Trivia / Destination Moon

• Executive Meddling: According to Heinlein, the Powers That Be contemplated turning the movie into a song and dance musical with space cowboys. Fortunately Sanity Ensued.
• Dueling Movies: Rocketship X-M stole this movie's thunder by rushing to the screens quicker than its more expensively produced rival. Interestingly the movies have diametrically opposite messages — Destination Moon is pro-nuclear, while Rocketship X-M has an anti-nuclear message (the crew lands on a Mars devastated by atomic war).
• Prop Recycling: A rejected Chesley Bonestell design for the Luna was used for the 1951 movie Flight to Mars instead. The spacesuits were recycled for later (and cheaper) sci-fi including Flight to Mars (1951), the TV series Space Patrol, and the spoof Amazon Women on the Moon.
• Robert A. Heinlein contributed significantly to the script (which draws on his works Rocket Ship Galileo and the later-published The Man Who Sold the Moon) and served as a technical adviser.
• Referenced by...: In The B-52s' "There's a Moon in the Sky (Called The Moon)" they name the (nine) planets and then yell "Destination MooooOOOOOON!"
• Role Reprise: Grace Stafford reprised Woody for his cameo.
• Science Marches On: The moon surface cracked from the sun's heat turned out to be inaccurate, as were the craggy lunar mountains.
• What Could Have Been: This reviewer put it best:
  Destination Moon created the great SF boom of the 1950s. It offered a single, wild leap of imagination that said the stars could be humanity’s for the taking. But despite the deluge of SF films that subsequently came almost none of them — excepting maybe Forbidden Planet (1956) — accepted the implicit challenge. Instead humanity’s attitude toward the stars contrarily became one that the sky was in imminent danger of falling on our heads, be it filled with alien invaders or atomic monsters.
  • Heinlein was originally approached by Fritz Lang to make a journey to the Moon movie.