Column Science Fiction Film Club Robinson Crusoe on Mars: An Optimistic Space Age Survival Tale An astronaut and his monkey crash-land on the Red Planet… By Kali Wallace | Published on November 5, 2025 Credit: Paramount Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount Pictures Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). Directed by Byron Haskin. Written by Ib Melchior and John C. Higgins, based on the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Starring Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, Adam West, and Barney the Woolly Monkey. On November 28, 1964, NASA launched the Mariner 4 mission to Mars. It was NASA’s second planned Mars probe, as just a few weeks earlier Mariner 3 had been launched but soon lost power, putting it on a trajectory that would miss Mars by a wide margin. (Thankfully it was just a probe full of scientific instruments and not a futuristic cruise ship filled with depressed travelers.) This was during the height of the Space Race, when the United States and the Soviet Union were flinging spacecraft into space more or less nonstop. It wasn’t just about getting humans to the Moon; they were also racing for every other “first” in space exploration, and that included sending unmanned spacecraft to the other planets in our solar system. Mariner 4 was a success, and after more than seven months in transit it completed a two-day flyby of Mars in July of 1965. It sent back some 634 kb of data, which is less than a single one of the many thousands of cat pictures I have saved on my phone, but in 1964 it was a whopping amount. That data included information about Mars’ atmosphere (very thin), temperature (very cold), magnetic field (nonexistent), and Van Allen radiation belt (also nonexistent). Most strikingly, Mariner 4 captured 22 photographs of the surface of Mars, all of which revealed a planet that was pockmarked by craters and devoid of obvious signs of water or life. That was, alas, not quite what people had expected. Pardon me for a moment while I set aside my film writer hat and put on my somewhat dusty geologist hat… These days, living as we are in the era of fondly anthropomorphized Mars landers and abundant surface imagery, it’s a bit hard to conceptualize just how little we knew about Mars in the early ’60s. I’m not just talking about the general public, but about scientists actively involved in the research. Nobody was going there looking for a vast civilization made up of Percival Lowell’s canals, but they did have some expectations of a planet that was rather more similar to Earth than it turned out to be. The eternal problem of planetary geology, then and now, is that we have exactly one well-studied data point, so what we see on Earth inevitably colors all of our theories about how planets work. Prior to the ’60s space missions, scientists expected Mars to have a magnetic field, because it formed the same way and at the same time as Earth from the same raw material. Earth’s magnetic field protects our atmosphere from being stripped away by solar wind, which in turn protects the surface from ultraviolet radiation, which means that the large molecules necessary for life (such as DNA) are protected from the full force of the Sun’s radiation. So when the Mariner 4 flyby showed that Mars has no magnetic field and very little atmosphere, as well as significant cratering on the surface that indicates an “old” surface that has not been geologically active, planetary scientists had to very dramatically shift their understanding of exactly how Mars compared to Earth. The fundamental processes that shape the planets are the same, but Mars sits at a different place along the timeline of planetary evolution. Mars had a magnetic dynamo like Earth’s in the past, when it was still cooling and had a partially molten core, but that ceased when the interior completely cooled. (It’s a lot more complicated than that—geomagnetism is always more complicated—but that’s the general idea.) Mars also had a thicker atmosphere in the past, but without the magnetic field to protect it, the solar wind was able to scour most of that atmosphere away, which meant the surface temperatures would drop, most surface water would evaporate or freeze, and any life would be exposed to radiation. All of that new information hit the planetary science community like a ton of bricks in the summer of ’65. If you poke around scientific articles about Mars prior to Mariner 4, you can find things like scientists theorizing about the biochemical composition of the life they will inevitably find on Mars. Afterward, the focused shifted to searching for evidence there had been life in Mars’ distant pass, rather than expecting it in the present. All right, I’m taking off the geologist hat and putting the film writer hat back on now. Naturally, the new data from Mars also changed the way sci fi writers wrote about the planet. That includes movies, although there is a curious dearth of cinematic depictions of Mars between the mid to late ’60s and the ’80s. Robinson Crusoe on Mars sits right at the boundary of the old type of Mars movie and the new. It