Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

One U.S. astronaut pitted against all the odds beyond this earth!

Stranded on Mars with only a monkey as a companion, an astronaut must figure out how to find oxygen, water, and food and companionship on the lifeless planet.

Date of release
1964-06-01
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (162)
Runtime
1h 50m
Genres
Science Fiction, Adventure
Director
Byron Haskin

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $1.2M
  • Based on: Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a 1964 American science fiction film directed by Byron Haskin and produced by Aubrey Schenck that stars Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, and Adam West. It is a science fiction retelling of the classic 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures and filmed in Technicolor and Techniscope.

Production

Exterior locations were shot mostly at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, California.

Special effects by Lawrence Butler and Academy Award-winning matte artist Albert Whitlock gave the film the benefit of "big-studio resources usually lacking in movies about outer space". Whitlock provided the matte paintings used in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, as he commented that "some scenes of spacecraft in motion were created with the kind of flat animation seen in official NASA promotional films".

Byron Haskin told interviewer Joe Adamson:

Robinson Crusoe on Mars was so obviously a director's tour de force, that there was nobody to interfere and tell me how to shoot ... I can't think of any other film I've made, unless it was The War of the Worlds, where I had such complete autonomy ... that I had as much genuine pleasure and fulfillment from as Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It was as fulfilling as cinematography had ever been.

With past experience producing special effects, Haskin even hand animated photos of the slave ships that terrorize the protagonist which were patterned after Japanese visual effects designer Albert Nozaki's Martian ships' design in Haskin's earlier film, War of the Worlds.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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