C-57D

United Planets Cruiser C57-D lands on Altair's 4th planet.

The United Planets Cruiser C57-D is a fictional starship featured in MGM's 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet. The design used for the C57-D is a flying saucer, inspired by of the spate of UFO sightings of the 1950's era, and which itself inspired the look of the exterior saucer section and interior design of another iconic starship, Star Trek's USS Enterprise.

Forbidden Planet production

In the movie's screenplay, the ship carries no name, only the designation "United Planets Cruiser C57-D."

The starship has a lenticular profile. Above there is a dome, approximately a third of the diameter of a lens. Below there is a very shallow cylinder of about the same diameter, and a somewhat smaller dome that ostensibly houses the ship's faster-than-light light drive engine and central landing pedestal. The precise contours and proportions differ slightly between the models, full-size sets, and matte paintings used in the film. On landing, a stairway and two conveyor-loading ramps swing down at an angle from the central base of the bottom lens shape.

The original movie blueprints for the ship's command deck show it to have a central circular "navigation center", reminiscent of the console used later in Doctor Who's TARDIS, with a transparent globe centered on a small model of the C57-D. Around this central space are a number of wedge-shaped rooms, including:

• A room with a curved table, chairs and a space for books (presumably a galley and rec room).
• A room with the "communications center", a chart table and the "main viewscope".
• A room with 16 bunk beds, with a pit and crane between it and the central area.
• A room with 9 "decelerator tubes". The movie shows the crew standing within these transparent cylinders while the ship decelerates from hyperdrive, but does not reveal whether the tubes must also be used during acceleration.

On the ship's mezzanine level there is an instrument station and other rooms that aren't seen.

The studio created a stage set of the ship's interior command and mezzanine decks and a 60-foot (18 m) semicircular mockup of the landed ship's lower half (with the landing pedestal and ramps). The sets suggest that the starship's size is between 100 feet (30 m) and 175 feet (53 m) feet in diameter.

Three miniatures were used, of 22 inches (56 cm), 44 inches (110 cm), and 82 inches (210 cm) or 88 inches (220 cm) in diameter, and costing an estimated $20,000. The largest miniature, constructed of wood, steel, and fiberglass, which contained the internal motors for the ramps, central pedistal, and red neon engine light, weighed 300 pounds (140 kg).

MGM sold off the large miniature during the large MGM studio auction in 1970, but there was no record of who bought it. In 2008 a North Carolina man, who had bought the prop and stored in his garage and hadn't realized its market value, finally put it up for auction. It was sold for $78,000.

Appearances in The Twilight Zone

The C57-D props were later used in several episodes of the 1959 Twilight Zone TV series, sometimes slightly altered, and never using the original C57-D designation:

• 1960 "Third from the Sun" — Here the original navigation center is seen, as well as the ship.
• 1960 "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" — Here the movie model was shown flying upside down.
• 1961 "The Invaders" — A facsimile of an original movie model, used for USAF Space Probe No 1, was partially destroyed by the episode's sole (giant) character.
• 1962 "To Serve Man"
• 1962 "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby"
• 1963 "Death Ship" — This episode makes the greatest use of stock and new footage of the saucer; it is identified in the episode as the Space Cruiser E-89, patrolling the 51st star system in the year 1997. Here the ship is shown using downward-directed rocket thrust propulsion. The crashed ship on the ground is a separate prop.
• 1963 "On Thursday We Leave for Home"
• 1964 "The Fear"

Model kits

The C57-D was recreated in miniature by Polar Lights in 2001; it was incorrectly labeled "C-57D" on its product carton. It is labeled as being a 1:72 scale, injection-molded, all plastic model kit, which is 28 inches (71 cm) - a scale 168 feet (51 m) - in diameter. Some fans and modelers have reported inconsistencies in the scale; example: measurements of the included small Robby the Robot model indicates the kit is actually in a non-standard kit scale of 1:56, giving the starship's actual size as being 130 feet (40 m).

Polar Lights re-issued the kit in 2009, adding figures of the C57-D's crew, Dr. Morbius's daughter Altaira, and the monster from the id.

Over the years various small "garage kit" model companies in both the U. S. and Japan have produced kits of the C57-D in a variety of sizes/scales, using both vacuformed plastic and spin-cast resin.

Tribute

The search and rescue ship found on the planet Miranda in the Joss Whedon film Serenity (2005) has the codename "C57D" in tribute.

References

• The movie images and subtitles from 1999 and 2006 Forbidden Planet movie DVD releases.
• 1979 CINEFANTASTIQUE Magazine Double-Issue (Volume 8, Number 2 and Volume 8, Number 3) — Article: "MAKING FORBIDDEN PLANET" by Frederick S. Clarke and Steve Rubin.
• Forbidden Planet Screenplay Draft — May 14, 1955.

External links

• Forbidden Planet at the Internet Movie Database