Forbidden Planet's robot swallowed almost 7 per cent of the film's budget
Robby the Robot cost MGM roughly 125,000 dollars, nearly 7 per cent of the 1.9 million dollar budget for Forbidden Planet. The 1956 film earned that splurge back in influence: it was the first to send humans across the stars in a faster-than-light ship of their own making, and the first set wholly on a planet around another star.
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox from a Cyril Hume script, the film stars Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen. In the 23rd century the starship C-57D, commanded by John J. Adams, reaches Altair IV to learn what became of the Bellerophon, an expedition sent 20 years earlier. Only the scientist Dr. Edward Morbius and his daughter Altaira remain; everyone else from that mission was picked off by an invisible force.
Morbius has been studying the Krell, an advanced race that vanished in one night 200,000 years ago, leaving a colossal underground machine fed by 9,208 thermonuclear reactors. It could turn thought into matter anywhere on the planet, but it also set loose the Krell's subconscious urges, the famous monsters from the id. The creature stalking the visitors springs from Morbius's own buried self, and Robby, built never to kill a human, refuses to attack it. Critics have long read the story as The Tempest relocated to space.
Everything was shot indoors on MGM's Culver City lot, with the alien exteriors conjured from sets, effects and matte paintings. A mock-up of about three-quarters of the ship suggested a vessel 170 feet wide, ringed by a painted desert cyclorama that filled an entire sound stage. Disney lent animator Joshua Meador to create the Id Monster, and a close look reveals a small goatee like Morbius's. Filming ran from April 18 to late May 1955.
An early 1952 draft called Fatal Planet placed the action on Mercury in 1976. The finished film had its first screenings on March 3 and 4, 1956, at a science fiction gathering in Charlotte, North Carolina, earned an Academy Award nomination for its effects, and turned a profit of 210,000 dollars. Robby went on to star in The Invisible Boy, and in 2013 the Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry.
Source: Forbidden Planet
