"The Day The Earth Stood Still - the special effects"

The Special Effects

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In today's high-tech megabuck special effects industry, Gort would be a computer-generated marvel. In 1951 there was no such technology. SF monsters and robots were men in rubber suits and so it was with Klaatu's robotic companion. The man inside the suit was Lock Martin, 7' 7" in his stocking feet and, by day, doorman at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. TDTESS was nothing if not intelligently consistent. Both Klaatu and Gort were tall and thin, suggesting perhaps that this was a racial characteristic. Both the spaceship and Gort appeared to be made from the same material – a metal impenetrable to anything on earth, yet able to bend and reform without retaining evidence of creases or cracks – a predecessor of the T1000 in James Cameron's Terminator Two film.
This production photo shows Lock Martin's face clearly visible in the helmet behind where the visor would normally be. Right-click the visor and select "Zoom in" for a closer look.

To provide the look of seamless fluid metal, the Gort costume was made of latex rubber, the parts glued together and any joins concealed by a thick coating of rubberised silver paint. It would be impossible to hide the seam which allowed the actor to get into the suit, so one suit was created with a seam in the rear and a duplicate with a seam in the front.

Therefore, when Gort faces the camera, it's the suit with back seam. When he's facing away from the camera, it's the suit with the seam at the front. (Just visible in the picture alongside)

The helmet, which was painted with the same rubberised silver paint, fitted both suits and was fabricated from metal. It had three sets of air ventilation holes, a set of four slits under the chin and holes around each 'earpiece'.

Gort is actually represented by three different methods. In scenes with movement, it's Lock Martin and the rubber suit(s) – where the Robot is immobile it's a fibreglass full-scale model (see left) – and for the 'laser-beam' closeups it's a motorised head-and-shoulders model. The latter was built oversize to allow for the electrical equipment to be accommodated inside. The visor was powered

by a small battery operated electric motor to ensure it opened at a constant rate (the visor in Lock Martin's suit was a removable dummy). Directly behind the visor was a window of transparent blue-tinted plastic. Behind this was placed a system of dark blue light bulbs, which were wired to light sequentially, from side to side. Overlaying an animated horizontal glow effect over the light-bulb pattern completed the illusion of the system powering up. The actual laser beams were also animation, superimposed onto the film.

Apart from the spaceship in motion and a few other mechanical effects, virtually all the special effects were created by, or with, light. The spaceship in motion glows and pulsates, the melting effect of the laser beams is an overlaid glow and perhaps most significantly, light is used as a major communication device. The spaceship appears to respond to a pattern of broken lightbeams, set up by either Klaatu or Gort passing their hands over receptors on the control panels. The communication screen pulses with light and exchanges information with Gort with no audible sounds at all. Klaatu regains entry to his ship by a sequence of torch flashes across Gort's visor, and of course, the resurrection process appears to depend on a lot of light pulsations to get Klaatu breathing again.

However, words are obviously still a major method of communication, and we hear several commands in Klaatu's native language, which appears to be made up of a series of rhythmic monosyllables embedded into single words. The most famous phrase is, of course, "Klaatu, Barada Nikto", although we do hear "Gort, Meringa" a couple of times. There's also a "Gort, Deglet Ovrosco" at the beginning of the film (to stop Gort melting any more tanks) and a much longer sentence when Klaatu returns to his ship to phone home.

It's never explained what it all actually means, and some people have had fun trying to translate the phrases directly into English. Take "Klaatu, Borada Nikto" for example. One of those is a name, tagged at the beginning to identify from whom the message is coming, and this means that from only two words - "Borada" and "Nikto" - Gort extracts enough information to stop vaporising people, recognise Helen as a friend, pick her up and take her into the ship for safety and then phone home to report the situation and ask for further instructions. Maybe the strung-together components of the "words" actually trigger seperate and specific command sequences built into Gort's memory bank – he is a computerised tank after all.

The Flying Saucer miniature was less than eight feet across. It was created by Fred Sersen and his special effects team of Ray Kellogg, L. B. Abbott and Emil Kosa. This model is still in existence and is shown to the right on display. (In the photo, for size comparison, is Jim Gerard who has his own TDESS website which can be accessed from our links page.) For close-up shots of Klaatu and Gort emerging from the spaceship, a three-quarter scale mock-up, 25 feet high and 100 feet wide was used.

One of the highly dramatic moments is when Helen eventually screws up her courage and gives Gort the "Barada" command - only to see that he's continuing to power up the death ray. It takes a second, desperate attempt before he reluctantly shuts it down. Suspending disbelief once more, maybe the local accent is a problem here. Michael Rennie's Klaatu speaks (surprise, surprise) with a distinguished English (British) accent which means long vowels and the emphasis being placed at the beginning of words, tailing off at the end - "KLAAtu, BARada, NIKto". Patricia Neal's American accent means short vowels and the emphasis at the end - "klaaTU, barADA, nikTO". No wonder poor old Gort gets a bit confused!

Left-click the Helen-graphic to have a listen and hear the difference.
(It's in RM format)