came out a year before Mariner 4 reached Mars, so the exciting new discoveries were not incorporated into its vision of the planet. But in the context of what people knew prior to Mariner 4, it is a significantly more grounded view of Mars than what we seen in many movies that preceded it. That’s by design, but the film didn’t start out that way. The first version of the screenplay was written by Ib Melchior, who had previously written and directed another Mars movie, The Angry Red Planet (1959), and would later write the English-language script for Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965). Melchior was a man who liked to write about terrible things happening to people exploring other planets, and I like that about him. His version of Robinson Crusoe on Mars featured a Martian surface replete with plant and animal life—not quite the classic creature feature that was The Angry Red Planet, but definitely not a lifeless landscape. Melchior had intended to direct the film himself, but he had to abandon it in order to focus on The Time Travelers (1964). The studio (Paramount) found another director to helm the project, and that was Byron Haskin, who is best known for his collaborations with producer George Pal. Haskin directed The War of the Worlds (1953), as well as a couple of space exploration films: Conquest of Space (1955) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). He was no stranger to sending characters into space, and with screenwriter John C. Higgins, he revised Melchior’s script to add some realism to both the portrayal of Mars and the process of exploring it. In a 2011 essay for the Criterion Collection, Michael Lennick points out that variations on the theme of Daniel Defoe’s novel would become all the rage in the second half of the 1960s, with television series like Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie using the premise of characters getting stranded on remote islands as a foundation for camp and comedy. I’m sure there is some interesting cultural psychology to study regarding what was going on there, but it’s not relevant to our purposes today because Haskin takes a much more straightforward and earnest approach: An astronaut is stranded alone in a faraway place, and he has to survive. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. I’ll let the English lit majors in the audience argue about its impact and significance, but I think most of us have heard of it and know at least the basic premise. I’ve never read it, and my knowledge of it is limited to the general cultural knowledge one acquires as a person who grew up and attended schooling in the English-speaking world. That is, I’ve encountered deeply abridged children’s versions, and I’m aware of the outline of the story, but that’s about it. I didn’t know that the story was inspired by one or more real sailors who had spent years marooned on various islands; the man most frequently cited is Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who tried to mutiny against his captain, failed, and ended up spending four years on an island in the South Pacific. Nor did I know that in the book the titular character is participating in the Atlantic slave trade when his ship is sunk and he becomes stranded. They left the slave-trading out of the abridged versions I encountered as a child. The men traveling to Mars in Robinson Crusoe on Mars have no evil intentions. Commander Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) and Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West, a few years before he would become Gotham City’s caped crusader) are collecting data aboard Mars Gravity Probe 1. Along for the ride is Mona the Woolly Monkey (played by Barney the Woolly Monkey, who was required to wear a diaper to hide the fact that he was a male monkey, and probably also for the usual diaper reasons). While they are in orbit around Mars, Draper and McReady have to change course to dodge a meteor, which leads to them running out of fuel and ejecting from the ship in separate landers. (It does not, thankfully, lead to them soaring off course and into the unknown where they are obliged to start a doomsday space sex cult.) (Yes, I will continue referencing Aniara any time we encounter a Mars-bound flight gone awry.) Draper crash-lands on Mars, which looks a lot like Death Valley, because it is Death Valley. Specifically, it’s the gorgeous landscape near Zabriskie Point in the Amargosa Range, which you too would recognize immediately if you had also spent your college years studying rocks instead of reading Robinson Crusoe. Death Valley stars as Mars in nearly all of the exterior scenes, although some are augmented by matte paintings by artist Albert Whitlock, whose work we’ve seen before in The Thing (1982) and Dune (1984). The giant firestorm and balls of flame are not natural to Death Valley—nor to the real Mars—but they provide some nice peril to welcome Draper to the surface. He quickly realizes he can’t survive breathing the Martian atmosphere for long, so he takes what air and water he can from his wrecked lander and searches for shelter. What follows