The Saucermen (Earth vs The Flying Saucers) vs The Mysterians
Table of Contents
So, What’s The Theme Here?
Earth invasion forces from the 1950’s.
Dying, decrepit races heavily inspired by the Martians from The War of Worlds who make one final stab at survival at humanity’s expense and fail due to human grit and ingenuity.
Guys that should have knocked first on their interplanetary neighbor’s door.
Oh, and their films make a really good double feature.
The Saucermen
Quick note before we go any further–the alien invaders in Earth VS The Flying Saucers are not called Saucermen. They aren’t called anything. That was by design. the aliens were meant to be mysterious and inscrutable because they embodied the inscrutability of the cosmos defying man’s understanding. They were faceless, in some cases formless, and they did not have a name. They don’t even tell mankind where they’re from other than “another solar system.” I gave them the name Saucermen so I could have some way of referring to them throughout this article and also because I think the name is neat.
The 2008 comic books by Bluewater comics give the Saucermen the name “The Sons of Aberann,” but I’m not a fan of the comic, and find that it deviated too much from the source material. So Saucermen it is then.
Oh yeah, there was an Earth VS The Flying Saucers comic. Bluewater published a lot of comics based on Ray Harryhausen films and ideas. They turned Ray’s idea for a fourth Sinbad film set of Mars into Sinbad: Rogue of Mars and made a sequel to Clash of the Titans called Wrath of the Titans where they made my Harryhausen fanboy heart skip a beat by revealing that Clash of the Titans and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad take place in the same universe and that the Cyclops from Seventh Voyage came from Perseus’ time.
But praises for Bluewater aside, I didn’t like their take on Earth vs The Flying Saucers. At all.
Their Earth Vs The Flying Saucers comic was called The Flying Saucers VS The Earth and was pitched as a retelling of the events of the film but form the aliens’ point of view…which sounds interesting, but let me remind you that the point of the aliens was that they were supposed to be inscrutable. If all they did was flesh out the “Sons of Aberann,” I wouldn’t have a problem with the comic, but they took a lot of liberties and made a lot of weird decisions. I usually like weird creative decisions, but not in this case.
I won’t go into the details as this is about the film, not the comic, but tldr, I’m calling them Saucermen, not the Sons of Aberann.
And now for our feature presentation…
Every American studio in the 1950’s had one, but just one, sci-fi film that they put the talent and budget behind to make shine. It was strange. It was as if the studios had all made up their mind about sci-fi being primarily the genre of B-movies and matinee hokeyness, the genre of The 50 Foot Woman and It Conquered the World, the genre of Roger Corman and Bert I Gordon, and yet they still wanted to leave their mark on the genre. They wanted to plant their flag in science fiction and make one, just one, film to put in their trophy case so they could say “We had the ability to put a wild sci-fi concept on screen and make it credible–and we did so.”
For 20th Century Fox, their sci-fi trophy film was The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), for Paramount, it was War of Worlds (1953), for Warner Bros, it was Them! (1954), for Disney, it was 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), for Universal Pictures, it was This Island Earth (1955), for MGM, it was Forbidden Planet (1956), and for Columbia Pictures, it was Earth VS The Flying Saucers (1956).
Earth VS The Flying Saucers was said to be inspired by the 1953 conspiracy theory book Flying Saucers From Outer Space by Major Donald Keyhoe, and indeed it was inspired by Flying Saucers From Outer Space–in the same way The Blair Witch Project was inspired by true events.
That is to say, it wasn’t inspired by Flying Saucers From Outer Space at all.
The real inspiration was War of Worlds, both the classic HG Wells book and the Paramount adaptation.
See if this sounds familiar–a dying race of aliens from a dead world looks to invade Earth’s resources for their salvation. They are physically weak and decrepit, but their technology makes up for it. The aliens are cruel, cold, and calculating. They will harvest the Earth over the bodies of mankind. Mankind tries to fight back, but they get curbstomped harder than Fetterman on a debate stage. But mankind manages to endure and in the final hour pull off a win with the help of a last-second plot device.
It’s very likely that Columbia conceived of Earth VS The Flying Saucers as their version of Paramount’s War of Worlds and forced a connection to Keyhoe’s conspiracy book in order to distance themselves from the source material. “No, we aren’t based in Well! We’re based in the writings of Major Keyhoe!”
God, what a name. Major Keyhoe. That doesn’t sound real, but it is.
Columbia probably also forced the connection to cash in on the trendy saucer paranoia of the 50’s. “Ohhhhh this film is inspired by real conspiracy theories, spooky! Future events such as these will effect you in the future! Keep watching the skies!”
Columbia wasn’t able to get Paramount’s budget, so they weren’t able to release it in glorious technicolor like War of Worlds, but they were able to get special effects god Ray Harryhausen, and he did a phenomenal job. The scenes of the saucers crashing around Washington DC are some of the most iconic scenes in cinema history.
I know what you might be thinking–“Harryhausen did stop-motion models, that was his thing, but how much of an effect could he have had on saucer models? There’s not a lot of moving parts.” But do you want to know the mark of a great animator? It’s when they can take very little and produce a lot, and that’s exactly what Ray did. The way the saucers’ undersides rotate, the way they fly in tight formations, the way they blow apart buildings into debris, the ripple glass effect of their force curtains, everything they do communicates what the mysterious command voice of the Saucermen says about them–“Speed, maneuverability, and force.”
