>**Altaira Morbius**: Where have you been? I've beamed and beamed.
**Robby**: Sorry, miss. I was giving myself an oil-job.
**Altaira Morbius**: Robby, I must have a new dress, right away.
**Robby**: AgAiN?
**Altaira Morbius**: Oh, but this one must be different! Absolutely nothing must show - below, above or through.
**Robby**: Radiation-proof?
**Altaira Morbius**: No, just eye-proof will do.
**Robby**: Thick and heavy?
**Altaira Morbius**: Oh, no, Robby. It must be the loveliest, softest thing you've ever made for me, and fit in all the right places, with lots and lots of star sapphires.
**Robby**: Star sapphires take a week to crystallize properly. Would diamonds or emeralds do?
**Altaira Morbius**: Well, if they're large enough.

==The only interestingly written exchange in the whole film==

It starts out with some indecipherable technobabble and continues to give the impression of being incompetent nonsense, but then it comes out of nowhere with some truly impressive production and set design, along with some antiquated and arrested developmentally stagnant sexual politics that shows how infantalized we were in the 1950s, and how much we continue to be, proceeding from that. I don't know if it had a rating at the time, but given it was Disney, I'm actually surprised at how preoccupied with sex, and how aggressively provocative* some of the subtext is—though, again, in a decidedly immature mode. Also, if I understood the opening exposition, they thought it would take until the end of the 21st century for humans to land on the moon... just ten years before it happened. But hey, we had no idea when AGI would be developed 15 years ago, and we may be there by Christmas.

The three deaths near the end of the film are so stupid that I felt them completely deserved. Apparently ray guns are like water hoses, and you need to get closer to really give it to 'em, or so they felt.

However, once it decides to give up its secrets, it surprises with some genuinely interesting and high concept science fiction that manages to almost not be behind the times of actual SF literature (of the 1950s). The dialogue never trips the needle above "serviceable", though, and it gets pretty terrible in the finale. The drama and acting is straight out of the 1930s, as is the anti-musical, experimental Therminvox "score", and the directing lifeless. The kissing is pretty good for awkward 1950s post-puritans, though, especially as everybody is pretty okay to look at.

Actually, the whole thing has a pretty 1930s pedigree, aside from the production design. I say that, but then I think about (the production design of) Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_. Now there's a moving science fiction action drama. (J/K) Oh wait, I was thinking of ~~Osamu Tezuka's~~ Rintaro's _Metropolis_. Holy snot, I love that movie. Same basic concept, but that (those) films are a lot more expansive and have a greater breadth of spectacle, and—at least the latter—depth of character. Seriously, that film made me appreciate Louis Armstrong while making me cry like someone had just told me my childhood love had just died.
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