The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anvilicious: "Grow up and stop being Bastards or someone out there will make you stop." This is a damned good one.
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Klaatu takes the human name John Carpenter. Any similarities to Jesus Christ are entirely on purpose.
    • Director Robert Wise later said that while most of the Christ allegories were intentional, the use of the name "Carpenter" was a coincidence that he never noticed until it was pointed out to him years later.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: There's a scene where two doctors are discussing Klaatu's physiology, and one mentions that Klaatu supposedly has a life expectancy about twice that of a human. As they speculate about what medical advances might be responsible for this, one of them produces a pack of cigarettes, and they both light up.
  • Narm Charm: Gort visibly creases at the knees when he walks, rather spoiling the illusion of an all powerful robot, but the film is good enough that you just don't care.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The theme of the whole movie whacks you over the head with the idiocy of paranoia and violence, and it works.
  • Special Effects Failure: Gort visibly creases at the knees when he walks, rather spoiling the illusion of an all powerful robot.
    • Hardly a "failure" - there's all-powerful and then there's ignore-the-laws-of-physics. Material creasing at a joint is in accordance with the laws of physics.
  • Values Dissonance: The Fifties, when a mother was okay with her ten year old boy going off with a strange man she had met last night.