I quite like the Saucermen from a design standpoint. They manage to embody the two prominent phobias of the 50’s–spies and science–in a way other monsters couldn’t. They spy on humanity through tiny foo fighter balls of light–that’s the fear of covert surveillance. They suck memories out of their captives and leave them vegetables–that’s the fear of ideological subversion. The Saucermen embody fears of terrestrial foes, but also fears of cosmic inscrutability. They don’t have names. They don’t have faces. Their leader, if it even if their leader, is a voice projected from a big crystal. They don’t even have histories. The closest we get to backstory is the scary command voice mentioning in passing that the Saucermen are the last survivors of a disintegrated solar system–that’s right. They didn’t come from a planet that blew up, or even a solar system that blew up, they came from a solar system that disintegrated–which raises more questions than it answers in the best way. I love it when stories aren’t afraid to have mysteries. How did their solar system disintegrate? Did they have a space war? If so, then who? Are their opponents still out there? Did their sun just blow up from age? Did they accidentally blow up the sun by trying to harvest energy form it? It’s fun to speculate. The mystery of the Saucerman reminds me of what Harlan Ellison said about Forbidden Planet and how it was a great film, such a great film that he wanted to make a sequel for it exploring what became of the Krell race. The movie suggested much about the Krell, explained very little, and it fired Ellison’s imagination.
I really miss Harlan Ellison…
It’s easy to say “Well, Earth VS The Flying Saucers is just Columbia’s version of War of Worlds,” but Earth VS the Flying Saucers modernized the Martians of Wells for the 50’s noosphere in a way the direct adaptation couldn’t. I highly recommend watching it for that reason.
Now, lets spare a few words on the plot:
America’s Skyhook rocketry program is crashing and burning–literally. Its rockets are being shot down and the brass figures its sabotage. The truth is far worse. Aliens are responsible. They land near a military base and attempt to communicate, but the message is confusing and garbled–remember that “inscrutible cosmos” theme? Then as a unit of Saucermen land and approach, a soldier opens fire and does the Klaatu thing, but the Saucermen don’t do the Gort thing in retaliation and only vaporize the guns, oh no. The soldiers get mowed down in glorious 50’s special effects.
God I love how vaporization beams were depicted where an aura surrounds you and you vanish. It is the best. I hate that plasma softballs ended up becoming the default sci-fi death ray in pop culture because of Star Wars. Phasers>>>>>blasters any day of the week.
The lead of the film, Dr. Marvin, gets taken aboard one of the saucers along with his token girlfriend and a few military types so that the aliens can explain what’s going on. They own up to blowing up the Skyhook rockets, explaining that they assumed they were weapons aimed their way and not primitive scouting tools. They also explain that the garbled message was on them–they didn’t accurate compensate for time differential between themselves and beings outside the saucers.
Yeah, the time differential. You see, the saucers fly by creating a magnetic field which nullifies gravity and a side effect of this field is that time moves slower inside the saucers. Dr. Marvin and friends are very surprised when they find that their watches have stopped–and they’re even more surprised to find that their hearts aren’t beating anymore, but this is all because of the time differential. Everything on a saucer takes place between the ticks of clock and the beats of a heart.
I love the time differential bit detail, it’s so weird and so understated, its mentioned in a single scene and never comes up again, but it goes some ways to separating the Saucermen from humanity and making them seem truly alien. They’re so outside and beyond man’s understanding that not only do they not share our planet, they don’t share our time.
So it seems we got a The Day The Earth Stood Still case on our hands. The Saucermen no doubt wish to be friends and help humanity. This was all a big misunderstanding. There will be peace in our time.
Except no, and Columbia knew exactly what they were doing here in subverting the audience expectations The Day The Earth Stood Still created half a decade ago. The aliens are not nice. They produce Dr. Marvin’s girlfriend’s father, an abducted military man, and reveal that after having his memories sucked by their Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank that his mind is gone and to prove his memories now belong to them, they tell his daughter information only she would know…and they use his voice.
God, that’s evil.
Then they summon a saucer from behind the moon to fly to Earth in 4 seconds and destroy a battleship–and all 300 men aboard. They did this just to prove that mankind can’t possibly challenge their might, but they aren’t interested in a war. They’re interested in an occupation. They task Dr. Marvin’s group with informing the world making arrangements with world leaders to negotiate the inevitable occupation. Earth and earthlings belong to the Saucermen, the ink just needs to dry.
Of course, the puny humans aren’t going to go down without a fight. Dr. Marvin proves that the ingenuity and intellect of mankind can stand up to the cosmos by inventing a sonic cannon that completely cuts the internal power of a saucer, forcing it to crash. Dr. Marvin races against time to mass produce his sonic cannon for a final showdown in Washington DC–one of the coolest action scenes in sci-fi history with saucers crashing into the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the reflection pool, all over the place. It’s a lot of fun.
Come on, admit it, every American secretly wants to watch Washington burn. General approval for the government hasn’t topped 50% since what, FDR? And FDR was pure evil.
Go watch Earth VS The Flying Saucers. I highly recommend it. It is quintessential 50’s sci-fi, every bit as crucial to the genre as The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet. Sure, the characters may be lacking in development–I had to look up Dr. Marvin’s name while writing this article and as for his girlfriend, forget it, not even her mother remembers her name, but this isn’t a story about characters. This is a story about Earth and flying saucers and how human ingenuity wars with the great unknown of space. This is a story exorcising the psychic demons of a culture. This is an atom age culture hero vs chaos dragon kind of story. And you want to know what I think is the best part? It is paced so well. So many sci-fi films from the atom age drag, and drag, and drag, and have maybe 3 minutes of things worth watching out of an hour and 30 minutes of film. Earth VS The Flying Saucers doesn’t drag. It comfortably glides from cool set piece to cool set piece, from battles on the ground to interrogations in the air to chaos in Washington. It’s a fun ride all throughout.
