10/21/04 8:42 PM Joe Coluccio

Id Id Id Id Id

One or two odd nights a year I sit down to watch the movie Forbidden Planet. It is the movie, I think, that I have seen for the most repeat times. The watching, a glass of red wine, some ersatz buttered low sodium popcorn, high resolution computer screen, has become an important ritual to me. Forbidden Planet is clearly the best science fiction film ever made.

I know that I saw the film in the theaters when it first appeared in 1956. As proof, I will now guide you back to the cafeteria slash lunch room at William Penn School. Right off Verona Road not too far from the historic log house that has since been covered with a fine white aluminum siding. Tradition dies hard in this Mid Atlantic neck of the woods.

It is a Friday evening. It is Spring. The school year is winding down. It is the night of the sixth grade dance. The hall (hitherto known as the cafeteria slash lunch room. I just could not add another slash in good conscience) is festooned with large paper cut-outs of alien life forms. On the small raised area that serves as a stage, where I myself was a Jack-in-the-Box in a Christmas Play several years prior Boinnng! I sprang up on cue and said my line, which, for lack of the proper recording equipment in those olden days of yore, is lost in the halls of my childhood audio, more science fiction props. I'll bet it was cute as hell, though. And so, more than likely, was I. If you are imagining that scene with a passel of parents raptly sitting on folding chairs watching scores of toys in Santa's Workshop animated by their little children, dancing and singing around the stage, you will have little trouble visualizing, that same stage, some years later, the night of the dance, empty and alien save for lunar craters and twinkling stars and planets with halo's pinned fetchingly on the maroon curtain. Please note with care that the name of this alien civilization on a banner that spans the middle of the room, high over the dance active 5th and 6th grade classes is, the Krell! 1956. Forbidden Planet.

Excited! You bet I was! Here was a tribute to my miraculous Krell who had literally raised with their expanded minds the energies of the planet Altair IV to the infinite power. Who had managed to forsake physical appearance for the deep realm of the mind. And contained therein was their downfall. Those noble creatures who must have had a really wide posterior if you looked at the shape of the arches that lead back to the Krell laboratories from Doctor Morbius' office. Forgive me, but the image of Giant Barneys, giant purple costumed dinosaurs with large bottoms waddling and singing I love you as they pack off to a hard day of work at the energy lab each day comes to my aged and expanded mind. No wonder the poor things wanted to leave all physical manifestation behind for the comforting geography of pure consciousness, where the people of Altair IV looked lot more like Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis in those really innocent yet sexy and revealing clothes. But I get ahead of myself.......

Luckily the Krell are left to our imagination and though I suppress the image of purple children's television drivel as I hope you will, the sixth grade dance committee has done a fine job of green and horned creatures. (Sheb Wooley for the record, one eyed and one horned was still solidly two years in the future).

But the fine and artistic depictions did not help. For the Krell were ultimately defeated by Monsters from the Id. And have been every year since. The Id! Now, this was the first time I had ever heard the term. Freud was really never mentioned in 6th grade civics class, but I caught on pretty quickly and have been intrigued by my unconscious urges ever since. It is really the superego that I have battled the most. Good thing the Krell didn't have to reckon with it. More than likely they would have become fundamentalist Christians. A fate way worse, as far as I am concerned, than being smashed to jelly by unconscious rage.

Strangely Robby the Robot was missing from the decorations and we were not served pints of "the good stuff" fashioned by the hands of Robby by the request of Cookie. Nontehless, I was drunk. I may have even danced a little. Secure with the knowledge that the universe was a vast and mysterious place just awaiting my voyage of discovery.

"Guilty, guilty", says Morbius, as his monster is burning through a door of solid Krell metal 26" thick, trying to get at his daughter, Alta and her new lover. "My evil self is at that door and I have no power to stop it!" Oh yeah, we've all been there!

Mr. Kurtz, he dead.