Battle Beyond The Sun

About The Movie

This movie started it's life as a Russian scifi film / cold-war propaganda piece called Nebo Zovyot.  Roger Corman got the distribution rights for the US, edited it heavily, changed all the names, and then released it under the new title.

Oh, and there are aliens that look like a giant penis and vagina at one point.  Those were added in for the US release, and their sequence was directed by the young film student overseeing the "adaptation", a guy named named Francis Ford Coppola.

It tells the story of a space race between two nations as they try to be the first to reach Mars.  Due to the miscalculations about launch windows and fuel reserves, several people get stranded on an asteroid and are going to fall into the sun and die if not rescued.

About the Riffs

There's a part of me (Jim) that wants to just delete this episode from YouTube entirely and pretend it didn't happen.  It was never really meant to be released, and it certainly wasn't intended to be the first episode of CFTP ever... but that's what it wound up being, and here we are.

We (Mike and I) were in the process of resurrecting CFTP from the dustbin of history, and were going to be live riffing a movie at a convention in the future, so I contacted Jenny (part of the original CFTP crew) and Russ (a long-time friend and creative type) to help us get into our groove.

Google had just debuted a new chat service called Hangouts, and one of the features was that it let you all watch a movie together - and also let you record your own video call.  So we fired that up, riffed a movie, recorded the call, and afterwards I realized I could just edit our recording and the movie together and make... this.

We would eventually revisit this movie as part of CFTP Rewind, as the very first movie we covered.