Flying Saucers
As you would expect, the flying saucers are the backbone of the Saucerman invasion force. They are no only their principle means of offense, defense, and transportation, but they’re the Saucermen’s homes. They do not have a mothership or base. The Saucermen are like the Mongol hordes of old but with saucers instead of horses.
The saucers fly by manipulating gravity which also gives them a very strange and very cool affect–time is slowed on the inside. When humans are brought aboard, they’re surprised to find that that their watches have stopped and then they’re even more surprised to find that their hearts have stopped. This is because the same gravity manipulation the saucers use to hover creates an environment of slow time inside the saucer. Minutes pass within the span of a single heartbeat or second.
This provides many advantages. Imagine you’re fighting someone and what seems to be minutes to you is experienced by them as seconds. Imagine being able to put in minutes worth of planning and calculating between seconds. Say a second is only a single minute to you. For every half minute of brainwork your opponent gets to put in, you get to put in a whole half hour.
Now imagine what a day of preparation for your opponent gives you.
The saucers are amassed around the moon, but this creates no great difficulty in getting to Earth. In four seconds, one flew from behind the moon to a battleship on Earth and blew it up with one blast of its beam weapon.
This beam weapon’s effect, for whatever reason, seems to vary based on the size of the target. Small targets, such as people, tanks, trucks, and artillery batteries, are frozen in place as a blueish green aura waxes around them. This aura vaporizes the target, leaving only a wisp of smoke behind. Larger targets such as battleships and buildings react as if they’ve been hit by powerful, but conventional, explosives.
An example of the vaporization effect:
Why smaller targets get vaporized and larger targets get blasted isn’t clear. Perhaps its a matter of matter? It’s possible that targets below a certain threshold of mass are “caught” in some kind of particle net that then creates intense temperatures over a small area, boiling the target while keeping unintentional damage to a minimum. Targets above a certain threshold of mass “slip the net” and the beam instead impacts them with explosive kinetic energy.
Regardless of how you make sense of the fictitious alien technology, its certainly powerful if it can vaporize people. Believe it or not, vaporizing people takes a lot more heat than vaporizing steel weapons. Humans are about 20 percent carbon and carbon has a very high boiling point–4,827 degrees Celsius. Compare this to steel which has a boiling point of just 1,370 degrees Celsius. To boil carbon, you need temperature nearing that of the center of the Earth (5,200 degrees Celsius).
Saucerman saucers aren’t just powerful, they’re durable. Nothing in mankind’s arsenal so much as makes a dent against the, Bullets, rockets, shells, they do nothing. While a nuke was never used directly on one, Dr. Marvin felt like nukes didn’t have a chance of working.
The saucers also function as infantry support by projecting energy curtains as you can see below:
These energy curtains not only make everything below the saucers look like they’re shot in day-for-night, they also protect everything below them with an impenetrable wall of force that not even artillery shells can penetrate. Though defensive in nature, these energy curtains have offensive applications as capturing weapons and area denial weapons.
For being the definitive flying saucers of filmland, the saucers of Earth VS The Flying Saucers don’t disappoint. If you thought that maybe all they could do was fly and shoot lasers, boy were you wrong!
Ground Troops
I’ve heard some disparaging remarks about the spacesuits in Earth VS The Flying Saucers. “Yeah, the saucers were cool, but the suits were goofy looking.”
No, you absolute plebs, the suits were amazing. Every element of the designed worked to convey something about the Saucermen. It’s a good thing they look like gingerbread men from Hell, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The suits are uniformly drab and plain to suggest the uniformity of their culture. Saucermen don’t have social divisions. The voice that communicates to the human cast might be a “leader,” but this is speculative.
The suits are bulky and its wearers waddle instead of walk because they’re first and foremost life support systems. Human scientists are shocked when they come across a dead Saucerman and find that he, armor and all, is as light as a feather–such is the extent of their physiological degeneration. If you took one of the Saucermen out of their suits they would die. The suits are not warsuits. They aren’t T51-b power armor from Fallout. They’re designed for every-day function. They don’t need warsuits. Their saucers do all war work for them.
It’s worth repeating–without the suits, the Saucermen die. When they took a helmet off a dead one, it quickly faded away into nothing. That could either be due to some sort of failsafe within the suit to prevent enemies from getting biological samples and using them to create a bioweapon or it could be that the Saucermen are just that weak without their suits. It may be that they’re so puny that without their suits they just don’t exist anymore like dadman and momman. If so, they’re probably the weakest alien species in all of fiction on a purely physiological basis.
The suits don’t have hands to show that their culture has progressed past the need for manual labor or really manual anything. The Saucermen have mastered gravity to the point they can slow down time and move between stars. They need to lift things like people in 1st world, non-communist countries need to get water from wells.
The helmets are enormous because they enhance the visual and auditory senses of the wearer both to compensate for naturally degenerated senses and to improve upon nature. When Dr. Marvin tried a helmet on, he remarked that it “made him Superman” and allowed him to see across a variety of visions. It also allowed him to perfectly hear what was happening a room over.
I don’t want to hear anything about the suits looking goofy. They look cool…though in terms of defensive protection, they leave a lot to be desired.
Though the suits are described as being made of “solidified electricity,” they’re pretty fragile. Rifle fire cuts right through it and kills the Saucerman on the inside. Ground troops rely on the energy curtains projected by the saucers for defense.
