Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) on Netflix
Bound for Mars, Commander Christopher Draper and Colonel Dan McReady take to one-man pods to avoid a meteoroid. Draper lands alone on the red planet, needing air, water and food.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.4/107,714 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
Commander Christopher Draper and Colonel Dan McReady reach Mars aboard the spaceship Mars Gravity Probe 1. To avoid a collision with a large orbiting meteoroid they use up their remaining fuel and come down in separate one-man pods, becoming the first humans on the planet. Draper survives the landing and finds shelter in a cave. He refills his air tanks with a hand pump, which lets him leave the cave in the thin air outside. The monkey Mona, who also survived, keeps him company.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Paul Mantee was chosen for the lead of Commander Kit Draper out of approximately 70 actors, a group that included Victor Lundin, as an experienced unknown whom director Byron Haskin picked partly because he resembled Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
- For Robinson Crusoe on Mars, director Byron Haskin shot from the tops of Death Valley's "marshmallow sand" ridges instead of the canyon floors that westerns used, because the vista up there looked like another planet rather than Death Valley.
- Designer Albert Nozaki built three miniatures for the alien spacecraft, closely resembling the "Martian war machines" he had created for Byron Haskin's earlier film The War of the Worlds (1953).
- Producer Aubrey Schenck said the original script's monsters and alien beings were jettisoned for plausibility, the medium-sized budget, and because they undercut the premise of an astronaut stranded and alone; screenwriter Ib Melchior denied this.
- The original screenplay's companion for Draper was not Mona the monkey but a Martian creature that would have been a costumed armadillo; a monkey was chosen as more believable and easier to train.
- According to Paul Mantee, the monkey Barney was a male playing the female Mona, so he had to wear a fur-covered diaper.
- Two songs were inspired by and named after the film, one sung by Johnny Cymbal and one by Victor Lundin, who wrote his version to perform at science fiction conventions and recorded it for his 2000 album Little Owl.
