Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier
special edition for Roger That! 2021
A Trip to the Planets (192?) 17 min., b&w/color, tinted, silent
Narration by Megan Prelinger, 2012
Soundtrack by Agatha Kasprzyk and Rafaël Leloup, 2012
Source: Prelinger Archives, Library of Congress
As cultural historian and archivist Megan Prelinger notes in her voice-over commentary, A Trip to the Planets is “a true orphan.” Production credits are absent from the 16mm print, perhaps deleted by a producer-distributor of second-hand goods to cover its tracks. Even this title was created after the fact, as we find no record of a silent-era film with this title. Nor any non-English titles that might translate as “a trip to the planets.” However, a few days after the Orphans in Space DVD began circulating in 2012, a pseudonymous writer (gun_shy) left the first comment on the Internet Archive’s posting of the Prelinger Archives video: “The correct name of this film is …. Wunder der Schöpfung (Germany, 1925), with the English language version called Our Heavenly Bodies.” This is mostly correct, and the reason the Roger That! conference scheduled a screening of Our Heavenly Bodies after the orphan film panel on February 19, 2021. But the full answer is more complicated – and illustrates how some films become orphans.
The Munich Film Museum restored the feature-length German Kulturfilm Wunder der Schöpfung in 2008, issuing a DVD edition with German intertitles and an English voice-over translation (no subtitles). Nearly three years in the making, the 1925 educational film had an exceptionally large budget and a crew of dozens of technical experts, designers, writers, unit directors, and cinematographers. Director writer Hanns Walter Kornblum was its guiding force. In its aesthetic achievement, his film compared favorably with the best-known silent movie from Germany, science fiction epic Metropolis (1927), which it outperformed at the box office. The DVD booklet essays by Stefän Drössler, Ronny Loewy, and Stewart Tryster offer rich historical background about the movie. (The Wikipedia entry on Our Heavenly Bodies is helpful too, containing an outline of the seven acts/reels.)
In the restored Wunder der Schöpfung, the array of color tinting and toning demonstrates unusually lavish production values for an educational film. A Trip to the Planets limited its 16mm print to a single tint.
However, the puzzling film bearing the title card A Trip to the Planets is itself a unique work, not simply a short version of Wunder der Schöpfung. The Prelinger Archives print may be the only surviving copy. Most of the images are indeed from the German source, but some come from unidentified fragments. In this sense it is a compilation film, one containing a conspicuous number of intertitles. As many as a dozen consecutive texts roll by with no intervening images – a sign of a cheap and hasty byproduct. Another indication that A Trip to the Planets is not simply a condensation is the hodgepodge of fonts and designs among these intertitles. It has an opening title (or is that an intertitle from Heavenly Bodies?) and a “The End” final shot suggesting it is (and was intended to be) a whole work, however derivative or bootleg. But who made it? when? who saw it?
Wunder der Schöpfung was widely seen in Germany as a seven-reel feature, but there is little evidence of its distribution abroad in that form, particularly in the United States. The dominant German film distributor UFA had U.S. offices and a contractual partnership with Hollywood, particularly with Paramount and MGM after the so-called ParUfaMet agreement of 1925. I can find no evidence that the full-length Wunder der Schöpfung received American theatrical screenings. No listing either for the English title Our Heavenly Bodies, which the 2009 DVD uses. Instead, in 1927, MGM released a silent one-reel version as an “Ufa Oddity” under the title Heavenly Bodies, one of 80 shorts rolled out during 1926-28. Thereafter, the short version had documented nontheatrical distribution, with rentals or sales to schools, churches, and others. It had a long life in that sphere, remaining in American 16mm rental catalogs until at least 1945.
Most publications that use the title Our Heavenly Bodies take it from the 2009 DVD; only a handful of sources used it in the late twentieth century and only one that I find before 1972. “Movie Shows Wonders of the Universe,” Science and Invention, July 1927, refers to the “seven long reels” of Our Heavenly Bodies. A few latter-day science and film history books mention Kornblum’s production under other English titles: Wonders of Creation, Miracles of Creation, In the World of the Stars, and In the World of the Planets and Stars. A print catalogued as Heavenly Bodies (1920s) survives in the Prelinger collection, a 10-minute fragment from Wunder der Schöpfung. Its opening title card reads “HEAVENLY BODIES. Gravitation. The Moon. Constellations.” The reel ends abruptly mid-action. Searching for accounts of a film called Our Heavenly Bodies was indeed a red herring. Omitting the Our leads to many primary sources confirming the German film circulated in the United States from 1926 onward, but as a one-reel release.