Though the suits are, as I’ve stated, not warsuits, they still have weapons. They can fire the same beam their saucers fire from the ends of their arms, and dare I suggest this is the first arm cannon in history? I think Mega Man may owe a debt to Saucerman…
These beams seem to be every bit as powerful as the ones that come from the saucers. They blow up buildings and vaporize tanks and squads of humans.
Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank
He will not recognize you. He has been subjected to a machine we call an Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank. We have transferred all knowledge from his brain to our machine. Thus, we have available and readily accessible his total experience. We can do this to as many as we like and learn whatever we must know.
Here’s a nasty piece of alien technology.
The Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank is an odd crystal-like object which can suck all of a person’s memories and make them available to the Saucermen. Those subjected to the procedure end up as mindless vegetables.
It doesn’t copy memories, it steals them.
The relationship between the IIMB and the disembodied voice that speaks for the Saucermen isn’t clear. The camera zooms in on the IIMB when the voice speaks, which seems to indicate that the “leader” of the Saucermen is either the IIMB itself or is inside of or part of the IIMB. The IIMB may function for the Saucermen like how Supremor functions for the Kree. It may be a gestalt of the Saucermen’s greatest thinkers and leaders. Or it may be an AI, a custodian created to guide the storage and expansion of the culture’s knowledge similar to what Brainiac was created to do in the DCAU. It’s also possible that the leader isn’t the IIMB. It never calls itself the IIMB. The leader might function like an archivist. It could be attached to the IIMB without actually being a part of it.
Sometimes it’s more fun when the story doesn’t explain everything because then your mind gets to wander and imagine things.
It is not clear whether only one saucer contains the IIMB or if it exists across saucers, but all information within the IIMB is available to the collective. If there is only one, its worth noting that its on a saucer that looks no different from any other saucer–and which is probably going to hide behind the mind once the fighting starts. It’s not on any kind of noticeable “capital ship” that would indicate to the Saucermen’s enemies “here is where they keep their important stuff.”
Spy Probe
The Saucermen have little balls of flying light, no doubt references to the foo fighter phenomena, through which they can spy on people. These probes are useful, but relatively noticeable (its a ball of light) and fragile (one was destroyed by a handgun).
Laserbeak is still the coolest alien spy (nearly killed Optimus Prime in the cartoon and was responsible for the big Autobot slaughter in the film) but the foo fighter probe isn’t shabby.
The Mysterians
Like Earth VS The Flying Saucers, The Mysterians (released in Japan as Earth Defense Force), is a take on the War of Worlds formula. Aeons ago, the titular Mysterians wrecked their homeworld Mysterioid (hey, don’t laugh, we named our homeworld “ground.”) through a global thermonuclear war. They migrated through the stars, the survivors enfeebled by radiation. Their bodies cannot stand the warm temperatures of Earth. Beneath their helmets and suits their bodies are shriveled and atrophied. 80 percent of their children are born deformed. They build a base on Mars, and in this way, they are Martians, but who wants to be kind of a dead planet? What can a dead planet do for a dying civilization?
The solution to their woes? The same solution the War of Worlds Martians came up with–harvest humans. The Martians harvested human blood for their health and the Mysterians are interested in harvesting human genes. After an initial display of their power through a giant robot called Moguera, they reveal themselves and their Earth base–a giant burrowing dome, a terrestrial mothership. They invite several scientists, including lead character Dr. Joji Atsuki, to their Dome to explain their aims–all they want is a 3 kilometer stretch of land and permission to “marry” human women, their euphemism for taking sex slaves. In fact, they’ve already kidnapped several during the Moguera attack and have a list of several more women they would like to have as breeding sows.
Humanity rejects their proposal–bad move, Mysterians, if you guys landed in Killary’s Libya, humanity would have thrown sex slaves your way for a candy bar.
Complicating matters is that Dr. Atsuki’s friend Dr. Ryoichi Shiraishi has gone Neville Chamberlain, or if you prefer, Mike Pence. Ryoichi believes that its not man or Mysterian that rules the universe, but science, and since Mysterian science is more advance than man’s own, it’s best to side with them. Greater science will always conquer lesser science.
With war declared between mankind and the Mysterians, does humanity have any hope of overcoming superior science?
Of course they do, duh. It wouldn’t be a fun film if humanity lost now, would it?
Director Ishiro Honda, legendary director and co-writer of Godzilla, envisioned The Mysterians as a film to one-up Godzilla and not only all his previous films, but all of Toho’s previous films. The Mysterians was to be for Toho what Forbidden Planet was for MGM in 1956, what This Island Earth was for Universal Pictures in 1955. what War of Worlds was for Paramount in 1953, and what the Day the Earth Stood Still was for 20th Century Fox in 1951–a bar-raising special effects extravaganza that went above and beyond the average sci-fi flick by having something important about the human condition to say. Honda pushed special effects god Eiji Tsuburaya to up his game and up his game he did. This wasn’t going to be a story about a monster stomping through a city. This was going to be a sci-fi epic. This was going to be saucers and mecha and a giant dome with a death ray vs tanks and hones john rockets and weird experimental weaponry called markalites. This was going to be art. This was going to raise the bar. Toho put a lot of support, care, and money behind Honda’s vision. It was going to be filmed in widescreen and in color. Even Godzilla’s sequel Godzilla Raids Again didn’t get the budget for color!
Toho put their soul into The Mysterians, and it shows.
I love how the film starts. It starts like your typical Toho monster flick. There’s something mysterious going on at a rural village. Something is moving underground. Boom! It’s a monster–but it’s not like any monster ever seen before in a Toho film. This monster is a mechanical robot, a first for Toho. It wouldn’t be until the seventies that Mechagodzilla would be a thing.
