Re: Mercury Movies?

On 22 Aug 2005 14:49:29 -0700, cfleon@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>I'm doing research for an article on (fictional) treatment of the
>various planets in the mass media; and while I've found plenty of
>movies or television shows dealing with Mars or Luna, some with Venus,
>several with Jupiter (or its moons), a couple with Saturn, and even one
>with Uranus (Journey to the Seventh Planet), I can't find any that do
>anything more than just mention Mercury, Neptune, or Pluto (Pluto gets
>MENTIONED a lot, but nothing more). Does anyone know any that actually
>visit these planets? Animated shows would be alright. If anyone's
>interested, I can post the lists of what I already have.

....WRT Pluto, that BBC "sci-fi mocumentary" featuring a Grand Tour
mission that covered Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Saturn's Rings,
and Pluto, covered the majority of them. They deliberately skipped
Mercury, and at the time of such a mission later in this century,
Uranus and Neptune were way out of range. Pluto specifically gets
visited because they're setting up a telescope array there. One that
gets reprogrammed along the way to search for Earth-like planets
instead of just stars going >BWOOM< and the like.

...."Journey", on the other hand, for some Gawd-awful reason, keeps
getting reposted about every two-three months on the binary groups.
Always the same bloated DVD version, too. That movie stank worse than
a pile of dead fish, but for somehow people keep posting it.

....There was another Uranus or Neptune-based one, where the crew finds
a "Vampire Queen" of some sort, and the whole plot from that point
becomes something akin to the big question that runs thru "Alien" -
can we get home without bringing this damn thing back with us?" San
Antonio's KENS-TV used to run this about three times a *year* back in
the old days when they ran "Project: Terror!" late Friday nights in
the 60's, but I'll be frapped if I can remember the actual title.

....But when it comes down to it all, the majority of fictional trips
in cinematic form to the planets are going to be to either the Moon or
Mars, with Venus coming in a distant second thanks to Abbott &
Costello and their peers. I'd be willing to bet that the Moon probably
beats Mars in the number of visits right now by a small margin, but
that Mars will eventually overtake the Moon thanks to all the nice
footage we'll be getting in the next few years from the surface -
remember, the last live ground footage we got from the Moon was from
some ***-quality TV cams on the Soviet rovers, and that was over 30
years ago.

OM

--

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