Star Odyssey: Ludicrous 1978 Italian Star Wars Rip-Off

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Hopefully, you have never seen ‘Star Odyssey,’ also known as ‘the Italian Star Wars.’

Now is your chance! It’s a full immersion into cinema of the ludicrous. For your convenience, it’s dubbed into English. Beware though, you will never look at science fiction the same way again after subjecting yourself to this assault.

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One can only hope that at least the actors might have had some fun making this, but unfortunately most of them appear to be thinking about the food truck instead of their lines.

Its awful history goes back to 1978, barely a year after the real Star Wars was released. Its unforgivable direction is credited to one Alfonso Brescia, heaven rest his soul.

The primary achievements of this interstellar fiasco appear to be robots constructed from trash cans and light sabers fashioned out of painted plywood.

Enjoy this Italian treat in the comfort of a nice quiet insane asylum.

Transformers Generation: Wild Robot Action Fan Film by Harris Loureiro

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Filmmaker Harris Loureiro went to the store and bought himself a bunch of robot toys. Then he made a Transformers movie. It’s a wild, action-packed thrill ride of a stop-motion extravaganza, complete with voice overs and a fittingly super-dramatic score. Have fun!

Monsanto House of the Future in 1957 Tomorrowland

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This is more interesting than it looks. Monsanto – yes, that evil company that takes dirt and turns it into a lawyer – worked with Disney to build a house of the future in Disneyland. It was intended to show how plastics would revolutionize home building. Apparently, the house was so strong that when Disney tore it down at the end of the sixties they could not break the outer shell with wrecking balls.

My primary interest in the film, aside from the mentally challenged smiling morons that inhabit Monsanto’s future vision, is the fascinatingly awkward focus on comfort as the primary aspect of life in the future. I think a great new science fiction film could be made by some nutty director who would look at the future of industrial films like this one for inspiration. It could be the antidote to the completely bleak, dystopian, post-apocalyptic dumb soup being offered by witless filmmakers like Neill Blompkamp. The thudding incomprehensibility of such work must eventually be counteracted by a house of the future and people who think they are happy!

 

 

 

The Meeting: 1984 Science Fiction Animation from Ukraine

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This is an extraordinary 1984 science fiction animation from the Soviet era Ukrainian film studio known as Kievnauchfilm. Aliens visit the earth to investigate whether humans have any knowledge of the reality behind UFOs.

Here’s a link to another animation from this studio. Stephen King’s ‘Battleground’ short story.

 

Cosmic Voyage: 1936 Soviet Science Fiction Film About a Moon Landing

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This is an absolutely fascinating and rather beautiful 1936 Soviet science fiction film that foretold how a future 1946 moon mission would work. It’s got incredible zero gravity effects, miniature models of a fantastic space ship on a launch ramp, and very cool technical details like filling the cockpit with fluid to buffer the cosmonauts from launch forces. Then there’s a marvelous sequence on the surface of the moon with excellent stop motion animation inter-cut with live actors. Apparently, the Soviet censors banned the film after a short but successful first run because they felt the cosmonauts were having too much fun on the moon. They were right. These characters go hopping and bounding about with so much joy it’s almost an embarrassment. Citizens of the Soviet Union were not supposed to be happy.

Don’t worry about understanding Russian. The film was shot as a silent and is more or less a completely visual experience.

It was directed by Vasili Zhuravlov, but what’s really most interesting about the production history is that Constantin Tsiolkovski, a Soviet scientist and professor, became enthusiastic about putting some of his theories on space travel into a film. He consulted with the filmmakers in an attempt to lend verisimilitude to the moon voyage. Many years later, Werner von Braun credited Tsiolkovski’s calculations as having been correct.

So here is a old Soviet film that went to great lengths to get many of its details right.



Here is an interesting article about the film.

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