Just Imagine (1930) on Netflix
NR19301h 53mComedyFantasyMusicSci-Fi
In 1980 New York, J-21's marriage filing is refused, and LN-18 is to wed the conceited MT-3. RT-42 takes J-21 to watch surgeons revive a man from 1930.
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- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb5.3/101,011 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
The New York of 1980 has no cars: aircraft fly between 250-story buildings linked by suspension bridges and elevated roads. People go by numbers, not names, and pills stand in for food and liquor. J-21 lands to talk with LN-18, whose marriage has been ordered to the conceited and mean MT-3 after the tribunal refused his filing. To lift his spirits, RT-42 brings J-21 to watch a team of surgeons bring back to life a man from 1930, renamed Single O.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Just Imagine (1930)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Art Deco cityscape the film is remembered for was built in a former Army balloon hangar by a team of 205 technicians over five months, and the giant miniature cost $168,000, wired with 15,000 miniature lightbulbs and lit from above by 74 arc lights.
- A box-office flop, Just Imagine made back some of its costs when the studio rented out clips of its futuristic sets to other films of the period, and its Mars spaceship miniature and mock-up were later used in Universal's Flash Gordon serials as Dr. Zarkov's spaceship.
- Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for Just Imagine, the first science fiction film ever nominated for an Oscar.
- By the time Just Imagine was released, movie musicals had greatly declined in popularity, and as a result major American studios would not back another big-budget science fiction film until 1951.
- Kenneth Strickfaden's electrical equipment, used in the scene reviving Single O from the dead, made its first screen appearance in Just Imagine before becoming more famous in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931).
- More than 50 special effects shots, combining previously photographed backgrounds with live foreground action, were made with the Dunning Process because rear projection of the required scale and quality did not exist at the time.
- The DeSylva, Brown and Henderson song "Never Swat a Fly" was covered by McKinney's Cotton Pickers in 1930, revived by Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band in 1967, and recorded more recently by Doc Cheatham.
