Wheels within Wheels

I was recalling the 1955 George Pal movie, 'Conquest of Space' recently and the fabulously retro spaceships it contained, especially the beautiful 'flying wing' type spaceship. But it also has a nice classic 'Von Braun' style space wheel station in the film, which is again extremely competantly visualised. While looking for suitable imagery, I came across the extremely comprehensive blog, by NZPete - which deals with the history of the matte shot, which made films like this possible, well before the advent of CGI. This is an area that our late friend Ken Holt worked in for MGM studios, on films such as Gorgo and Tom Thumb.

Space Wheel stations don't come much better than the massive model shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey, seen here in the production painting by Robert McCall. The interesting thing here is that the wheel is shown as still under construction, with the secondary wheel still in red girder framework. From the sublime to the ridiculous, but still very enjoyable, we have the station Gamma 7 from the Green Slime - a film with effects slightly below par compared to its contemporary Thunderbirds; using lots of models and pyrotechnics.

The model world is not without a fair showing of classic wheel shaped stations, such as the Strombecker model from Disney's 'Man in Space' and Lindbergs nice U.S Space Station, which was re-issued several times until fairly recently, along with the Mars Probe rocket kit.

Although Midori released the main ship (which we know as the Lunar Transporter) from Green Slime, there are a number of other notable models in the film, which have not found their way into kit form, including the main Rocket Transport.

And finally, an entirely gratuitous McCall painting of the revolving interior deck of Discovery, from Kubrick's seminal 2001.