was like 7 or 8 years old. I wish so much that there was a sequel to it. I'm not sure what it is...I cannot put my finger on it exactly....but something with 1950's sci-fi movies that I'm a sucker for. I have a love affair with most 50's sci-fi. I'd much rather watch T.I.E. than 98% of modern sci-fi movies.
In fact, now I'm going to watch T.I.E. again :)
That's an awesome idea! I'd go see it!
The name is Scruffy Nerfherder