After turning themselves into cartoons last episode, Sean and Cody make a side trip to a mostly fictional version of the red planet on their way back to the real world. In the 1964 space adventure Robinson Crusoe on Mars, white bread astronaut Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) and the monkey he loves crash-land on the titular planet to find the basic tourist amenities such as oxygen, water and food haven’t been restocked in several million years. With only a mid-60s tape deck, an Air Force surplus flight suit and a couple of tubes of turkey paste, can Draper find a way to survive long enough for Lyndon Johnson’s NASA to come rescue him? The environmental issues covered in this episode center around humans’ changing conceptions of conditions on Mars, with surprise cameos by our old friends settler colonialism and the white savior, who we can’t seem to get rid of even 200 million miles from Earth.

What did scientists know or think they knew about what Mars was really like at the time they made this film? Can liquid water exist there or can’t it? What are Mars’s polar ice caps made of? Why did some astronomers, including especially Percival Lowell, believe that the “canals” of Mars were works of engineering created by an alien species? How was the mission of the Mariner space probe in 1965 a huge bummer for filmmakers and conceptual artists who got paid for producing “Mars porn” for science magazines? What poor sap in the costume department on this film had to sew a fur loincloth for a monkey? Is Adam West the only true Batman? Who was that mid-1950s Disney narrator who sounded suspiciously like Orson Welles? Is there no escape from racist stereotyping anywhere in the universe? All these questions are sucking air out of the rocks in this, the first part of a double header on Green Screen centered around Mars, together with the next episode on The Martian.

Where you can find Robinson Crusoe on Mars: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/robinson-crusoe-on-mars

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058530/
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/robinson-crusoe-on-mars/

Next Movie Up: The Martian (2015)

Additional Materials About This Episode