The Angry Red Planet
1959 film by Ib Melchior
The Angry Red Planet (also called Invasion of Mars and Journey to Planet Four) is a 1960 American science-fiction film directed by Ib Melchior and starring Gerald Mohr and Les Tremayne. It was filmed in 1959, and was released on September 8, 1960 on a double bill with Beyond the Time Barrier. It also played in some areas with Circus of Horrors (1960).
Filming for The Angry Red Planet began on September 9, 1959, at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, California, only a month after Ib Melchior and Sid Pink completed their final draft of the screenplay. Melchior reportedly had an initial production budget of only $200,000 and was given just nine days to film it. Such financial and time constraints necessitated the use of "CineMagic", a film-processing technique that combined hand-drawn animations with live-action footage. The relatively inexpensive process was used for all scenes depicting the surface of Mars. While CineMagic proved unsatisfactory for creating visually believable special effects for The Angry Red Planet, producer Norman Maurer did reuse the process in 1962, although to a lesser extent, in the comedy film The Three Stooges in Orbit.
Plot
Mission control personnel on Earth monitor the rocket ship Mars Rocket 1 (MR-1) as it approaches Earth orbit following the first crewed expedition to Mars. Personnel are surprised to see the ship on their monitors, for they believed that the vehicle had become lost or destroyed in space.
The public source identifies “The Angry Red Planet” as 1959 film by Ib Melchior. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Angry, Planet and film.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1313452. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1959 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Angry Red Planet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.