Destination Moon

During the moonwalk, studio lights are seen reflected in the glass visors of the astronauts' helmets.

During the early scenes in zero-gravity, some of the wires are visible.

Although the characters mention that radio signals take 3 seconds to travel between the earth and the moon, earth replies arrive almost instantaneously during conversations with the men on the moon.

In the one scene a rocket is seen crashing, but remains partially intact.

Rockets are built in a way that the fuel inside the fuel cells acts as a structural support.

So when a rocket crashes there is not much left to see.

When first watching this film, it appears as though the crew looks through the round port that leads into the airlock to view the Earth outside the ship.

This looks like a continuity error, but it is not - the confusion comes from the elaborate "special effect" of weightlessness generated with a rotating set and magnetic boots.

The crew was squatting on the "wall" of the cabin and looking "out" through a round porthole on the outer wall of the ship, not down through the floor.

There is indeed a round airlock door that leads down into a lower cabin where the spacesuits are kept, but it is not the same round port they looked through to see outside.

The rotated perspective, the magnetic shoe use, and the two round windows causes this common misconception.

A radio announcer explains, "It takes three seconds.

for radio waves to travel between the Earth and Moon.

" In fact it's 1.

3 sec each way, but the round-trip causes delays of almost 3 sec in conversation, which probably is what the announcer meant.

When the crew of the ship are pushed into their seats by G forces, distorting their faces, their shirt collars show no effects.

They should have been flattened as well.

When the astronauts emerge from the hatch during their spacewalk to repair the antenna, the shadow of one of the film crew can be seen on the open hatch door, helping push the cast members out onto the surface of the "ship".

When Cargraves and Thayer are watching the launch of the satellite at the beginning, Cargraves tells the General, "They'll break your necks to get you back and raise your rank when they see what this'll do.

" Clearly, actor Warner Anderson (Cargraves) misspoke his line, which obviously should have been, "They'll break their necks.

" When Cargraves and Thayer are watching the launch of the satellite at the beginning, they are looking out a window while facing away from the camera.

Then, in one continuous take, they turn around to face the camera and walk out of the building to look at the wreckage that is now on the opposite side of the building they were in.

The 1950s can be looked back upon as something of a golden age for science fiction films. Both large and low budget films dealt with everything from giant monsters to space exploration, in the latter's case years before it became a fact of life.

Independently made by George Pal with test failures and government backing collapsing, rocket scientists receive aid from an aircraft magnate (John Archer), and human space travel begins. The first spacecraft to the moon experiences a complex landing and using too much fuel during descent provide excitement in this Technicolor science fiction feature.

Considering this movie was made seven years BEFORE Sputnik it was very accurate in it's telling of the first lunar landing. Unlike many si fi made in the '50s, there were no" Moon men" and the astronauts actually knew there was no oxygen on the moon.

DESTINATION MOON is a landmark science fiction film that nowadays would be seen as science fact. It tells of a trip to the moon a good twenty years before the event happened in real life, so listening to all the theories play out and watching as the astronauts head off into space makes for very interesting viewing – in most aspects the technicalities are spot on.

This cool Scifi film has as main figures, the prestigious George Pal as main producer and the notorious fantasy writer Robert Henlein as one of its screenwriters, nevertheless the sets and production design are dated today . It deals with a team of expert scientists : John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, Dick Wesson, prepare a rocket to go the moon.

DESTINATION MOON (1950) was produced by the legendary George Pal (see his WWW.IMDb.

Destination Moon (1950), twenty years before the first actual moon landing, manages to effectively draw the audience's attention to the dangers involved with manned space exploration, as well as with the technical difficulties with travelling to, landing on and safely returning from literally another world.With almost 70 years' hindsight, we can pick apart some of the technical aspects of the film and its degree of accuracy, but there are many things the film got fairly (uncannily?

Interestingly, the opening title sequence looks vaguely familiar, let's see, could it be that George Lucas could have 'borrowed' the receding prologue sequence in Star Wars from Destination Moon? Certainly this is no coincidence and a testament that there is nothing new under the sun...

The story centers on efforts to get to the moon. The film's intent seems to be to explain space travel in a realistic, scientifically accurate way that can be understood by ordinary people.