1964. Eleven years after director Byron Haskin directed The War of the Worlds he was back at work directing another science fiction classic - Robinson Crusoe on Mars. These two movies paved the way for many Saturday afternoon movie viewings as a kid on our old black and white television. I didn't know about Technicolor until I saw color televisions at my friends' houses before we finally got one in 1982.
But beyond my small corner of the world, Robinson Crusoe on Mars for me captures the beauty of science merged with science fiction. We didn't know much about the mysterious red planet at the time. Mariner 3 and 4 were launched in November 1964, and Mariner 4 sent back pictures nearly eight months later. The Soviets had beaten us there in 1962 with the Mars 1 probe, but we were all in the dark and learning everything we could at that time. When the Viking probes were launched in 1975, the goal was to put a lander on the surface and send back detailed information - pictures from the orbiter left above the planet and the landers themselves sent back an amazing amount of data and images that fueled a Martian fever here on Earth.
That fever of course wasn't new, with theories going back to the 17th and 18th century proposing that life existed along the "canals." Writers from H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs proposed grand civilizations wanting to cause trouble for us mere Earthlings. So by 1964, we knew little about what was actually there but had some experience with space flight and how to keep humans (and animals) alive in space for a time. Yuri Gagarin had orbited the globe in 1961 for the Soviets and John Glenn did the same in 1962 for the United States. Our budding space program was gearing up after John F Kennedy's famous speech in 1961 announcing the goal to get an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. We arrived in 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission.
So for writers John C. Higgins and Ib Melchior to take Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and set out to strand a man on Mars, they didn't go halfway. They researched. We knew there was minimal atmosphere on Mars from early probe results. We thought there might be water on Mars somewhere, courtesy of the polar ice caps. And if there's air and water, there might be life...
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