Space is certainly the place. Animated space you can live in, you’ll fly in cartoon space ships, eat cartoon hotdogs, everyone of your movements will be herky jerky and you will get turned into kitsch, retro toys by villains with aluminum helmets. If all this sounds appealing to you than you will like…
Smashing animation against live action like a really violent car wreck, this 38 minute short film will snap your spine and make whatever brains you have in your head bloodily leak out of your ears.
“Futuropolis” is a short film I repeat view numerous times, its in its own, whacky, low budget world. I can tell that the creators were paying homage to and making a parody of the 1930’s serials like “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rogers”. With what budget they had they designed an impressive space opera adventure. The theme song is pretty catchy with the common refrain “Fly Rangers Fly” and looking at the credits they also wrote all the tunes for this movie.
Alot of the effects in “Futuropolis” remind me of a lot of the special effects laden videos on 1980’s MTV, herky jerky live action actors pasted onto some form of animation. Some films I wish would be shorter and they’d have more power but this one I wish was longer. I wanted more exploration into this universe, sadly there is no “Futuropolis 2”.
The Space Cadets (take of that what you will) are Spud, Lieutenant Luna, Cosmo and Captain Garth, they are sent to find out why there is violent mutations of various species on different planets. The source of the mutations is Professor Egghead, a guy who looks like a reject from the band Devo, he has a silver helmet and has a machine that mutates people into animated gaseous clouds or retro toys. Yeah this thing is insane and stuff like this makes me very happy, don’t expect logic out of this short because if you do you’ll be disappointed.
Not only do you get cartoon food, cartoon alien villains, cartoon guns, cartoon saws etc. you also get cartoon farting alien dinosaurs. Go back and read that, yes you read that right, anyways, info on this short is very scant it was directed by Phil Trumbo and Steve Segal (no not the “acting like a stone in every movie he is in” Segal, a different one) Segal also plays Mutcho, one of Professor Egghead’s henchmen. Segal also did the special effects for the end part on a Commodore 64!
The directors of “Futuropolis” went on to work on “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” which makes a lot of sense they go from this short film to that show. This would be something Pee Wee would watch, do his weird pedo chuckle and clap his man boy hands. Steve even worked on “Toy Story”. Apparently this was shot over 9 (!) years in a basement under the Broad Street Station that is now the Science Museum of Virginia.
I can’t tell that this was shot over 9 years, the actors don’t look like they aged at all in 9 years. The dialogue is badly synced, like this could’ve been a foreign movie brought over and dubbed over with bad, stale English. I think that was the effect they were going for.
So do you want to board this animated rocket and shoot into animated outer space? Well you are in luck you can do it here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Rf3sTLEwc4yM/
If you want to get on a actual flying saucer, your gonna have to get a fake one because there is no official release of this in dvd, you can get it here: https://dvdlady.com/dvd/futuropolis-1984-starring-tom-campagnoli-on-dvd/