Initially seeking to identify footage sources for A Trip to the Planets, press descriptions and published stills led me to suspect some shots might be from Max Fleischer’s animated 1920 short All Aboard for the Moon (aka All Aboard for a Trip to the Moon), part of Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph no. 424. As animation historian Ray Pointer notes, Fleischer supervised other Bray Pictographs about the solar system at this time: Eclipse of the Sun (1918), The Birth of the Earth (1919), Hello, Mars (1920), and If We Lived on the Moon (1920). Bray Pictographs ran in movie houses and then circulated in nontheatrical settings, especially American classrooms. Although it was only a segment of a one-reel release, a leading trade magazine noted it as simply “one of the best bits of educational film ever made.” (Wid’s Daily, Feb. 22, 1920).
Entry into the new classroom market is evidenced by an illustrated profile of Fleischer, the Bray studio, and All Aboard for the Moon in Educational Film Magazine (Feb. 1920). Pictograph educational subject matter covered categories such as “science, biography, invention, biology and civics,” according to an ad in the magazine. In the United States, the visual education movement blossomed in 1920, with teachers and administrators advocating for motion pictures in nearly every branch of learning. Companies large and small were formed to sell to this new market. And the commercial studios repurposed theatrical films to secondary, nontheatrical outlets.
Searches for All Aboard for the Moon bore little fruit until realizing that Bray released it solo as If We Lived on the Moon. Two fragments viewable online differ considerably in content and quality. On the left, Fleischer studios YouTube post; right, audiovisual metaphors. Sound removed.
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The sophisticated animation and special effects in Wunder der Schöpfung were created by Kornblum’s team using state-of-the-art technology. However, Max Fleischer had already collaborated with the German director on his previous film. Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Relativitäts-Theorie (The Basics of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 1922) is not known to survive, but its derivative American production does. Made in collaboration with scientists and with Albert Einstein’s tacit approval, The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923) mixed live action and animation – and lots of text on screen. Running times for the several editions of this film ranged from 15 to 50 minutes.
At last three versions of Fleischer’s Einstein film can be found online. Edwin Miles Fadman (Premier Productions) produced and distributed this mixture of animation and actuality with popular science writer Garrett P. Serviss. The influential film composer Hugo Riesenfeld arranged for first-run screenings of The Einstein Theory of Relativity at New York’s palatial Capitol and Rivoli theaters, where he was house conductor. Fleischer’s end titles refer to a genius in his study in Europe; but a later edition mentions the genius at Princeton University. Einstein moved to Princeton in 1933. The film by then was circulating via 16mm educational film catalogs. Even ten years after the fact, nontheatrical production invested in the shooting of revised end titles. A third ending appears on a Kodascope Libraries 16mm print preserved at the George Eastman Museum. Its final text lap-dissolves to a portrait of the celebrity scientist.
In an issue devoted to the role of short subjects in the American picture biz, Motion Picture News named these two films as having particular appeal in a niche arthouse market. “If the Little theatre, managed by H. G. Weinberg, has a particularly strong supporting subject such as the Einstein Theory of Relativity, or the Ufa astronomical film ‘Heavenly Bodies,’ mention is usually made in the advertisements.” (“Baltimore Exhibs Giving Short Features a Break,” April 19, 1930).
With the introduction of 16mm film in 1923, schools that purchased prints for their AV libraries could screen it for years. This nontheatrical afterlife for educational films enabled this copy of A Trip to the Planets to survive. The opening title likely appeared only as the on-screen introduction to a segment of Ufa’s Heavenly Bodies. However, as evidenced by its radical stylistic shifts, this is a compilation film incorporating shots from other productions. But most of them derive from the German super-production Wunder der Schöpfung.
Although we lack information about the film’s transition from 35 to 16mm, the provenance of this orange-tinted print is instructive, exemplifying how thousands of orphan films often lived on in altered forms and “repurposed” excerpts.
This version of A Trip to the Planets is the only one known to survive. It comes from the library of Mogull Bros., a long-lived nontheatrical distribution company created in the 1920s. In 2009, Library of Congress staff, in consultation with Rick Prelinger, selected 259 reels of 16mm film for a Mogull subcollection assessment. Andy Uhrich, then a master’s student in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, conducted the study. Uhrich’s assessment traces the print’s migration from the company’s warehouse to Anthology Film Archives to Prelinger Archives to the Library of Congress.
