Trivia / Track of the Moon Beast

• Creator Killer: Richard Ashe (credited as Dick Ashe) had a few credits as a second unit director before Moon Beast but never directed another film after this one. Chase Cordell (Paul) only had a few television credits after this movie, while Donna Leigh Drake (Kathy) decided to quit acting and return to court reporting. As for Gregorio Sala (Johnny Longbow), this was his only acting role and there's little information about him available.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Kathy's actress is probably about ten years older then her character, although the film is so washed out and faded it's hard to tell.
  • Paul is supposed to be a grad student, but also looks ten years older than he should be, supposedly still living with his mother.
• Defictionalization: Thanks to MST3K, viewers have tried making their own versions of Johnny Longbow's stew such as this recipe.
• Deleted Scenes: The original cut had much more prolonged and graphic violence, particularly Paul's attack on the fishermen in the tent. The MST3K version (which itself makes some minor trims to the movie for time) uses the TV edit which appears to be the only surviving print of the film.
• He Also Did: You probably know the film's writer William Finger better as Bill Finger, co-creator of Batman^note Though some comics historians go so far as to give him more credit than Bob Kane, since he came up with the iconic costume pretty much single-handedly and wrote most of the stories. He also wrote another film that was riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000: It Lives by Night. If you're wondering what he was doing writing lame movies, Bob Kane conned him out of the royalties for the character.
• Old Shame: Understandably, many of the cast and crew were not thrilled with the finished movie.
  • Leigh Drake (aka Donna Leigh Drake), the actress who plays Kathy, hated the movie, her performance and the experience of making it, capped off by the film's failure to secure a theatrical release. The experience distressed Drake so much that she retired from acting afterwards, with only two other minor roles to her credit.^note She's recorded several country music albums under her married name, Donna Leigh Scott, and now runs a court reporting agency in New Mexico. Drake was interviewed for its MST3K DVD release and says that she loved the episode, finding their mockery of Moon Beast "therapeutic" for her bad memories of it.
  • Co-writer Charles Sinclair thought so little of Moon Beast that he completely forgot about it until he caught the MST3K episode on television decades later. Sinclair told his son afterwards that he couldn't believe that he'd written such a terrible movie.
  • On the other hand, Albuquerque hosted a special screening of the movie in May 2016 which Frank Larrabee (the California Lady singer), Gary Kanin (the newscaster) and several surviving crew members attended, discussing the film afterwards with the audience. All of them seemed amused by the film's So Bad, It's Good reputation and didn't mind the notoriety MST3K brought to it.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Originally filmed in 1972, Moon Beast failed to find a national distributor for four years. Eventually the producers made a deal for the movie to be shown on television after a brief theatrical run in July 1976, which is why only the edited version is currently available. Leigh Drake claims that she was shocked when her mother found Moon Beast on sale in a video store years later, because she hadn't even been notified that it had ever been released!
• What Could Have Been: Exploitation star Cheri Caffaro was supposed to play Kathy but backed out for unknown reasons.
• Working Title: The Lunar Analog

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