Saturday Morning

9:00 am: Pinocchio in Outer Space

Written by Fred Ladd and Norm Prescott who later went on to introduce America to Japanese animation, this film was animated in Belgium and involves Pinocchio taking a trip to mars to stop a giant space whale. Extremely silly, it’s the sort of thing you and your kids should be sitting down to watch together on Saturday morning.
16mm, 1 hr. 11 min

Preceded by Fred Ladd and Osamu Tesuka’s short animated version of Beauty and the Beast, a nicely done bit of early Japanese animation.
16mm, 12 min.

10:30 am: Bamboo Saucer

This cold-war-era thriller involves a flying saucer hidden in a Red Chinese village and the American and Soviet teams that converge on it and find they have to work together to complete their missions. It’s dated today, but it’s surprisingly well produced and still holds up very well.
16mm, 1 hr, 40. min. Eastman LPP Color.

Preceded by three Roger Ramjet cartoons of extreme silliness.
16mm, 18 min.

 

Saturday Afternoon

12:30 pm: SF Films to See

PANEL: What are the essential SF films you MUST see before you’re abducted by aliens or reincarnated? What makes them so important?

1:30 pm: Last Battlestar

PANEL: After the long hard journey it seems the refugees of the Colonial fleet had finally come to journey’s end—or have they? With only a few episodes left, there are still several unanswered questions.

2:30 pm: NASA Documentaries

This year we’re stacking two of them together, with Stepping Stones To Space, a historical look at rocket propulsion from ancient China to Apollo, followed by SIR-A, showing the first images from the Shuttle Imaging Radar, a side-looking radar system intended to view the earth’s surface. Presented with the assistance of the film archives at Marshall Space Flight Center
16mm, Approximately 30 minutes

3:00 pm: Astro-Nut Cartoons

Astro-Nut is a short green being from outer space who is always trying to help out his friend Oscar. Unfortunately his help is not always very helpful. We’ll be showing a sequence of cartoons including Proton Pulsator, Martian Recipe, and whatever else comes to the top of the pile.
16mm. Approximately 30 minutes.

3:30 pm: Customs and Immigration

Every year we make a point to run some sort of avant-garde film that stretches people’s idea of what a movie should be, and this year we have picked a film by J. Hoberman, the long-standing film critic of the Village Voice. This film combines new and stock footage with a disconcertingly eerie soundtrack to describe a half-dozen risky new ways for visitors to America to go native.
16mm, 34 min. Color By DuArt

Preceded by History of the Automobile, a short film describing the evolution of transportation in a parallel universe.
16mm, 6 min.

4:30 pm: Space Sentinels—Space Giants

Hal Sutherland’s action animation show involve three Greek gods transplanted into the future where they do good and battle evil. We’re showing an episode called Space Giants in which they battle evil giants. Everything is cut and dried and the good guys always win, and that’s the way it should be.
16mm, 30 min

5:00 pm: Repo: the Genetic Opera

This is a fantasy horror musical about a world in which medical insurance is nonexistent and where if you take out a loan for an organ transplant, you’d better make sure you can pay it. Cindy says, “Take painkillers first.” It’s silly, it’s horrible, it’s a musical with real opera singing, Anthony Stewart Head, and Paris Hilton. How can you go wrong?
35mm, 1 hr. 38 min

Preceded by History of the Automobile, a short film describing the evolution of transportation in a parallel universe.
16mm, 6 min.

 

Saturday Evening

7:00 pm: Rhapsody of Steel

Former Disney animator John Sutherland’s 1959 classic details the history of steel from the first meteor to strike the earth to the first manned rocket to leave it. Time Magazine called Sutherland a “slick entertainer and painless pedagogue.” Our print is in excellent condition with beautiful color.
35mm Technicolor Dye-Transfer, 23 min.

7:30 pm: Next Door

A sobering story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., about what happens when an imaginative young boy is left alone with nothing but a television set, a radio, and a real life drama next door. Directed for WGBH in 1976 by local filmmaker Andrew Silver with lighting by the late Minor White.
16mm, 28 min.

8:00 pm: This Island Earth

This film is probably best known for having been made fun of by Mystery Science Theater 3000, but in fact it’s one of the more thoughtful SF films of the fifties, with shifting alliances, evil invasion plots, and Earth scientists caught in-between.
35mm Cinemascope, 1 hr. 27 min. Color by Technicolor

9:30 pm: Westworld

During Michael Crichton’s long life, he wrote a large number of screenplays that all centered around technology going terribly wrong but ingenious humans managing to overcome it. Perhaps the best film he ever made on that theme was Westworld, and with his recent death we’d like to comemmorate his work. Delos is the vacation of the future, today. At Delos you get your choice of the vacation you want, but you probably haven’t bargained for Yul Brynner as a murderously malfunctioning robot. This film is in the process of being remade; see the original before it’s too late.
16mm, 1 hr. 28 min

11:00 pm: Battlestar Galactica

It has come to our attention that many members of the younger generation do not realize just how bad the original Battlestar Galactica was. Therefore in conjunction with the Institute For Very Bad Cinema, we are presenting the original theatrical film released to coincide with the original television series. Although beautifully photographed, the wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and ludicrous plot make this a film to be laughed at and we invite you to come and do just that. This film has previously been used by the San Bernardino poison control center to induce vomiting.
35mm, 2 hr. 28 min. Presented in original Sensurround.