The audience thinks that this monster, this Moguera mecha, will be in the film for the long haul–but its not. It goes on a nice rampage, eye beams blasting through soldiers and tanks, but its disabled by a collapsing bridge, King Koopa in Super Mario Bros style.
It was an incredible flex. Honda basically said to the audience “We just showed you one of our monster films in short form–but now the real movie starts.”
How do you top a giant mecha monster emerging from underground? You have a giant dome full of alien invaders emerge from underground.
The Mysterians speak to Japanese anxieties just as the Saucermen speak to American anxieties. While the Saucermen all wore the same black uniform, the Mysterians’ uniforms are color coded based on rank. They’re martial in a human sense with ranks and chain of command and this speaks to Japanese anxieties concerning their occupation. It wasn’t that long ago that foreign troops walked their streets as an occupation force. The Mysterians are also obviously humanoid. The way a Saucerman’s armor looks, you have no idea what’s underneath, but though the Mysterians wear helmets and big shades, you can tell with a glance that they’re people–space people, but people nonetheless. And it was important for the story that the Mysterians looked human because their past–blowing up their planet through global thermonuclear war–could be mankind’s future. The Saucermen were frightening because of how unlike man they were, but the Mysterians were frightening because of how similar they were to man.
There’s a strong message of global brotherhood throughout the film. Though Japan and Japanese characters are the focus of the story–in fact, all the women the Mysterians abduct happen to be Japanese, they happen to stake their headquarters in Japan, and the human delegation that meets with the Mysterians at their dome happen to all be Japanese–it is stressed that only by uniting can mankind defeat the Mysterians. The markalites, experimental weapons which prove decisive against the Mysterians, are an American invention and they’re deployed with the help of the USSR. It’s very interesting to compare The Mysterians with the modern Shin Godzilla where Japan has to work against the involvement of international allies to defeat Godzilla. Times have changed. The Japan of the 1950’s saw itself as a proponent of global peace. Surely, if it came down to it, they would support the USA over the USSR and its ally China, but they weren’t NATO. Japan saw itself as the calming figure on the world stage, someone that could say “I have seen war and would like to see an end to it.” The Japan of nowadays post Shinzo Abe sees itself as more assertive, more of a fighter.
The character of Dr. Shiraishi and his arc, though a tad underdeveloped, spoke to how Japan viewed technology after the war. Though Dr. Shiraishi joins the Mysterians, he has a change of heart at the end after learning that the Mysterians planned to destroy Tokyo in retaliation for humanity’s resistance. He dies a hero’s death leading the captured women to safety and freedom and sacrificing himself to blow the dome’s core. His last words are for humanity to never follow science for science’s sake. Science alone is not enough, but Dr. Shiraishi doesn’t demonize science as was common in several sci-fi films of the era. He doesn’t say that there are things man should not know and things man should not explore. He simply asks for discretion, and that’s the perspective on science Japan took after the war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed them the dark side of technology, but their economic boom and rapid rise to global leadership in technology taught them that technology wasn’t something to hate and fear.
The Mysterians is a hopeful, heartfelt movie. Mankind comes together to protect the Earth, and even the traitor joins in at the end and our technology, instead of dooming us, saves us.
But The Mysterians live up to its grand envisioning? I would have to say no, though I still recommend the film. It raised the bar, and because of its efforts the ground was set for better Toho films. As a space war epic, it would be surpassed very quickly by Battle In Outer Space (1959) which gave the world the first-ever outer space dogfight which would later become a ubiquitous part of sci-fi cinema. As a sci-fi film with a message, it would be surpassed by Atragon (1963), which articulated Japan’s post war anxieties more directly and more poignantly than The Mysterians and featured Captain Hachiro Jinguji, easily the most complex character Toho ever put to screen.
So ultimately what I’m saying is this–watch the Mysterians, but first watch Atragon and Battle In Outer Space. Watch the Mysterians knowing that while it wasn’t the best Toho film, it set the stage for the best Toho films.
Flying Saucers
In the film they’re called “Universe Ships,” and I got a good guess as to why. The Japanese script probably used the word “uchuu,” which can translate either to “outer space” or “universe,” so what was intended to be “Space Ships” ended up being “Universe ships.”
You see weebs mistranslate “uchuu” a lot in order to pump up their pet settings. “Oh you see, my translation notes say that my favorite character didn’t fly through space, he flew through an entire universe, meaning he’s fast enough to leave the universe can come back!”
Be on guard against the weeaboo and his dark designs.
The Universe Ships fight by shooting streams of green dots capable of dropping a Earthling fighter jet with one glancing blow. They’re fairly simple for saucers and don’t get that much screen time in the film. If you want a film with awesome fighters jet vs UFO action, may I direct your attention to Toho’s Battle in Outer Space (1959)?
Though the Mysterians never use any of their alien H-bombs in the film, presumably if they did deploy them they would use the saucers as bombers.
Ground Troops
The Mysterians dress like…well there’s no other way to really put it, they dress like Super Sentai, and seeing as how they’re from 1957 and Super Sentai debuted in 1975, I think the Mysterians had more than a little influence on the Super Sentai look.
They even have the red one as the leader!
Am I going out on a limb here? Take a look at the Gorangers and tell me there’s not a resemblance:
The Mysterians aren’t as frail as the Saucermen, but near the end of the film we get to see some of them without their helmets and shades and they look shriveled and sickly. It is unlikely they have the physical strength of an average man. They are also highly vulnerable to heat, and heat is listed by human scientists as one of their weaknesses. Even with their suits on, they have to keep their dome chilly. Human visitors were given cloaks for their comfort.
