George Pal

But first, please welcome the cast of Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show.

Michael Rennie was in the day the Earth stood still But he told us where we stand And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear Claude Rains was the invisible man Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong They got caught in a celluloid jam And when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride, I'm going to give you some

terrible thrills like those.

Science fiction, double feature, Dr. X will build a Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday.

And you already have a lot of the puppets for those characters, right? Like they did produce like tens of thousands of like replacement faces.

So like their, their style of animation like goes back to George Pal where they use 3d printers to change expressions by changing out face plates and stuff.

Whereas George Powell had to hand carve them out of wood.

So like is vastly more efficient, but so they could adapt with the fact that they have the sets or whatever.

And yeah, he apparently had the submarine from this until somebody made off with it.

We should talk a little bit, a few notes here about George Pal.

He was not born George Pal.

He was actually born Grigori Pal Marzenczak.

He was born in Hungary in 1908.

He basically got bored doing 2D cell animation and kind of like looked at the cigarette in his hand and was like, well, what if I animated this somehow? So this guy is...

really like foundational in stop motion animation.

And people who know, people who care about this kind of thing, they know George Pal.

But I just think his writing is so far ahead of its time in, in what he was doing, and I think it's so timeless now that s- still even to this day there, there's never been a definitive version of War of the Worlds actually made.

Like, people have at- Like the, the, the George Pal one, the, the Steven Spielberg one, like, they've, they've tried it, but no one can actually pinpoint it and they always do...

Like, the, the 1953 one's an allegory on the Cold War and the nuclear bombs.

The Steven Spielberg one is, is, uh, is based on, you know, a terror attack on 9/11.

That means he is one of the major guys who invents how science fiction cinema looks and how space looks in the popular imagination.

So George Pal has got the best guy in the business.

He can draw spaceships like no one else can.

He can do amazing matte paintings.

The other big effects guy on this is Gordon Jennings.

Gordon Jennings does all the flooding effects, all the miniatures and everything in this.

A couple of years after this, with George Paligan, he won the Oscar for War of the Worlds, which whatever else you think about that film, the effects are amazing.

He died sadly before he could collect it.

Yeah.

Are, are you familiar with the George Pal movie, The 1960 Time Machine?

No.

The Time Machine?

Mm.

You know, the George Pal film, in which the, you know, the Chesley Bonestell illustrations of the Moon have these much more jagged, dramatic peaks and things.

And, um, and that's what Kubrick wanted.

And apparently, when, you know, when the, when the Apollo 8 crew arrived in lunar orbit later in 1968, after 2001 was released, they were disappointed it wasn't as dramatic as it had been shown in-