— Dan Streible, NYU Cinema Studies.
— Megan Prelinger is author of the 2010 book Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962.
About the Mogull Collection
Mogull’s was a New York area nontheatrical film distributor from the late 1920s through the 1990s. Started by brothers Charles, Leo, and Peter Mogull, the company moved its offices within Manhattan at least four times during its lifespan. By 1990 the business had moved to Plainfield, New Jersey. Alternately called Mogull Bros., Mogull’s, Inc., the Mogull Film Company, Mogull Bros. Film Library, and Mogull’s Camera and Film Exchange, it was a full-service company for the home market, churches, schools, and private groups. The company rented and sold features and shorts, as well as a wide range of equipment (cameras, screens, projectors, and accessories). The majority of Mogull’s film prints were 16mm though they did deal with 8mm, 28mm, and 35mm.
The limited press reports on Mogull’s paint the company as operating on the edge of the law and social propriety. As reported in Boxoffice, June 26, 1937, a federal judge found Mogull Bros. guilty of “unauthorized distribution and reproduction” of the Charlie Chaplin movies Shoulder Arms (1918) and The Kid (1921). The next year a lurid advertisement from Mogull’s – “Sino-Japanese War Pictures Uncensored. Gruesome Shanghai Bombing. Actual Uncensored War Pictures Just Flown In. Stark! Vivid! Bombings, Panics, Waterfront Fires, etc.” – spurred a New Yorker reporter to investigate these “hyper-gruesome” films, which were intended for home consumption. A Talk of the Town column (January 1, 1938) quoted Eugene Castle, a leading nontheatrical distributor, expressing shock that Mogull’s did not expurgate – as Castle Films most certainly would – the most violent scenes to protect sensitive home viewers.
Mogull’s acquired prints from a variety of production and distribution sources, both well known (Pathé, Universal, Mutual, Warner Bros., Biograph, Fox, plus the U.S. government) and obscure (Kodascope, Castle, Color Classics, Official, Astor, Comedy House, Pictorial, Filmo, ERPI, Education Pictures, Neighborhood Motion Pictures, DeVry School Films, Bray Educational Films, Cinelog, and many more).
The genres Mogull’s dealt in were just as varied. Its Catalog of 16mm Silent Motion Picture Film Library (ca. 1945) survives in the William K. Everson Collection, housed at the NYU Film Study Center. It lists narrative features and shorts — with a focus on westerns and comedies — and a preponderance of nonfiction, thematically grouped (e.g., Africa, Bees, Civics, Forestry, Oddities, Science, Transportation, World War I). As such, the collection samples the wide continuum of moviemaking, from Hollywood features to newsreels, low-budget comedies, instructional shorts, sponsored films, religious-themed shorts, animation, educational films, and travelogues.
Mogull’s acquired its material by means legal and illegal. Its catalogs included ads from Castle Films, evidence that Mogull’s was legitimately distributing the other company’s product. However, the legal problems with Chaplin suggest that some copies were gained in less than legitimate manner. A preliminary inventory of 259 reels from the collection found some composite duplicating negatives among the prints, suggesting that Mogull’s did indeed dupe prints from other sources, as Chaplin’s lawyer contended.
In 2000, with the company defunct, the Mogull family donated some 10,000 warehoused reels to Anthology Film Archives. By 2004 the archive began to deaccession works that did not fit its mission. Anthology donated approximately 40,000 reels to Prelinger Archives, including the 10,000 Mogull reels. Prelinger already owned 140,000 cans of film elements. Because the Library of Congress had acquired the Prelinger Collection in 2002, the enormous Mogull subcollection was integrated into that long-term accession project. Since 2006 the films have resided at the Packard Campus of the library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.
Meanwhile, Prelinger Archives continues to digitize hundreds of Mogull prints and upload them to the Internet Archive for free public access and reuse.
Andy Uhrich is Curator of Film and Media, Washington University Libraries in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Media School, Indiana University.
Prelinger bonus:
The Mogull Bros. collection includes 16mm home movies from the 1920s. In this reel, we see inside the family business in the Bronx. The film distributorship perhaps benefited from being next to a movie theater. The marquee on the Chester tells us it’s 1929.
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