Charles and I returned home after the last ConDor science-fiction convention panel before the 6 p.m. dinner hour, raced to put a meal together and then headed back to the ConDor (I think that’s the nomenclature they’re using) for a program by Gerry Williams of short films about the moon and Mars. Charles and I arrived late and missed the first film, a 1910 Thomas A. Edison short called A Trip to Mars that is reportedly the first movie ever made about a journey to the Red Planet, but we walked in (after a comedy of errors getting there — we missed the #6 bus by minutes and rented a Car2Go) and got to see most of what turned out to be the best film on the program, or at least on the portion of it we saw. This was a 1930 Oswald the Rabbit cartoon called Up to Mars, in which Oswald and his sidekick (the typical hefty Bluto-ish type, sort of Hardy to Oswald’s Laurel) hang out in a movie theatre and watch newsreels of prize-winning balloon flights. Naturally they’re inspired to try it out themselves, and they end up on Mars, where an even more Bluto-ish ruler holds forth and their idea of “sport” is firing guns at random (the National Rifle Association’s wet dream!). Oswald the character had a convoluted history; he was originally produced by Walt Disney and designed by Disney’s assistant Ub Iwerks, only a contract dispute with Charles Mintz, the middleman between Disney and the releasing company, Universal, cost Disney control of the character and he ended up in the hands of Walter Lantz, later the creator of Woody Woodpecker. (Having lost the rabbit, Disney had Iwerks create a different character who, though nominally of another species, looked remarkably like Oswald the Rabbit: Mickey Mouse. Still later, Iwerks temporarily left Disney to set up on his own and created a character called Flip the Frog, who looked remarkably like Oswald and Mickey despite the dramatic differences in the real-world appearances of rabbits, mice and frogs.) This was a Lantz-era Oswald from 1930 and was animated with dazzling creativity, far removed from the photo-realism Disney was already insisting on in 1930, and though the ending was a typical it-was-all-a-dream cop-out the film was otherwise quite brilliant and very engaging and funny (and Lantz’s creative use of sound was on a par with Disney’s).
Afterwards they showed Haredevil Hare, a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1948 with Bugs foiling an
attempt by a Martian (who looks like a little green version of a Roman
centurion) to use the moon as a base from which to fire a giant ray cannon
which will destroy Earth, as well as some other cartoons that put familiar
characters in space-travel settings: Popeye: The Ace of Space, Duck
Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (a Daffy
Duck cartoon in which he’s a spectacularly incompetent astronaut continually
saved by his young sidekick, Porky Pig) and a truly bizarre 1956 propaganda
film from the American Petroleum Institute called Destination Earth. In this one, an astronaut is sent out by Ogg, the
absolute ruler of Mars (who’s created a personality cult of such depth and
breadth Stalin and Hitler would have blushed), to explore Earth, and he finds
that whereas Mars has only one
motor vehicle — Ogg’s personal limousine — and it barely moves at all, Earth
has millions of them and they’re all powered by gasoline, derived from
petroleum, extracted from the earth by hundreds of competing oil companies. The
film is as much propaganda for capitalism as it is for petroleum, and even as
such it’s a relic; as I’ve noted in these pages before, Ayn Rand had already
published The Fountainhead and
was writing Atlas Shrugged, and
she was (as far as I know) the first intellectual defender of capitalism who
did not posit competition as one
of its virtues. Given how relentlessly the world’s largest corporations are
combining with or acquiring each other, it’s clear that someone making a movie
with this agenda today would not
be hailing competition — quite the opposite; they’d probably be emphasizing the
sheer beauty of size and how the bigger the corporation is, the more
effectively it can serve consumers and lower prices. (Of course, the opposite
is true; in actually existing capitalism, the more consolidated an industry
becomes, the less it innovates,
the worse its customer service gets and the higher its prices go.)
Alas, the
quality of the films dropped dramatically as it moved from these old cartoons
to more recent independent productions (many of them student films) whose view
of the future in general and space travel in particular is considerably less
benign than the one presented in the oldies; among the movies included are Horses
on Mars, which appeared to be a student
filmmaker’s attempt to do their own Solaris; and Last Flight, which appeared to be an attempt to do the old
lost-in-Death-Valley trope on Mars, with the added kicker that the astronaut (a
woman) is not only running out of oxygen but hearing radio reports from Earth
that a catastrophe is befalling her home planet and billions of people are
dying. The final one — at least the last one we actually saw before Charles and
I raced out of the room to catch the last bus home — was Viaje a
Marte, an Argentinian film (Spanish,
unsubtitled, but not hard to figure out) about a young boy who watches an
Argentinian sci-fi series called Viaje a Marte on TV and either dreams his way into a Martian
adventure or actually gets driven there by his dad in an old pickup truck — and
there was an it-was-all-a-dream ending to this one, too, though the “dream”
involved the boy growing up and returning to Mars, checking out the hamburger
stand on Mars he’d bought a helmet from on his first trip, and the film ended
uncertainly. It was O.K. and a needed lift after the direness of Last
Flight but it wasn’t exactly a major “up”
either!