is a survival story that hits all the familiar beats, but it’s interesting and engaging as it does so. McCready doesn’t survive his own rough landing, although Mona does, so Draper is alone with a monkey companion. He’s lucky enough to find some rocks that not only burn but somehow produce oxygen while they burn, so he can take shelter in a cave, stay warm, and breathe for a little longer. Mona is the one who finds the Martian cave pools filled with edible plants that can somehow also be processed into fiber for textiles. (I have… so many questions about those plants. And about what happens to the digestive systems of both man and monkey after eating nothing but fiber for months.) Draper approaches it all with a can-do attitude, but he does suffer from some moments of despair. Mantee was chosen for the role largely based on being an unknown and resembling American astronaut Alan Shepard, but he plays those heavier scenes well. Even though I find the idea of NASA sending astronauts to Mars with videotapes of “How To Survive on Other Planets” hilarious, I still like that the film takes a practical approach to the problems Draper faces. I also really like that even when Draper thinks he’s never going to leave Mars, Draper dutifully records observations about what he finds. He’s an astronaut who has come to Mars to explore the planet, and nothing will keep him from doing that. Of course, just as in the original Robinson Crusoe, Draper’s solitude does not last. Defoe’s character encounters a group of cannibals and befriends one of their escaped captives, whereas the astronaut version encounters an extraterrestrial interplanetary mining operation and befriends one of the escaped slaves, who is played by Victor Lundin. (A few years later, Lundin would make an appearance in the Star Trek episode “Errand of Mercy” as one of the first Klingons shown in the series.) The two of them help each other (and Mona) survive, evading the relentless alien miners by first descending into volcanic caverns, then by heading for one of Mars’ polar ice caps (which have been known to astronomers since the 17th century). There, they are finally rescued by another mission from Earth. If you looked at the three-pointed shape of the alien spacecraft and thought, “Gosh, those look familiar,” well, there’s a reason for that, but it’s not quite the reason I first assumed. Like others before me, I thought Haskin had merely reused the models from War of the Worlds, but the truth is he just really liked that shape for alien spaceships and had special effects artist Albert Nozaki make him another set of similar ships for this film. Haskin also did the film’s small amount of spaceship animation himself, making use of the special effects experience he had developed during the earlier part of his career. Robinson Crusoe on Mars ends on a bit of a silly note—melting the Martian ice cap is a bit much—and there are moments throughout where the 1960s of it all invites a bit of eyerolling, but overall I found it to be an enjoyable movie and a fun sci fi take on one of literature’s most familiar survival stories. The film occupies an interesting spot in sci fi movie history. It’s one of the more grounded takes on space exploration from the era, making good use of what science was available at the time while leaving room for a fairly light and optimistic tone. Just a few years earlier, space exploration films had leaned more heavily into monsters and metaphors and cautionary tales; just a few years later and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) would enter the scene and nudge the genre toward high-minded solemnity. But right there in the mid ’60s sits Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which firmly set aside the paranoia and science skepticism of the Atomic Age to embrace the adventurous spirit of the Space Race. The film tries to match the mood of the era, and I think it does a pretty good job. What do you think of Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Does it make you want to go to Mars? It makes me want to go to Mars, even though I know Mars is not Death Valley and there are no fibrous cave plants to turn into hallucinatory sausage and weave into blankets. I still want to go. (A final note: I’m sure many of us have seen the premise of The Martian, the novel by Andy Weir, also described as “Robinson Crusoe on Mars.” I really like The Martian—both the book and the film version—but I have no idea if Weir has ever spoken about knowledge of the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars. I haven’t looked into it and, honestly, asking if an English-language author knows the premise of Defoe’s novel is a bit like asking if somebody in a swimming pool knows water is wet. Also, everybody should write more sci fi planetary exploration survival stories, so I can read them.)[end-mark] Next week: We can and will remember all kinds of things for you wholesale with Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. Watch it on Apple, Kanopy, or Amazon. The post <i>Robinson Crusoe on Mars</i>: An Optimistic Space Age Survival Tale appeared first on Reactor.