monarch of the moon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

SuperheroHype has our first look at Dark Horse's upcoming classic sci-fi spoof Monarch of the Moon - and I must say, it looks like nothing short of amazing. The idea of the movie, if you haven't heard, is to recreate the look and feel of a 1950s serial sci-fi story, and so far it looks to be right on target. The script follows the adventures of the World War II action hero Yellow Jacket, an ex-fighter pilot who defends truth, justice and the American Way against evil Japanese robots and Nazi scientists bent on creating a device called the Doomsday Ray. Somehow, in the course of this wackiness, Y.J. goes into space to fight the Monarch of the Moon, as well. The three pictures which can be viewed at the above link provide an exciting early look at the project. They don't show anything wildly outrageous in terms of special effects yet, but they do have a great looking shot of a hero in flight, Rocketeer-style, which just screams 1950s.

The more I learn about this crazy project, the more excited I become. The concept is a winner, the plot is delicious, and now the early images look right on target. I have no idea if this film will be a success, but I can tell you I surely expect to enjoy it. Dark Horse may have a daunting task ahead of them, however, in giving the project mass appeal.

Remember the story from a few days ago about the "long lost WWII" sci-fi flick Monarch of the Moon? The film, if you recall, had been annouced and known as a parody/spoof for quite a number of months, but an amusingly well done press conference at Wonder Con managed to scam several news sources into confusion about the origins of the project. Today, Sci Fi Wire finally realized the truth - even if they continued to pretend like there was some controversy over the origin. In fact, Sci Fi Wire had to get the scoop from a Dark Horse insider before being convinced...but just in case you were one of those few somewhere who actually thought that we were on the edge of viewing a "lost" series, Sci Fi Wire is on the much belated case, clearing away the last vestiges of doubt.

According to their insider, the "legitimate seeming news conference" was in fact "an elaborate hoax and 'creative marketing' effort designed to sell the spoof movie, which was actually shot last year." Imagine that! The news about the spoof movie that we heard all those months ago was, in fact, the truth. Who would have guessed, even with the face of a clearly alive and young actor on the poster art? Sci Fi goes on to suggest that despite modern creative trends in marketing, this is the first time that "filmmakers have gone so far as to hold a news conference and lie flat out to the press."

The source, however, defended the claim on ridiculously accurate grounds, saying "it's obvious that this is being done in the spirit of fun...we don't try to cover it up too much." Honestly, the news of the spoof had been announced previously, and it took me and my little laptop about 5 minutes on the internet to find all the evidence needed to realize that this was a joke. Now I'm not going to nail Sci Fi Wire to the wall; we've all acted on bad information at one point or another, and they did indicate in their original coverage of the story that the origin was in doubt. It's just amusing that the scam worked well enough to have a few people who should have known better seriously entertaining their fabrications.

Sci Fi Wire and IESB are both reporting variations of the following story, as told by Dark Horse representative film historian Travis Liberty. The story is offered as an explanation put forth for the Dark Horse project Monarch of the Moon.

The US Department of War commissioned a sci-fi serial in the model of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to be created as a means of promoting pro-American and anti-German/Japanese sentiment. The film may not have been propaganda per-se, but it definately had political overtones (think Day After Tomorrow). The series was reasonably advanced for its time, as a large budget allowed for high quality production. It focused around the adventures of the very American hero "Yellow Jacket" who went about fighting various evil menaces of Japanese and German persuasion. However, the death of a significant number of extras marred the production of the film, and it was eventually discovered that German agents had snuck their way onto the staff as replacements, hijacking some of the lucrative budget to fund weapons research. When this was learned, the DoD canned the project, arrested the director, and erased all public record of the film. Until now, when Mr. Liberty discovered it in the archives of Mosfilm, the official Russian film studio.

As far as I can tell, both of the sites are reporting this story as if it has a credible basis in fact- although with IESB, it may just be that my sarcasm detector is on too low of a setting. I'm pretty certain that this movie was orignally annouced as a spoof film some time back, as it is reported to star actors who are still quite young, alive and well. It seems pretty obvious to me that the above tale is just a fun little attempt by the Dark Horse people to create a bit of stylized and unorthodox hype for the film- but it may have accidentally duped a few people into thinking they are actually trying to pass the film's "history" off as fact.