A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
the text are to this edition.
24. Bruce Lainer Wright, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters, 1950-1964 (Dallas, Texas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1993), 3. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
25. David Wingrove, “Project Moonbase,” Science Fiction Film Source Book, edited by Wingrove (London: Longman, 1985), 185.
26. Robert A. Heinlein, “Foreword” to “The Last Days of the United States,” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, by Heinlein (New York: Ace Books, 1980), 145.
27. H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 70. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
2828. Project Moonbase (Galaxy, 1953).
29. A similar lack of imagination can be seen in other space station films, including the Outer Limits episode “Specimen: Unknown” (1964), The Green Slime (1968), the television movie Earth II (1971), and the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999). Arguably, out of all the filmed depictions of space stations, only Project Moonbase, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Solaris (1971) display any sensitivity to the unusual characteristics of a space station environment.
30. For the record, when she hosted the film for the Canned Film Festival, as I recall, Laraine Newman also noted—facetiously, of course—that the “parallels” between Project Moonbase and 2001: A Space Odyssey were “amazing.”
31. My bibliography of science fiction works involving space stations, The Other Side of the Sky (2009), lists in addition to Project Moonbase twelve Heinlein stories and novels published before 1955—more entries involving space stations than any other writer in that period can claim.
32. In one respect, though, the feeling that the film burlesques the military mind may be the accidental result of later events: the actor playing the General, Hayden Rorke, went on to play the befuddled commander in the television comedy I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970), so it is particularly easy, I suppose, to see him as a buffoon in this movie. Still, I would argue that the comical aspects of his portrayal are to a large extent intrinsic to the film, and do not emerge simply because of the impression left by his later television role.
33. Indeed, elements of this philosophy can also be detected in Destination Moon: early scenes criticize the shortsightedness of the American government and military in failing to mount a space program, and the privately-sponsored flight to the Moon is almost halted by bureaucratic interference. However, these aspects of that film could be interpreted simply as efforts to interject a sense of drama into a narrative that otherwise has very little conflict; in Project Moonbase, a story about enemy agents trying to sabotage the American space program, there was no compelling reason to introduce criticisms of military thinking.
34. Also, while the all-American character of this space mission cannot be overlooked, the two rockets that are launched from Earth to the space station are interestingly named “Canada” and “Mexico.” At least on a metaphoric level, then, there is some international participation in the conquest of space.
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