Rocketship X-M

"In tandem with Destination Moon, Kurt Neumann's Rocketship X-M introduced the science fiction genre to postwar American cinema. And as an independently made feature, Rocketship X-M came to television very early, which helped it become one of the most familiar and popular of all science fiction films among baby boomers. It appeared on laserdisc in the late-'80s in a mediocre transfer. The DVD features a crystalline transfer of a very sharp 35 mm print and an even cleaner audio track, all the better with which to appreciate the best moments of the soundtrack by composer/arranger Ferde Grofe. The disc opens automatically to an easy-to-navigate menu, offering chapter breaks and the original trailer. The latter is fascinating in its attempt to present the story of an expedition to the moon that ends up on Mars as something potentially real and immediate circa 1950, rather than as pure fantasy. The trailer is also notable for the presence of the original take-off shots from the film, depicting a German V-2, which have been replaced with updated material in the film itself; and for the fact that it doesn't reveal much of the film's second half, so that audiences were truly surprised by what they saw. The presence of legitimate actors, including John Emery, Noah Beery Jr., Osa Massen, and Lloyd Bridges, in a science fiction movie, years before it was an established genre, must also have been beguiling at the time. In view of its status as a 50th anniversary edition, there's surprisingly little that's special in this release beyond the clean transfer and the presence of the trailer. Indeed, in contrast to some of the decidedly lesser films in the very same group of movies (The Wade Williams Collection) -- including Missile to the Moon and Frankenstein's Daughter -- this title, one of the prizes of the collection, gets rather unimpressive annotation compared to the packaging of those throwaway features. Additionally, the dozen chapters into which the movie is broken down are the minimum effective number in terms of dividing the key sections of the film. Overall, it's a decent disc and an improvement over other editions of the movie, but otherwise relatively unexceptional."