Genre: Science Fiction
Director: David Bradley
Starring: Ken Clark, Michi Kobi, Tom Conway, Anna-Lisa, Anthony Dexter, John Wengraf, Robert Montgomery Jr., Phillip Baird, Richard Weber, Muzaffer Team, Roger Til, Corey Devin, Francis X. Bushman
MST Season: 5
Short Featured: "Design for Dreaming"
The Short
Did those salesmen from Hired! just not sell you on buying a Chevrolet car? Well the good people at General Motors are here to try to sell you more! In Design for Dreaming a dancing couple head to the FUTURE...of the past, and tour Motorama, looking at a bunch of neat gizmos and some shiny new automobiles.
There's not much meat on the bones of Design for Dreaming. It's a song and dance number that's trying to sell product. It's surreal and imaginatively shot, and the beat is catching. Try not to get too weirded-out by it and you might enjoy yourself.
There is a companion short called A Touch of Magic. This short was riffed by Rifftrax in their Summer Shorts Beach Party Live show.
The Movie
First Spaceship on Venus wasn't the only film from 1960 to portray international cooperation in space travel. A few months later, a much cheaper black and white film, which is essentially the same movie just in a more simplistic Rocketship X-M way, was released. This one features the international astronauts making their way to the moon, and finding signs of alien life that may threaten their lives.
Coming out around nine years before the actual moon-landing, 12 to the Moon is pure imagination about what we might find on that little rock, which brought about cheap thrills in its period. For today's audience, it's a riot in just how bullshit it is. The moon landscape is nothing like the actual moon, imagining the large gray rock that orbits our planet as some sort of exotic and deformed alien location, with way more going on on the surface than the actual moon. If this were our actual moon, the moon would be so much cooler than it actually is.
Like First Spaceship on Venus, 12 to the Moon is an idealist idea of a future of international cooperation, which was an idea more popularized with Star Trek later in the decade. 12 to the Moon's heart is in the right place, but it strains itself. The film sometimes utilizes accidentally racist ideas, such as an alien language resembling hieroglyphs, and the Asian crewwoman can decipher fluently because symbol writing is all the same even if it's alien I guess? The movie also strains to create conflict between the characters, as when the filmmakers start to feel their characters are a little stoic they introduce some sort of inane tension for kicks, like two characters who suddenly learn their ancestry is intertwined through Nazi Germany and another character who suddenly tries to utilize a dire situation that threatens the Earth to destroy Capitalism so Communism can reign supreme. It's weird and forced and the movie plays them so goddamn earnestly that it's actually kind of funny.
12 to the Moon is probably most notable in being a bit too close to what a parody of this type of movie would be, with models featuring rods and strings flying about, being too cheap to use complete space helmets and coming up with a totally bullshit "invisible face force field" or whatever to make up for it, everyday objects trying to be masked as futuristic equipment (lawn chairs?), and even points where you can see past the set. Though it should probably be noted that 12 to the Moon was likely framed for widescreen and the version seen here has the matte opened for a full screen presentation, which means the framing is off in this particular version of the film and when seen in theaters you most certainly couldn't see the ceiling of the set like you can here. The cheapness of 12 to the Moon makes it's seriousness even more amusing, transcending its traditional entertainment value and becoming something more fun than it's trying to be.
It seems that 12 to the Moon was made independently, but during the editing process it was scooped up by Columbia Pictures, who highjacked the editing and rushed it to theaters. It's hard to imagine that even a less rushed version of the film would be much better than this, but it did get issued in double features with superior films such as William Castle's thriller 13 Ghosts and Ishiro Honda's Japanese import Battle in Outer Space. It's hard to believe anybody came out of those double features talking about this film, but if they did, they probably had a good laugh at its expense.
The Episode
The fifth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 comes to a close, and it was a bit of an emotional roller coaster if nothing else, now that we are firmly past the loss of Joel and squarely in this new era of the show. Mike has some great episodes under his belt already (Beginning of the End, Outlaw, and Teen-Age Crime Wave are nothing if not great), but his greenhorn status might still be troublesome to most. The fifth season has a trump card up its sleeve though, and that's probably that it has the best season finale of any MST season, and they closed this season by not only giving Mike one of the strongest episodes of his tenure, but making it one of the funniest episodes of the entire series.
Starting out the episode is one of the most memorably bizarre shorts they've ever seen. Design for Dreaming is constantly in motion and giving Mike and the Bots different and weird imagery to work with. This is pretty much T-ball, but a home run is a home run. This short is the equivalent of a sugar rush and once the ball is rolling there is no stopping the energy in the room. This is one of my favorite shorts in the series, with catchy musical numbers, eye candy, and hilarious riffs perfectly in tune with the material.
The episode could lose pace with such a rambunctious appetizer, but 12 to the Moon offers up a different pace entirely, and it can be just as fun. While 12 to the Moon doesn't offer anything breakneck, the great thing about this movie is that the production value is so crude that even if there is little happening onscreen, there is always something in the frame to comment on. They have fun with the strange fantastical science gear that the movie utilizes with vague purposes, causing Crow to imagine the next step being "Now I'll activate my wings and I'll FLY!" They jab the lackluster sets and editing, noticing the overhead lights and even spotting a shot supposedly showing the moon's barren landscape that somehow has someone walking off in the frame ("Hey?! Who is that?!"). They also latch onto the characters' lack of personalities, as the film seems to have mistaken nationality for characterization. The film offers up some broad accents, and the crew shoots those heavy accents back right at it, including a French one that sounds like it came straight from Jacques Clouseau.
This episode also gives me one of those silly lines that just makes me giggle for days:
"I have named it!"
"It's called ME-ite!"
The host segments call back the short over the main feature, as Bridget Jones guests as Nuveena, Woman of the Future, who has come to the Satellite of Love to take Mike to her futuristic world and turn the Bots into kitchen appliances. The segments are okay, they're goofy fun, but they mostly blend into each other, and Bridget is having a ball as Nuveena. I mostly like the appliance versions of the Bots, though I will say the song conversations do tend to stall the segments. But the arc mostly works, and it keeps the energy of the short flowing through the episode. Meanwhile in Deep 13, Frank offers up a comedic Roast of Dr. Forrester that goes off the rails.
12 to the Moon is probably Mike's best episode while the series was at Comedy Central, and it would be the best episode of his run until the eighth season was in full swing. If I had watched this episode as first run, I would have been at ease, as it firmly proves just how great an episode can be with Mike at the helm and would have left me begging for another episode just as the series went for a hiatus. This is one of the best episodes of the series, and I'll take that to the moon and back.
Classic
The DVD
BANG! ZOOM! 12 to the Moon takes off on Shout Factory's Volume XXXV box set, with slight image flickers but good audio. The only special feature is You Are There: Launching 12 to the Moon, which is an interview with filmmaker Jeff Burr (who worked on entries in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Puppet Master, and Pumpkinhead franchises) who sums up the film and its place in the filmography of director David Bradley.
