Barsoom

Before Netflix.  Before DVDs.  Before motherfucking VHS, the only way to watch a movie over and over and over again was syndicated television on the weekends.

For a certain generation (um, mine) that means that the movies you ended up seeing most frequently in your childhood were the movies syndicated channels had rights to.  For science fiction obsessed kids like me, that meant movies like Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Logan’s Run and all five (yes, I promise) original Planet of the Apes movies and  War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  (Coincidence that the last two starred Rod Taylor?  No.  Definitely not.  Watch for his cameo as Winston Churchill in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.)

If you went to film school, you’ve probably heard of all of those movies.  Well, if you went to USC and had Drew Casper’s “Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films” class, at least.

But there were plenty of even more obscure fantasy and sci-fi films syndicated television showed.  Italy’s 1961 The Thief of Baghdad dubbed in English?  Irwin Allen’s late 60s TV series The Time Tunnel cut into two hour TV movies?  1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars?  Half a decade before Matt Damon was stranded there???

For whatever absurd reason, Asia Cinemax happened to show the latter.  And I was enraptured just as I was in elementary school, bad optical effects and all.  It also gave me my all-time-favorite Chinese subtitle in any movie ever:

(火星话)

Which literally means “fire star language” but means “Martian language.”