The ID!!!

I can't help now but watch "Forbidden Planet" (1956) and not think of Twilight Zone, especially when I see the saucer, the uniforms of the crew, Robby the Robot, and various set props. The intellectual nature of the story--with the self-annihilated Krell race, the impressive underground machinations set up, the brain intelligence and boosting machine, and Pigeon's own environs, quite elaborately designed thanks to technology and advancements humankind has never seen--and the MGM studio production, spending the money on a genre not particularly rewarded such treatment in the past, during the 50s present, or even much in the early 60s. I can't fault Serling's studio getting a lot of mileage and leverage out of what "Forbidden Planet" left behind. Well into 1963, Twilight Zone was offering episodes with props from the film, made in 1956. Never let the prop department go to waste. Repurpose what is readily available while it is available.

Robby the Robot is obviously my favorite part of the film from just a pure fanboy perspective. I see him and the little boy geeks out. I see the ship and can't help but visualize immediately the episode of Twilight Zone, "The Invaders" with Agnes Moorehead barking at little astronauts in their spacesuits while finding their spacecraft in her attic. Or even an episode like "Death Ship", where a three person crew try to escape this repeating time loop, recalls the inside of the saucer in "Forbidden Planet". Robby squaring off with Lost in Space's Robot and Robby replacing Deacon as the director of operations at a complete AI operating factory in "The Brain Center at Whipple's"...the film has been plundered of it riches but not altogether from its intellectual property. And that's important. Because the Monster from the id arrives out of the subconscious mind to kill anyone that might deprive Pigeon's Morbeus from exploring and using the various advancements of the extinct Krell race, you have quite a unique kind of sci-fi threat, man, through the technology of a far superior race, killing man without even realizing it!