Most formal analyses begin with the introduction of the diegesis or may begin as far back as the opening credit sequence. However, it is important to recognize that some notion of the film predates a spectatorıs ticket purchase and may provide a framework for decoding a filmıs meaning. In the case of FORBIDDEN PLANET, these pre-viewing influences may have included reviews, advertising, and other forms of publicity. For instance, considering its central position within fifties advertising campaigns, the movie poster may have constituted many viewersı first introduction to the film. Thus, in the absence of extensive information on who might have been exposed to what reviews, marketing strategies, etc., we will use the poster as our starting point. Luckily, even a cursory investigation of the poster such as this one yields immediate rewards. Most obviously, the poster highlights the alliance of threat and sexual allure which is carried over into the film although in a different formation. It is the divergence between these two configurations, that of the poster and that of the film, which constitutes the first complication in defining a clear interpretive path. In other words, the incompatibility of the poster and the film is the first element in a pattern of textual contradictions which problematizes the idea of one clear interpretive route smoothly followed by every viewer.
One of the most prominent features of the poster is the title itself. Once titled "Fatal Planet," the name was changed to "Forbidden Planet" because the former sounded too negative. Obviously, few people would wish to land on Fatal Planet, but Forbidden Planet has a certain allure not to mention a sexual connotation which it shares with the forbidden fruit and Freudıs forbidden desires. This sexual or desirous element of the title mingles with the threat of punitive action (from the forbidding agent) and activates certain questions: Who is doing the forbidding? Who is being forbidden? And what are the consequences of disobedience? Rather than providing answers to these questions, the images on the poster reinforce the linked elements of sexuality and danger communicated by the title. Illustrating the prototypical icon of the fifties monster film, the poster displays a robot carrying in his mechanical arms a blonde woman (not identifiably Alta). Unconscious with her breasts stretching the very limits of her bathing suit, the woman in peril competes with the image of the menacing robot in terms of spectacle.
The beauty-and-the-beast paradigm evoked by this poster would have been even more familiar to audiences of the fifties than it is today. Carried over from literature into film, the gorilla-and-the-girl formula complete with its sexual connotations made the transition from horror film into science fiction and even into robot films despite robotsı commonly presumed asexuality. With images of nuclear-age mutant creatures, extraterrestrials, and robots, science fiction posters of the decade drew on this implied fear of unrestrained and "unnatural" sexual expression using captions such as "Who on earth could stop his awesome power, his unguessable desires . . . his invisibile menace?" or "From behind the moon they came . . . TO INVADE THE EARTH! ABDUCT ITS WOMEN! LEVEL ITS CITIES!" These sexual threats were followed through in veiled terms within these films such as when an extra-terrestrial robot-gorilla rips open Claudia Barrettıs blouse in ROBOT MONSTER (1953) or when a giant leech drags the seductive Yvette Vickers to his lair in ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES (1959). Endless examples such as these could be cited to help understand the context in which the FORBIDDEN PLANET poster would have been read, a context which would have encouraged a reading of the womanıs passivity and sexual endangerment.
The poster becomes important in our study when we recognize its ability to create expectations which may have affected readings of the film. As previously mentioned, what is interesting in this case is the divergence between the posterıs "narrative image" (Ellis ch. 2) which promises an evil robot and a female victim and the filmıs reversal of these terms. First of all, there is the question of whether the supine woman in the poster even refers to a character in the film. In the scene which most resembles the posterıs image, Robbie the friendly robot carries a man as opposed to the posterıs scantily-clad woman. And Alta, the filmıs blonde spectacle, functions far more complexly than the posterıs image of victimization. In fact, one might say that she is far more threatening than the domesticated robot.
Despite these contradictions, the appearance of this poster can easily be explained as an attempt to market FORBIDDEN PLANET according to a tried-and-true formula (despite the textıs divergence from that formula) and evidences the difficulty of selling an invisible monster through a visual medium such as the movie poster. What is more difficult to theorize, however, is the effect the poster may have had on spectatorsı extraction of meaning from the text. Either we can assume that the poster was forgotten even before viewers reached the front of the popcorn line, or we can speculate on the posterıs potential for organizing expectation and interpretation. In the latter case, a close look at the text is necessary to determine if certain meanings may have been created by the poster which then became unhinged and reattached to new signifiers according to viewersı personal reading strategies.
