Honorarium to George Pal

A simple honorarium to a pioneer in the film industry that married fascination with astronomy and a good story. For us older ones it was a fantastic thrill to watch science blossom in the 1950's and 1960's to such, as viewed now, naive films as Destination Moon, War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and When Worlds Collide. Besides making a few bucks for Paramount they did inspire a generation of science nerds and nerdettes.

"Hungarian-born animator-producer George Pal's and director Irving Pichel's fairly tepid and plain Destination Moon (1950), taken from famed sci-fi author/screenwriter Robert Heinlein's juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo; this was Pal's first feature as a producer; the technicolor science fiction film was historically important - it 'invented' the realistic look of spacesuits, rocketships (skillfully-produced models), and the lunar surface, and included a quasi-educational segment introduced by cartoon character Woody Woodpecker; this film gave George Pal his first Academy Award; this Cold-War era film was also notable for its use of space as a battleground with the USSR."--Tim Dirks

"SCIENCE FICTION FILMS"

"The Legacy Of George Pal"


Popularization of science