Baseball Caps of Mars

I've always regretted that the real Mars didn't turn out like the one in Rocketship X-M. I though it was neat that all you needed was an oxygenmask, a flight jacket and a baseball cap.

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That's how it is for me with space movies -- they give me the chance to go, if only vicariously.

The first sci-fi film I ever saw, Invaders from Mars, was on television one Saturday afternoon in 1961 and it scared the daylights out of me. I watched it because I thought it said "Adventures from Mars." What did I know? I was only five.

At that time, only a handful of people had even been in space. NASA was eight years away from the first moon landings. Sending people Mars was out of the question, even if we'd wanted to.

But Hollywood was creating a whole different reality. As early as 1950, films like Destination Moon were giving audiences a glimpse of the future, with a realistic look at space travel. That was also the year that Rocketship X-M gave us the first Mars voyage in modern cinema.

Written and directed by Kurt Neumann, Rocketship X-M depicts a team of explorers who set out on mankind's first journey to the moon, but because of an error in the fuel mixture, are catapulted to Mars.

If that sounds fishy to you, you're right; unlike Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M didn't waste much time on scientific accuracy.

On Mars, pilot Lloyd Bridges and his crewmates find the ruins of an ancient Martian city that is now deserted - or so they think until stone-age brutes emerge to pelt them with boulders.

Some of the explorers escape to the safety of their ship and take off, only to run out of fuel before they can make a safe landing on Earth.

For all its flaws (which include some pretty lame dialogue), Rocketship X-M managed to present Mars much the way astronomers envisioned it in 1950: a desert world with meager plant life and enough atmosphere for astronauts to need only oxygen masks for survival.

A year later, in 1951, Flight to Mars, directed by Leslie Salander, continued the trend with even sloppier science and more embarrassing dialogue.

This time the astronauts encounter more advanced Martians who live in futuristic underground cities. The Martians offer to help the astronauts repair their spaceship, but all is not what it seems: the aliens are secretly plotting to take over the ship and, after building a fleet of copies, invade the Earth.

With the help of some sympathetic Martians, the Earth visitors manage to escape. But there is no escape from the film's dreadful portrayal of interplanetary spaceflight.

At the same time as these fanciful Mars missions were being committed to film, visionaries like rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun had more realistic Mars journeys on their drawing boards. Along with a team of space scientists and engineers, von Braun envisioned what the first Mars voyages would be like in a series of books and magazine articles.

One of those books, The Conquest of Space, became the inspiration for the 1954 film of the same name, directed by Byron Haskin and produced by George Pal, who had made Destination Moon.

Aside from a melodramatic subplot - the ship's commander almost kills himself and his crew because of his own moral objections to the mission - Conquest stays mostly faithful to the meticulously planned Mars voyages envisioned by von Braun and company.

The design of the giant, wheel-shaped space station, and the winged Mars ship, look much as they did in space artist Chesley Bonesetell's classic renderings. In one of the film's more hopeful touches, one of the astronauts succeeds in growing a seed from an Earthly flower in the red soil of Mars.

A decade after Conquest of Space, human beings had orbited the Earth, were planning trips to the moon, and were on the verge of exploring Mars with spacecraft.

In 1964, NASA launched Mariner 4, which was to take the first closeup pictures of Mars. That same year, George Pal and Byron Haskin made their second visit to the Red Planet with Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

This time, Paul Mantee portrays Christopher Draper, a lone astronaut marooned on Mars after an emergency landing. As the months pass, millions of miles from home, Draper struggles to stay alive - and maintain his sanity - with only his expedition's pet howler monkey for company.

Filmed in California's Death Valley, the Mars of Robinson Crusoe looks remarkably realistic, thanks to the orange sky added by special-effect teams -- a prescient touch, considering that the Viking landers didn't reveal the rusty hue of the real planet's sky until 1976.

The lonely frontier

Haskin uses the scenery to spectacular effect as a backdrop for Draper's ultimate isolation.

Human companionship finally arrives in the form of an escaped alien slave, Draper nicknames him "Friday" and teaches him to speak a few words of English. Soon the pair must flee a series of attacks by Friday's alien masters; they trek to the north polar ice cap, where they make contact with rescuers from Earth.

All told, Robinson Crusoe on Mars renders a believable portrait of a martian voyage. True, Haskin stretches the truth by making Mars more hospitable than it really is: in the movie, Draper does not need his space suit, and he is able to replenish his supply of breathing oxygen by heating local rocks. But even these departures, as well as the film's other sci-fi touches, are handled deftly enough to avoid breaking the sense of realism.

I'll never forget the Saturday night sometime around 1967 when Robinson Crusoe on Mars was broadcast on NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies. I was completely captivated by the film; I remember making replicas of the alien ships with paper plates.

About 30 years later, on the set of From the Earth to the Moon, I mentioned this to Tom Hanks, and he lit up: He'd seen the same broadcast.

Just five years after Robinson Crusoe on Mars, human beings first walked on the moon. NASA had hoped to gain support for a real Mars mission, but it never came. And even as the robotic Viking landers made their explorations of the martian surface in 1976, Mars all but disappeared from the big screen.

Aside from Peter Hyams' 1978 suspense film Capricorn One, which depicts a faked Mars mission, the Red Planet attracted little interest from filmmakers.

Until now. With talk of real Mars missions in the early decades of the new century, cinematic trips to the Red Planet have once again become fashionable. Once again, accuracy has taken a back seat to storytelling.

But maybe this new crop of Mars movies will help spur audiences to demand the real thing. And then today's 5-year-olds won't have to be satisfied with watching science fiction voyages.