Mysterians are not heavily armed. They use handheld pulse blasters which, like the weapons on their saucers, fire streams of energy “pulses.” These pulses aren’t very strong. When Dr. Atsumi got his hands on one inside the Mysterian’s dome, it took several shots just to disable some machinery.
Mogueras
Here, have some soothing Mogeura ASMR as a Halloween treat.
Note the “s.” That’s right. There are two Mogueras in The Mysterians. The twist that there’s a second giant monster is a twist Toho had used before in Rodan (1956) and would use again in Mothra (1961).
Though the first was disabled before the Mysterians were even introduced themselves, the second was kept in reserve and made a brief appearance in the the final battle, being quickly defeated when a markalite fell on top of it while it was emerging from the ground–a little anticlimactic, if you ask me.
“Oh hey look! They have a second Moguera! This is going to be an awesome battle–oh no wait, it’s already down…”
The Mogueras’ principle weapons are their eyes. They can fire bolts of blue energy powerful enough to destroy tanks, essentially scaled-up versions of the hand blasters used by Mysterian ground troops. Mogueras can also burrow through the ground as befitting a mole robot. If your giant robot can’t tunnel through the ground, then why even make it mole themed to begin with? It’s like if they gave Gundam Wing Zero wings without the ability to fly. It’s just weird and awkward.
Mogueras aren’t very durable by the standards of other Toho mechs. They aren’t Mechagodzillas by any stretch. The first one was disabled by a collapsing bridge and the second by a falling markalite. I can see why they put Moguera in the NES game Godzilla: Monster of Monsters as an early enemy. It’s relatively weak and its replication across later maps in the game can be explained by the Mysterians creating new Mogueras for Godzilla to fight.
I think the big weakness of the Mogueras, even more than bridges, is that they are controlled through electronic communications. They’re essentially very big RC cars. If you find the right frequency, you can jam orders to the Mogueras or even better–send orders of your own.
The Mysterian Dome
Check it out, its the OG Technodrome!
The Mysterian Dome is the headquarters of all Mysterian activity on Earth. From it, the Mysterians secretly construct an immense underground fortress to better solidify their foothold on the planet–not that the dome isn’t already an immense underground fortress, they just wanted an even bigger one.
Think of the Dome as a terrestrial-geared mothership.
Like the Mogueras, and likely through the same digging technology, the Dome can burrow into the ground to shield itself from attacks. It can even fly and attempted to do so in the finale of the film.
The Dome houses a fleet of saucers for defense, two Mogueras, and is armed with a devastatingly powerful gamma ray weapon powerful enough to partially melt a tank.
During Earth’s first attempt at breaching the dome, measurements were taken of the gamma ray. It was found to emit 10,000 Roentgens an hour, which makes the ray as radioactive as the Chernobyl elephant’s foot. A human standing within three feet of the gamma ray would be exposed to so much radiation that they would be dead in about five minutes–assuming of course that the intense heat didn’t get them first. The ray’s “source energy” was estimated to be 10 to the 27th power hertz or 1,000 yottahertz–and that tracks for powerful gamma radiation. For instance, the highest energy gamma ray reported from the blazar Makarian 501 was recorded at 1.000 yottahertz. Scientists directly compare the destructive power of the Dome’s gamma ray with the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 which killed 140,000 people and generated 40 foot high tsunamis. But as powerful as the gamma ray is, it does have a big weakness–it’s power drops off over distance. After 3,000 meters, it has no effect at all.
If you can believe it, the Dome is more impressive as a defensive structure than an offensive weapon. Sapper teams were unable to breach its walls and found that even 3,000 degrees of heat had no effect on its outer layer. Conventional weaponry such as rockets and machineguns had absolutely no effect. Nuclear weapons were not used, and may have had an affect, but the Mysterians warned of retaliation with their own H-bombs.
During the final battle, the Dome was bombarded by experimental markalite weapons, which are conceptually and perhaps, in the context of the expanded Gozillaverse, literally the predecessors of the MASER tanks frequently seen in later Toho monster movies.
These markalite weapons were able to project a beam similar to the gamma ray and also absorb and fire back the gamma ray, but still the Dome held. The markalite bombardment was joined by an experimental electric cannon, and still the Dome held. Damage was getting through the armor, the insides were shaking and Mysterians were falling over, but the Dome still held until a final act of internal sabotage brought it down. Let me emphasize–the Dome successfully weathered all outside attacks. It did the job it was built to do. What sunk the Mysterians was the security team not being up to snuff.
The Mysterian Dome is so cool. I kind of want to have the Mysterians fight Shredder and Krang now…I want to see the Mogeuras fight with giant-sized Krang and Shredder to hitch a ride on one of the saucers.
Tell me that wouldn’t be cool.
The Mysterian Satellite
The Dome is the headquarters of the Mysterians on Earth and this satellite 42,000 kilometers above the Earth is their headquarters in space. If they had any major bases on Mars, they didn’t mention any.
After losing their Dome to humanity, the Mysterians retreated to their satellite which they call “Universe Station” for the same reason their saucers are called Universe Ships. They never counter-attacked, which indicates that resources at the Universe Station probably aren’t enough for a counter-attack. If the Mysterians get pushed back all the way to the Universe Station, it’s virtually game over for them.
The Universe Station was later featured in King Kong vs Godzilla as a UN space station, and I like to think that mankind eventually kicked out the Mysterians and took their satellite for their own.
