Trivia / Forbidden Planet

• Defictionalization:
  • Bay News 9, a cable news channel based in Tampa, FL, calls their weather radar system Klystron 9.
  • Isotope 217, the lightweight radioactive shielding that Robbie manufactures, turned out to be A Good Name for a Rock Band.
• Prop Recycling:
  • After his debut here, Robby appeared in other films and many TV shows. As did the C57D, primarily on The Twilight Zone (1959). However, from the late 1960s onward Robby's appearances were usually made by replicas, which weren't as heavy as the original. On that note, many other props and costumes were reused on The Twilight Zone in various ways.
  • The uniforms and some of Atlaira's clothing used in this movie also appeared in Queen of Outer Space two years later.
  • In a case of props from another movie being used in this one, it's also claimed that parts of Munchkinland were recycled into Altaira's garden. They were filmed in the same studio, though 20 years apart.
• Science Marches On:
  • Altair appears as a spherical, reddish star in the film when it was well known to be a whitish A7 subgiant. In the 1960s, astronomers found it to be egg-shaped due to its rapid rotation.
  • The opening narration is actually fairly pessimistic about space exploration; it states mankind would not reach the Moon until the 2090s (over a century later than we actually did), and that reaching the rest of the solar system would be completed by the end of the 22nd century (we're still waiting on that one, but a lot of older sci-fi assumes we'll get there faster than that).
• Screen-to-Stage Adaptation: Got a Jukebox Musical called Return to the Forbidden Planet.
• What Could Have Been: Both Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison were separately approached to write the script for a remake (which they found out while eating a meal together, to neither author's amusement).

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