Trivia / The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

• Adored by the Network: FX loves this movie.
• Backed by the Pentagon: The Army refused to cooperate after reading the script. The National Guard had no such qualms and gladly offered their cooperation.
• Completely Different Title: In Sweden, the film was called "Mannen från Mars", meaning "The Man from Mars".
• Deleted Scene: There was a scene which was cut, in which Klaatu is taken to a police station along with other men who were suspected of being the "space man". Klaatu admits that he has no identification, and is nearly taken to another area where eyewitnesses would be able to identify him. Fortunately for him, the military intervenes because Professor Barnhardt is asking to see "Mr. Carpenter", and Barnhardt's high standing with the government trumps the police department's procedures. This explains why Klaatu is taken from the boarding house by a government agent (Mr. Brady) who works with the police, but is then seen entering Barnhardt's home accompanied by an army captain. In reality, the cut scene would have tied all of this together, but Robert Wise felt that it disrupted the flow of the film, and that the audience wanted to see the meeting between Klaatu and Barnhardt more than they needed to see the scene in which Klaatu narrowly avoids being identified.
• Executive Meddling: Klaatu was initially supposed to survive the barrage of bullets via the Applied Phlebotinum that brought him back to temporary life in the final cut to reinforce his God-like powers. Unfortunately the censors didn't like the ending, suggesting it was too left-wing of a movie, forcing the line, "That power is reserved for the Almighty Spirit."
• He Also Did: Frank Lloyd Wright helped out with the design of the spaceship's interior.
• Science Marches On: There's a news report which casually states the most likely candidates for Klaatu's homeworld are Venus and Mars because they are the most likely planets to be capable of supporting life. In 1951 this would have made sense as it was suspected that Venus could be similar to Earth, and Mars had long been suspected as a possible candidate for life. We now know that the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus makes it too hot to support anything let alone a species intelligent enough to develop interplanetary travel, and so far there has been no solid evidence of life on Mars and most will agree that if there is anything at all, it probably won't be much more than bacteria. In fact since then scientists have actually been shifting focus even further out towards various Moons among the Jovian bodies (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) as more likely candidates for extra-terrestrial life.
• Shrug of God: There have been several contradicting opinions by the actors and other people involved as to a complete translation of Klaatu Barada Nikto, the phrase used to stop Gort's rampage. Klaatu, obviously, is the protagonist of the movie, and one can assume the other two words are something important in his language. Robert Wise, the film's director, related a story he had with Edmund North, the screenplay writer, saying North told him, "Well, it's just something I kind of cooked up. I thought it sounded good."
• Stillborn Franchise: In 1981, Fox hired Ray Bradbury to write a sequel for the film. It was called The Day The Earth Stood Still II: The Evening of the Second Day and was set starting on Christmas Eve. The script had Klaatu's daughter, Klaata, coming to Earth 30 years after the original film to judge Earth's progress. She meets and develops a romantic storyline with a NASA engineer named Chris Atkins, and after chasing her a bit, he learns of her mission and that she intends to create a series of larger and larger disappearances until eventually, all the world's oil disappears. She gives Chris a box that's said to be Gort's heart, although no mention is made of where the rest of him went. She tells him that if humans fulfill the assignments she's giving them within 20 years, he can put the box in his ship and it will bring him to her and they can be together.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The role of Klaatu was originally offered to Claude Rains, who wanted to accept it, but had to decline because of a prior commitment on Broadway. It was then offered to Spencer Tracy, who "didn't want to play second fiddle to a damn robot". Basil Rathbone was also considered.
  • Anne Baxter was originally cast as Helen Benson.
  • Jack Palance was considered for Gort.

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