WILD WILD PLANET

One of the most frequently seen of Wild Wild Planet‘s design elements is the sprawling model that stands in for Gamma City, the futuristic Earth metropolis that the Gamma One crew calls home. Again, the model fails completely to trick the eye, looking more like a space age train set, or a high school science fair diorama depicting a city of the future, than the awe inspiring super city it’s meant to represent. But nonetheless, Marghereti’s insistent employment of it as a means of orienting us within the story (he seems to cut to a lingering establishing shot of the model between almost every scene) combines with the complimentary, set-bound artificiality of the actors’ environments to successfully envelop us within the film’s quirky enclosed reality, thus making us that much more receptive to the various and sundry eccentricities of the story itself. In this way, the feel of the movie overall struck me as being not unlike that of the sci-fi marionette adventures of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, which similarly disarm skepticism by drawing their viewer into a meticulously constructed, Santa’s toy shop version of reality.