GoddessJ and I enjoy watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, a series that shows old movies while three hecklers toss in humorous comments. We’ve got quite a few episodes on DVD. But the thing that got GoddessJ interested was when I convinced her to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which mocked a classic 1950s science fiction movie called This Island Earth. We have that one on VHS tape, and we’ve watched it dozens of times over the years.

While watching MST3K episodes, I’m often shocked and appalled at how bad the original movies are. Bad editing is common: one of the characters randomly appears — not walks onto the set, but just appears, between one frame and the next — in the middle of a scene in Girl in Gold Boots (and that one is not science fiction!). Bad acting is more common that good: in The Cave Dwellers, a woman gets shot in the upper chest with an arrow, and suddenly starts limping. Bad costuming is the butt of many jokes: Space Mutiny seems to have been costumed primarily using high school marching band uniforms and exercise leotards (it’s also famous for a scene where a woman who was just killed is shown still sitting at her desk, working away). And if you think that the TV-show representations of technology are bad these days, you should see The Wild World of Batwoman (and no, it has nothing to do with the DC Comics character of the same name).

But the worst thing is the writing. A drunken baboon could often write better scripts! The painful part is, many of these scripts could have been good, if everyone involved had just been a little more careful. You can usually see the bones of a good story there, under all the crap piled onto it.

And thus we get back to This Island Earth. I could see that there was a good story hiding beneath the painful execution. I wanted to know more. So a couple weeks ago I picked up a copy of the book of the same name, and I’ve recently finished it.

I expected something very different.

The movie has Cal Meacham and Ruth Adams as two of the main characters, with Joe Wilson as a supporting character at the beginning. So does the book. The movie has a plane that’s flown by remote control, and a mysterious device called an interocitor, which Cal has to build to prove he’s worthy of joining a group with advanced technology. So does the book. In the movie, the group turns out to be led by human-looking aliens fighting a far-away war. Again, like the book.

That’s where the similarity ends. Essentially everything beyond those few facts is different. The entire story is different, completely and utterly. It was very disconcerting to see glimpses of scenes from the movie in pieces of the book, only to have things take a wildly different turn in the very next paragraph.

They’re both interesting stories, and the book is (in my opinion) a much stronger one than the movie. But I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the sources of any more old movie scripts. It messes with my head too much.

(Well, okay. Maybe just one more. 😉 )