I love that humanity in the Showa Godzillaverse has one foot into the Star Trek future. On Earth, everything is in the sixties and seventies, but up in space they have satellite bases and down at the JSDF base they have MASER tanks in the hangers. It makes the setting very optimistic and forward-thinking even with the ever-looming threat of giant monsters.
So, Who Wins?
The Mysterians get invaded.
The simplest way to explain the result is this observation–mankind never tried nuking the Saucermen because the aliens thought it was useless and humanity agreed with them. Mankind never tried nuking the Mysterians because they threatened MAD with their own nukes. There’s only one faction here that’s beyond nukes and that’s the Saucermen.
Another easy way to explain the result–Mysterian weapons burn, Saucermen weapons vaporize. The weapon on every single Saucerman saucer
Yeah, I’m afraid this one ended up a bit of a curbstomp.
In most respects, the Saucermen cream the Mysterians. Let’s start out with units vs units. The average Saucerman is a god compared to the average Mysterian. While a Saucerman is way more desiccated and puny on a physiological level, their suits more than make up the difference. Their arm disintegrators are way more powerful than the pulse blasters used by the Mysterians, though on an infantry vs infantry levelthe power differential is a moot point. A disintegrator blast will kill a Mysterian as easily as a pulse blast will kill a Saucerman, but a beam that can be swept around can cover a lot more area than a couple of pulses. Plus, while the armor gives very little protection, it does give a Saucerman enhanced senses. In an infantry skirmish, the Saucermen are going to see and hear the Mysterians coming. You factor that in with their saucers being able to protect ground troops by projecting energy curtains and the ground war goes to the Mysterians–and their saucers will be present. You’d expect the aliens from Earth VS The Flying Saucers would have the better saucers and that’s exactly what you have here. The Mysterian’s saucers never one-shot a battleship, never vaporized a tank, never laughed off attacks from Earthlings (and in fact, were one-shot by the markalite and electric cannon), and on the inside time flows normally while in the Saucermen’s Saucers time flows slowly. Imagine if you’re in a dogfight and you experience several minutes between the ticks of a clock. That’s a huge advantage–and its not just a tactical unit-vs-unit advantage, its a big picture strategic advantage.
Due to how time flows inside their saucers, the Saucermen have so much more time to think things over and prepare than the Mysterians. They got the time to make and revise their plans again and again. And that’s not the only strategic advantage they have. They have the Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank. The Mysterians will be struggling throughout the entire war to figure how Saucermen tech works, but all the Saucermen need to do to figure out the Mysterians’ tech is to kidnap –one– Mysterian. They just need one, and considering how Mysterian culture believes in leaving the weak behind, its easy to imagine the Mysterians leaving wounded behind as they retreat, not knowing that that in doing so, they fed all their secrets to the enemy.
Consider this–both armies have weaknesses to certain technologies. If their enemies discover them, they’re doomed. If the Mysterians figure out how to make sonic cannons, they win, and if the Saucermen figure out how to make markalites, they win. The Saucermen, with the slow time inside their saucers and Infinite Indexed Memory Bank, have a much better chance of researching and developing their enemy’s weakness than the reverse.
Could the Mogueras help?
No. They’re relatively fragile for giant robots. The first was put out of commission by a bridge blowing up beneath it. That’s something you do to beat NES Bowser, not to beat an alien killing machine. And the Mysterians only have two. They’re cool, but they really aren’t anything more than distractions for the Saucermen. The Mogueras can also be turned against the Mysterians very easily. Humanity discovers that they’re controlled by electronic signals–meaning they’re hackable. You find the right wavelength, and you control the Mogeuras–that’s something the Saucermen can find just by trial and error, and with the Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank, they can pull the wavelength right from the brain of a captured soldier.
The one advantage the Mysterians have is their Dome and Universe Station. But in any war, a castle just delays the inevitable if you can’t control the field. The purpose of a castle wasn’t so much to keep out attackers as it was to provide a supply depot where soldiers could rest up, stock up, and heal up so they could ride out in force and take the field. But the Mysterians aren’t going to get that opportunity. In theory, all the Saucermen need to do to turn the Dome into a giant tomb would be to project a bunch of energy curtains around it. And once the Dome goes–the Universe Station will be easy pickings. The Mysterians weren’t able to mount a counteroffensive from the Universe Station. It didn’t have enough resources to counter-attack Earth and it’s not going to have enough resources to counter-attack an Earth controlled by the Saucermen. Once the Dome falls, the entire solar system belongs to the Saucermen.
Here’s How The Fight Would Go
The fight opens on a series of Newspapers relating the backstory in second coming font–PROJECT SKYHOOK SABOTAGED. ALIENS LAND IN JAPAN. SAUCER WAR IN THE SKY. SAUCERMEN ACCOMPANY HUMAN DELEGATION TO MYSTERIAN DOME. WAR DECLARED BETWEEN MYSTERIANS ANDSAUCERMEN.
WORLD WAR THREE FOUGHT WITHOUT HUMAN COMBATANTS, MANY HUMAN CASUALTIES.
Then the paper blows away to show a devastated Washington DC. A saucer crashes into the reflecting pool–but this time it isn’t a Saucerman saucer but a Mysterian saucer. We pan up to see a saucer fight, and it isn’t going well for the Mysterians. For every Saucerman saucer that goes down, four Mysterian saucers go down or get vaporized right out of the air. We follow one Saucerman saucer as it destroys an entire wing of Mysterians, then lets down a ground force.
