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Robinson Crusoe On Mars (1964) - 12 corrections

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Genres: Sci-fi

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

Mistakes
Trivia
Corrections
Questions
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The aliens have interstellar travel capacity, use remote controlled mining equipment, and are in general very technically advanced. Why do they use inefficient (if expendable) humanoid slaves for mining? [Because humans aren't as inefficient as you make us out to be. There are some tasks that can't be finessed by a machine, and are in fact better done by hand. Besides which they are aliens, and don't necessarily have the same ideas and processes of thought that we do.]
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Several scenes used a fake monkey to protect the live one from injury. [Unless you can actually point out the scenes where the fake monkey is obvious, then this is not a true mistake nor even good trivia.]
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When Mars' two moons are shown in the scene after he eats the cooked sausages, they are both shown as spheres like our own moon, a "best guess" by the background painter. We now know from NASA photos that they are actually both jagged and irregular shaped moons. [Mariner 9 took the first close up shots of Mars' moons in 1971. The movie was made in 1964 using the best available data at the time; as such, this cannot be considered a mistake, unless you're seriously suggesting that they should have gone back, years later, and reshot the relevant scenes to take the new data into account.]
Edit Corrected by Rlvlk
Mantee knew the orbiting spacecraft was out of fuel before leaving it, but he was still trying to give the craft voice commands to land some forty minutes into the film. [The Shuttle lands without fuel - why can't the Martian Orbiter?]
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Paul Mantee had to blow up the orbiting Earth spacecraft as he watched it from the surface. Why could we hear it explode when it is outside the martian atmosphere and within a second after pressing the detonation button? [Because in the science fiction universe sound not only travels in a vacuum, it travels at the speed of light. If you doubt that, watch the Death Star explode - we see it from millions of kilometers away but we still hear the sound at the same time as we see the explosion, and all this in the vacuum of outer space. There are too many other examples to list here.]
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The trailer for this movie states that a trip to Mars is at a distance of 70 million "astro" miles. I have heard of nautical and statute miles but astro? [The trailer states it, the film doesn't. Not a movie mistake.]
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Mantee takes great strides in covering his tracks on Mars when he realizes he may not be alone because he find a buried human with shackles on the arms of the skeleton. He later sees a spaceship near the horizon landing, and he thinks it is from Earth to save him. The crafts lands in a zig-zag pattern; yet, he landed his craft straight down. The human skeleton near his cave plus the strange landing of the craft should have brought his guard up, but instead, he gets excited and heads over to the landed craft the next day. [He is alone on Mars, millions of kilometers from home. Realistically, he has no hope of rescue, and cannot survive for long in this hostile environment. He sees another space ship landing, and he goes a bit nuts. I would too. Character mistake.]
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Breathing the air on Mars was a big problem throughout the film because there was so little of it. With that in mind, why was Mona the Monkey never seen suffering like Paul Mantee? [Because Mona is a capuchin monkey and she needs about a twentieth of the oxygen a human needs. If a human can breathe the atmosphere with slight difficulty, as our hero can, a capuchin monkey would have no problems at all.]
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Meteroids do not glow in space and make rushing sounds as it did in this film. [In fact a 'Meteroid' (sic) is nothing like the thing we see - a 'meteoroid' is a piece of space debris that impacts on the Earth's surface. Whatever it was, it was superhot, perhaps from entering the Martian atmosphere, so it was glowing. As for the whooshing sound, there is sound in space in the sci-fi universe - it is artistic license.]
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Because the escape slave "Friday" has shackles on his arms, the aliens can home in on him and create great pain through the bracelets. The second half of the film, the aliens are constantly after him. Why are the aliens worried about an escaped slave on a hostile planet who won't live very long after they leave? [You are trying to second guess the motivations of a non-existent race of aliens from outer space. Perhaps losing a slave was a huge social disgrace? Maybe slaves were enormously valuable? Maybe this particular slave was wanted for committing some terrible crime (on their standards)? Maybe Princess Threena was secretly in love with him and wanted him back? Maybe he's a perfect organ donor match for King Throg's ailing son and heir? ]
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Mantee plants an American flag outside the cave he stays in. For a thin martian atmosphere, that flag was mighty robust. [This is science fiction, not reality. If the Martian atmosphere was represented accurately, Crusoe would be dead within seconds of landing.]
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There are a lot of scenes with fire burning on Mars. Even back in 1964, scientist knew that the martian atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide and fire doesn't burn in CO2. [This is science fiction, not reality. If the Martian atmosphere was represented accurately, Crusoe would be dead within seconds of landing.]
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