The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and its 2008 remake. The alien who comes in peace and brings a threat with him.

Journey Through Sci-Fi continues We Come in Peace, our series tracing the history of friendly aliens on screen. This time, the foundational one. A saucer lands on a Washington baseball field, a man walks out with a gift and a message, and he is shot for it inside a minute.

Klaatu is polite, patient and 78 years old in a 35 year old body. Behind him stands Gort, seven foot seven of rubber suit and near limitless force. We get into what 1951 audiences carried into the cinema with them, why a film about world peace was built from a short story that had nothing to do with world peace, and how much of the friendly alien playbook starts right here.

Then 2008. Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, a swarm of nanobots and a McDonald's. The nuclear threat becomes an environmental one, Klaatu arrives having already decided we are not worth saving, and the remake we both expected to be terrible turns out to be an admirable attempt at updating the classic sci-fi movie.

In this episode:

• Flying saucer mania
• Farewell to the Master: Harry Bates' 1940 story, and the twist Fox threw away
• Michael Rennie's charm offensive, and the two separate times he gets gunned down
• Gort's little pants, circus strongmen and the Superman connection
• Who would you take an alien to today? Brian Cox or Martin Lewis
• Milk, milkshakes, and the day the American dairy industry stood still
• GORT as an acronym
• Old Testament orbs, arks and biblical locusts
• Is humanity worth saving? Asked and answered in a McDonald's car park

Also discussed: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A Message from Mars, Destination Moon, The Man from Planet X, The Twilight Zone, War of the Worlds (2005), The Happening, WALL-E, Armageddon, The Matrix, John Wick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Alien: Romulus, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Disclosure Day.

Gort or GORT? Tell us which robot you would rather meet in a field.

Next time: It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Warning from Space (1956).

Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock.

Edited by James Payne.

Bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/journeythroughscifi
Join the JTSF Logbook, our free newsletter: https://journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com
Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com

Follow the show so you never miss an episode, and if you can, a review or a share costs nothing and helps a lot.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH Network.

Where does the friendly alien begin? Not with E.T., but with a Martian exiled to Edwardian London to reform the most selfish man alive.

Journey Through Sci-Fi returns with a brand new series. We Come in Peace traces the history of friendly aliens on screen. In this opener we set out the stall: what makes a visitor friendly rather than hostile, why everything gets measured against E.T., and how one mistranslated Italian word put Martians in our heads.

Then we go back to 1913 and A Message from Mars, widely held to be the first British science fiction film. Ramiel, a Martian stripped of his rank and banished to Earth, has to reform a selfish London bachelor called Horace Parker. It is A Christmas Carol with a spaceman, and almost every benevolent visitor since owes it something.

In this episode:

• Friendly visitor or invader? Where the line actually sits
• Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), possibly the first friendly alien story ever written
• Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, and how 1947 gave us the flying saucer
• Schiaparelli's canali: the mistranslation that built fictional Mars
• Ramiel's tough love, the zap power, and some baffling 1913 camera trickery
• Lizard people or Arthurian courtiers?
• Britain in 1913: picture palaces and a film industry inventing itself

Also discussed: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Cocoon, Batteries Not Included, Earth Girls Are Easy, It Came from Outer Space, Aelita: Queen of Mars, A Princess of Mars, Project Hail Mary and Armageddon.

Watch along with us. A Message from Mars is free on BFI Replay: https://replay.bfi.org.uk/video/7f470ecc-3ccd-5cde-aca0-ac97153f8ecd

Lizards or courtiers? Tell us what you saw.

Next time: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) meets its 2008 remake.

Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock. Edited by James Payne.

Bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/journeythroughscifi

Join the JTSF Logbook our free newsletter: https://journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com

Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com

Follow the show so you never miss an episode, and if you can a review or a share costs nothing and helps a lot.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the Evolution of Horror Network.

Some of them came to warn us. Some of them just wanted to go home.

We Come in Peace is a new series from Journey Through Sci-Fi, tracing the friendly alien across a century of film and television. We start in the earliest days of visitors from other worlds and work our way to the present, asking how and why that image kept changing.

Along the way: The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came from Outer Space, Warning from Space, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Starman, Cocoon, Alien Nation, Coneheads, Men in Black, The Iron Giant, Arrival and plenty more.

Episode one arrives (in peace) on 10 September, with new episodes every other week.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH network. Hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock.

Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the first episode.