Thursday, April 29, 2010

Fire Maidens From Atlantis Via Russia


Okay, today’s post isn’t going to be anything world-shaking, but I want to get a couple of things up here on the blog so that someday in the future I can talk about them all some more.

This poster—which is for the most part far more entertaining than the movie it advertizes—is for a 1956 low-budget British science fiction film.

The plot of this movie, “Fire Maidens of Outer Space,” is that a spaceship from Earth visits one of the moons of Jupiter and discovers humans living there. The humans are survivors from an ancient outpost of Atlantis. [!]

So the theory is that people from Atlantis not only colonized locations here on Earth, but also other bodies in the solar system. The movie is all very low-budget and it’s not so much a theory about Atlantis as it is an excuse to show pretty young women in revealing outer space dresses.

I’m mentioning this old film for a couple of reasons. First it’s a reference to Atlantis in space and someday I’m going to come back to that. There are tin-foil conspiracy people who take that thought seriously.

The second reason is because of the music in the film.

For some reason, the filmmakers used a score derived from the opera “Prince Igor” by Borodin.

I have no idea why the filmmakers did that, but this is interesting music to link to a weird theory of Atlantis.

The music has also been adapted to a much more well known play and movie, “Kismet.” And one of the songs, “Stranger in Paradise,” has become a Broadway standard.

The word Kismet comes from Arabic culture and refers to destiny or fate.

You don’t hear it that much nowadays, but it pops up now and then. In season three of “Smallville,” in the episode “Slumber,” when Lana Lang discovers that she and another girl both like the same kind of flowers (lilacsblue-violet flowers), Lana shrugs and says, “It must be Kismet.”

I’m not sure if this is true literally, but in my subjective experience, music from “Prince Igor,”—the “Polovtsian Dances”—is the most adapted classical music I’ve ever heard. The theme is instantly recognizable but it’s so beautiful that it hasn’t become cliché.

And, among the many performances of the music on YouTube, here is a woman who tucked a stand-up bass under chin to play the piece. (It’s not a stand-up bass it’s a viola I think but it looks like a stand-up bass.)

This is wildly beautiful stuff. The music has been around for more than a hundred years. It’s popped up in all sorts of weird places you’d never expect classical music to pop up. And I bet it will continue to pop up in weird places where you might not expect it.

Here is its appearance at Impossible Kisses:












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The Occult Technology Of Lost Songs















1 comment:

Rod Martin, Jr. said...

Beautiful music. Some of the classics have been used numerous times in more modern settings.

And what a wild idea! Fire Maidens, Jupiter and Atlantis. I'm not so sure about Atlantis in space, but we now have proof of an Atlantis-like event happening 9620 BCE -- a veritable bulls-eye for Plato's date.

I remember when George Pal's production on Atlantis came out. You would have thought it was Christmas, the way I looked forward to seeing the movie. When I finally got to see it, I wasn't disappointed, though now, as an adult, it looks gag-awful. It was perhaps Pal's worst production. Maybe some day a really good movie on Atlantis will be made.

Rod Martin, Jr.
Atlantis Quest