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The people of Tokyo go about their normal business – drinking sake, hunting and trapping young men, spotting flying saucers, designing the most powerful explosive ever known – unaware that catastrophe threatens in the form of a runaway rogue planet, currently on a collision course with the Earth.
Fortunately, a race of friendly aliens from a planet that shares its orbit with Earth, but is located on the far side of the sun, has already detected the threat. The aliens travel to Earth intending to warn its scientists, but find the process of making contact unexpectedly difficult.
The fact that the aliens look like man-sized ambulatory starfish and go around dressed in their jim-jams might possibly have something to do with it.
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#1 by Alaric on October 10, 2010 - 8:28 am
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Love those aliens- was disappointed to hear that they’re barely in the movie at all, at least in that form. Someone should do something more with them, someday…
And, the old “Counter-Earth” idea again… Even purely visually, the idea of a planet in the same orbit as the Earth being undetectable would only make sense if the Earth’s orbit were completely circular, which it isn’t. Even then, it would cause noticeable gravitational effects on other planets.
#2 by Read MacGuirtose on October 11, 2010 - 12:31 pm
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Even with the Earth’s elliptical orbit, it’s actually possible for a planet to always be directly on the other side of the Earth from the Sun, if it didn’t actually share exactly the same orbit as the Earth but orbited the Sun along a different but congruent ellipse with its second focus opposite the second focus of the Earth’s orbit (the first focus, of course, being the Sun). That way the parts of its orbit in which it’s going faster or slower would coincide with the corresponding parts of the Earth’s orbit, and the two planets would always keep in sync directly opposite each other. Eh… this would be easier to explain with a diagram, but hopefully that’s somewhat comprehensible.
However, even if a planet did exist in such an orbit so that it was always directly on the other side of the Sun from Earth and visually undetectable, it would still, as you said, have noticeable gravitational effects on the orbits of the other planets. Among other things, if such a planet had existed, the Mariner and Magellan space probes would have missed Venus, since the gravity of the counter-Earth would have had to be taken account in the trajectory calculations.
#3 by supersonic on October 22, 2010 - 12:23 pm
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Furthermore, somebody worked out the orbital dynamics of such a setup years ago, and showed that if another planet was exactly opposite the Earth (an idea that was seriously put forth by some nineteenth-century crackpot, and so has been studied for a while), then it would gradually slip out of position and after some large number of orbits would no longer be hidden by the sun.
#4 by Blake on October 10, 2010 - 7:20 pm
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Lyz, I want to give you a hug for throwing in a Simpsons reference that I got.
#5 by lyzard on October 10, 2010 - 7:24 pm
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Meaning you didn’t get the second one? 🙂
#6 by Read MacGuirtose on October 11, 2010 - 12:39 pm
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Hm… according to Wikipedia, this was indeed the first movie to use the counter-Earth idea, but it’s cropped up in books, comics, and radio before then. In fact, in the first episode of the Adventures of Superman radio series in 1940, the planet Krypton was said to be in such an orbit on the other side of the Sun from the Earth.
There was also such a counter-Earth body hypothesized in ancient Greece, but that was a part of a cosmology different enough from our modern scientific understanding that I’m not sure it should completely count.
#7 by B. Wood on October 11, 2010 - 6:16 pm
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Damn, I got beat to the punch about the gravitational effects on other planets orbits.
Starfish shaped protective suits hopefully still means starfish shaped aliens. Who hopefully still look like their wearing PJs.
Hmmmn, gotta find my copy of this and watch it again. Also feel the urge to watch Battle in Space again.
#8 by Blake on October 12, 2010 - 7:56 am
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I watched the dubbed version and was flabberghasted at how it started off preaching AGAINST said destructive formula, after which it became WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and preached in favor of said destructive formula.
#9 by PCachu on October 12, 2010 - 3:40 pm
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…Wow. Now I know what Patrick Star would look like if he did a guest appearance on Yu-Gi-Oh.
“Not so fast, Kaiba! I play Idiot Starfish in Attack mode! His special ability, Aggressive Ignorance, forces you to put your strongest monster directly into the Graveyard!”
(I am a foul and degenerate creature; I will now play the children’s card game.)
#10 by B. Wood on October 12, 2010 - 6:24 pm
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Hey Children’s Card Games are seroius buisness!
Now if that just shows up in Yu-Gi_Oh the Abridged Series…
#11 by Jen S on October 13, 2010 - 11:49 am
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Awww, those aliens are the cutest things since those ducky underwater ax murder guys! So cute. Yes you are, yes you are, my widdle cuddly-pants booboos! Now, let’s make you jam sandwiches and we’ll read Little Bear stories until bedtime.
#12 by lyzard on October 13, 2010 - 3:34 pm
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You had me there for a moment, inasmuch as I read your opening sentence as “ducky underwear ax murder guys” – but otherwise, yeah, that was pretty much my reaction too, sadly enough.
#13 by The Rev. on October 14, 2010 - 8:58 am
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*pfff* Dames!
#14 by lyzard on October 14, 2010 - 3:15 pm
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Okay, tough guy – so how exactly did you react the first time you saw them?
#15 by The Rev. on October 15, 2010 - 8:41 am
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Which ones, the ducky underwater axe murder guys or the alarmers in pajamas? I actually haven’t seen either movie. I’ve seen a few stills of the former, and recall thinking they were weird as hell but kind of cute since they resembled ducks. Your review featuring the latter is the first time I’ve seen them (not counting that poster/DVD cover El Santo’s got with his review), and…I dunno. I like them, but I wasn’t blown away with cuteness or anything. (I do like their little feet though.) No longing to feed them sandwiches or read them stories. Certainly no desire to run up and hug them, which I can indeed see you doing…and thus dooming the planet in the process, like that “Far Side” cartoon with the farmer shaking the alien’s hand-shaped head.
#16 by B. Wood on October 14, 2010 - 9:09 pm
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First I saw of them was a still in a book. My immediate response was “I think I have another movie I need to see.”
When I actually saw their introduction in the movie, I turned to my best friend and said “The Japanese are afraid of the oddest things.”
#17 by supersonic on October 22, 2010 - 12:29 pm
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I never thought the starfish were cute… my reaction to the movie as a whole was a feeling that as science fiction, it was pretty much form without content. They took some science fictiony pieces and totally failed to make a story that made sense out of them. Each individual scene is something that it would make sense to run across in a sky fy movie.
#18 by lyzard on October 22, 2010 - 2:03 pm
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Blasphemer! Get him, he is a blasphemer!
Otherwise, yeah, you’re quite right: it’s a science fiction film made by people who are doing it just to do it, not because they really wanted to. Mostly this results in too many uninteresting people and an overly langourous pace – and perhaps a lack of understanding that we wanna see the aliens, dammit!! – but it probably also gave us the fact that the aliens were subtitled: proper SF bods would have known that they’ve been “studying our language”.
Some of these people were involved in the Gamera films ten years later. It seems fitting that people who started with starfish in jammies would move on to a giant, flying, fire-breathing turtle.
#19 by Read MacGuirtose on October 22, 2010 - 2:28 pm
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Now I have a mental image of a giant, flying, fire-breathing starfish in pyjamas…