The ground force engages with Mysterian soldiers, who find it impossible to shoot through the energy curtain projected by the saucer. The Saucermen advance while the Mysterians flee. We see through one of the Saucermen’s helmets and find they’re detecting Mystrians hiding in a nearby building. He fires on the building, vaporizing it and everyone inside.
We focus on one Mysterian who manages to sneak behind a Saucerman and kill him, but he’s fired upon and gets his arm vaporized. He retreats to a saucer, stumbling, nearly unconscious from the pain, but as the saucer door opens, the way is blocked by a stern-faced commander.
“You are weakness. Therefore, you are discarded.”
The commander closes the door and the saucer takes off, leaving the soldier to be picked up by the Saucermen.
Cut to the interior of a Saucerman ship. The Mysterian is taken before the Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank. “You waste your time taking hostages. the Mysterian says to the troopers flanking him. “I am weakness, and therefore I am discarded.”
The disembodied Command Voice suddenly speaks up. “You Mysterians learned the wrong lesson from your flight across the stars.”
The Mysterian looks around, trying to find where the voice is coming from.
“The trials of the early evacuation fleet taught us a different lesson. Waste not a single man, not a single crumb of food, not a single drop of water…”
The Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank descends on the Mysterian soldier.
“…not a single thought…”
We cut to the siege of the Mysterian Dome. The gamma ray is knocking Saucerman saucers out of the sky, but the Mysterian saucers are really suffering. They’re resorting to kamikaze attacks, entire wings diving into single Saucerman saucers to weaken them enough to cause them to wobble in the air and be picked off by the gamma ray.
Cut to the inside of the Dome. The Mysterian leader is commanding his forces even while everything goes “Enterprise after being hit by a photon torpedo”
“Activate Moguera 1!”
But in the chaos, neither he nor his men see the little energy probe spying from the shadows…
Outside the Dome, the Saucermen saucers have encircled the fortress and are deploying their energy curtains to seal it. The gamma ray manages to break one curtain, down two saucers, but there’s too many. The curtains links with each other, draw power from each other The gamma ray can’t cut through them. But then, from behind and beneath the saucers, a Moguera rises from the Earth and starts attacking the saucers, tearing them apart with its drill hands. The energy curtain wall is broken. The saucers scatter as the gamma ray joins with the Moguera.
The battle turns in favor of the Mysterians. The Moguera loses some parts from the saucers retaliating, but it stabs one of the saucers and starts using it as a shield. Close-up on the Saucermen falling to their deaths from the shield-saucer.
Meanwhile, in a hangar below the dome, we zoom in on engineers prepping Moguera two as we hear the voice of the captured Mysterian soldier coming through the Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank–“The Moguera units are controlled through electronic signals. The frequency is as follows…”
Mogeura two’s eyes light up ominously…
Meanwhile, back on the surface, Moguera one knocks another saucer to the ground with its shield, then tramples the surviving Saucermen as they try to flee. Cut to the commander. “Yes! Teach them to respect Mysterian science!”
Then, from beneath Mogeura one, Moguera two strikes! Moguera one fights back, but with the saucers backing up Moguera two, it’s quickly overwhelmed. In desperation, it tackles Moguera two.
“Destroy them both!” The commander orders. “Before the second can be turned against us as well!’
The gamma ray blasts the Mogueras, fusing them into a very cool-looking chunk.
The saucers retreat from the Dome. The Mysterians watch them leave with bated breath as we hear the voice of the captured Mysterian again: “The gamma ray can be absorbed by certain materials and redirected through certain processes…”
A new wave of saucers appear over the horizon, but these have new, larger discs.
The Saucermen have discovered Markalites.
The gamma ray fires, but this time it’s captured by the Markalites which start forcing the beam out of the Dome. These are improvements on the markalites in the film–they don’t just absorb gamma rays, they drain them.
It’s chaos inside the Dome. The commander tries fruitlessly to keep control. “Shut down the gamma ray! Hurry!”
“We can’t commander!
“The gamma ray is being drawn from the reactor!”
“The reactor is being forced to overheat!”
Then suddenly, the markalites cut off. The base is dark for a minute, then dim red lights come on to indicate emergency power. The saucers hover for a moment, then turn on their classic vaporizers. The beams hit the Dome and it starts to undergo the pre-vaporization aura. The commander orders an evacuation. As the aura grows in intensity, several saucers take off from the base.
And then, the Mysterian Dome vanishes, leaving behind nothing more than a wisp of smoke.
The Saucermen saucers take off in pursuit of the Mysterians and shoot down the commander’s saucer. As the commander crawls from the wreckage, he finds himself surrounded by the enemy.
The commander is brought into a saucer, defiant. “There is nothing I will tell you.”
“There’s nothing you can tell us.” the disembodied voice says as the hollowed husk of the Mysterian soldier is brought out.
The disembodied voice taunts the Mysterian commander in the voice of the soldier. “The Universe Station has been moved to holding pattern over Venus. It’s orbital span is as follows…”
A screen in the saucer turns on to show the Universe Station. Several saucers converge around it.
The Mysterian commander has a look of terror on his face.
“No, please, our children!”
The saucers open fire, vaporizing the Universe Station.
“I trust, for the sake of what remains of your people on Mars, that you will make the necessary arrangements for a peaceful transfer of power?”
The Mysterian commander hangs his head in defeat as we close on one final newspaper–WORLD WAR 3 ENDS IN SAUCERMAN VICTORY.
HAVE A SPOOKTACULAR HALLOWEEN FROM CAPEWORLD COMICS!
AND REMEMBER, KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!
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