Besides the now iconic phrase Klaatu, Barada, Nikto, any ideas on the 'language' used by Klaatu when he presumably gives instructions to the home planet about the worldwide 'demonstration of power' Dr. Barnhardt asks him to arrange?
I am the proud owner of an autographed script of this movie (Neal, Rennie, Gray) and have gone over those words, hoping for Esperanto to be part of it. It's not.
Just a brilliant bunch of syllables that sound credible enough to me to be intergalactic. ;-) Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson can shed some light.
Wow. An autographed script. That's wonderful. Over the years, I've tried to memorize the language and wrote it down phonetically. I just like the way it sounds.
shareI'm still at work -- and you've inspired me to grab the script when I get home, and watch it.
BTW: the "FINAL" script (as it's marked) doesn't match the movie word for word… they made last minute changes in the filming, but the differences are tiny.
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No. It's the real mccoy. it was acquired by my father many years ago when he met patricia neal being treated after her stroke.
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and it totally is awesome. I was a teenager in 1968 when my mom and I went to Europe -- and we were staying at a hotel in Rome (no longer there, called, Hotel Flora) on the via Veneto… and walking to our hotel one day (it was July) Michael Rennie was sitting at a cafe and I nearly died… I was 14 years old… and had such a crush on him.. and my mother said, "go say hello" and I was too paralyzed.
When we got home, my father said, "oh! you know -- I have that script in my desk at the lab…" He'd never given it a second thought until that trip!
intense…. I don't let anyone touch it.
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OMG -- I totally understand. I fell prey to a scam (eBay) 10 years ago when I "bought" an autographed copy of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."
Saw the auction, had the winning bid; sent the seller a check, and in the interim, Julia died. I never got the book--and I was too new at it, and worn out, to pursue it.
However, I was always (and remain) a cynic. We have that in common!
Well, according to one source during an interview conducted with screenwriter Edmund H. North who based his screenplay on Harry Bates sci-fi novella "Farewell to the Master", Klaatu's alien lingo is completely made up. Much the same way the elfish in Peter Jackson's adaption of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings Trilogy" and the current "The Hobbit Trilogy" is entirely fabricated. Though for a great many years movie lovers who fancied themselves amateur linguists labored under the misassumption that Klaatu's alien language was some unique form of derivational morphemes on reconstructed Esperanto.
shareOh, thank you.
shareIt's a mixture of Hungarian, Fininish and Sanscript, but too obscene to translate into Engish.
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