BACKGROUND STORIES: LOST AND FOUND
Skinned Warrior
Robin Noorda: Besides the poem, the film is based on a drawing I made as a juvenile kid of 15 years of an anatomical statue called Skinned Warrior. Originally called L'Ecorché Combattant, an anatomy study statue made by the famous french neoclassical sculptorJacques-Eugene Caudron in 1845. The original stands in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. A copy of the Skinned Warrior stood on the mantelpiece in my parents' house. Both my father and mother used it as reference in their drawing and sculpting professions. I made a pen drawing of it combined with a lunar lander for the submission to the art academy. It probably helped my admission.
Finally, I did inherit the statue.
The drawing got lost for some 45 years to finally re-emerge in my strorage some years ago. It was the trigger to finally fulfill my wish as juvenile to make a film on the Skinned Warrior in combination with the Lunar Module.
Skinned Warrior
Robin Noorda: Besides the poem, the film is based on a drawing I made as a juvenile kid of 15 years of an anatomical statue called Skinned Warrior. Originally called L'Ecorché Combattant, an anatomy study statue made by the famous french neoclassical sculptorJacques-Eugene Caudron in 1845. The original stands in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. A copy of the Skinned Warrior stood on the mantelpiece in my parents' house. Both my father and mother used it as reference in their drawing and sculpting professions. I made a pen drawing of it combined with a lunar lander for the submission to the art academy. It probably helped my admission.
Finally, I did inherit the statue.
The drawing got lost for some 45 years to finally re-emerge in my strorage some years ago. It was the trigger to finally fulfill my wish as juvenile to make a film on the Skinned Warrior in combination with the Lunar Module.
My juvenile drawing made in 1975
Still out of the film Lunatic made in 2024
Cargo Space Ship 40LY
Another lost and found item was my apprentice work I made at the Toonder Studio's in 1982. It was a gigantic model of a spaceship, made of all sorts of everyday objects. About thirty interiors of compact cassettes formed the basis of the ship. I never got around to finishing the short film it was made for, because my sudden career at NOS broadcaster shifted my focus. My girlfriend at the time loved the ship so much that she hung it in her living room. It stayed there exactly 40 years after we broke up. Only very recently, just in the nick of time to participate in the film, did it come back to me. Hence its renaming to 40 Light Years (40LY).
Another lost and found item was my apprentice work I made at the Toonder Studio's in 1982. It was a gigantic model of a spaceship, made of all sorts of everyday objects. About thirty interiors of compact cassettes formed the basis of the ship. I never got around to finishing the short film it was made for, because my sudden career at NOS broadcaster shifted my focus. My girlfriend at the time loved the ship so much that she hung it in her living room. It stayed there exactly 40 years after we broke up. Only very recently, just in the nick of time to participate in the film, did it come back to me. Hence its renaming to 40 Light Years (40LY).
OTHER BACKGROUND STORY DETAILS
The Tardigrades
A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon. In 2019 a spacecraft called Beresheet was carrying the first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrades also known as “water bears” or “moss piglets”. They can survive pretty much any environment - including space. But when the Israelis confirmed Beresheet had been crashed, the concern rised they just smeared the toughest animal in the known universe across the surface of the moon.
In the Lunatic film, the tardigrades survived the crash indeed and are enjoying the view of the Big Burn and the forming of the Saturn-like ring around earth in a cocktail bar at the beach of the See of Tranquility.
References to films, directors, scenes and artists
A clear reverence to Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, is the coffee serving Monolith Music Library. It is actually a matte painting I made in Photoshop. Besides the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, it contains 42 yottabyte of music from all the 42 known universes, as is explained on page 42 of the UFO Today newspaper, a reverence to Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
There are many other references to films, directors, scenes, brands and artists implemented in Lunatic. These are homages to my hero's. Besides the above mentioned Kubrick with the Monolith, there are also other references to 2001 a Space Odyssey, like the Hall 9000 computer, the famous Slit Scan scene and he is mentioned in a newspaper stating he did film the first moon landing, actually on the moon.
All other references randomly put in alphabetic order of appearance:
Terry Gilliam - Planetaria on the moon, from Baron von Münschhausen
Auguste Rodin - The Thinker
Hergé - Tintin, Tryphon Tournesol's moon rocket
Garry Anderson - the Thunderbirds 3 rocket
Philippe Starck - Alessi Lemon Squeezer
Vintage Inventum Toaster 286
Charley Chaplin - The Great Dictator, dancing with the world balloon scene, actually copying a part of the choreography
Jacques-Eugene Caudron - L'Ecorché Combattant, as the anatomical statue that rises from the moon surface
E.M.C Escher - Simurgh, a Persian mythological bird as it appears in several of his works, but foremost in Another Other World
Gerrit Rietveld - Red and Blue Chair
Marcel Duchamp - Fountain
Venus of Lespugue - might as well have been made by Henry Moore, but it is a 25,000 years old fetish figurine
René Magritte - La trahison des image, Ceci n'est pas une pipe
Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory
Jheronimus Bosch -The Garden of Earthly Delights
Roy Lichtenstein - Nurse
Banksy - Girl with Balloon
Adam Douglas - HHGTTG, The ultimate question of live, the universe and everything, as explained in the newspaper
The newspapers
All seven lunar newspapers featured in the film are modelled after original Earth newspaper layouts and include revealing details such as: Alien spacecraft is lemon squeezer by Philippe Stark, Tardigrades on the loose, The Big Burn, Kubrick did film first step, Newspaper makes noises on moon despite airless vacuum, and, Drawing of 15-year-old led to surreal film 50 years later, Total AI Takeover.
The Satellite Dish
Actually it is a model of the Würzburg-Riese, a primary ground-based tracking radar for the Wehrmacht's Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine (German Navy) during World War II. After the war some were transformed to function as radio telescopes and Dutch scientists brought several of the surplus German coastal Würzburg radars to the Radio Transmitting Station in Kootwijk, Netherlands in the early 1950s. There, they were used in experiments important in the development of early radio astronomy, specifically the discovery of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Simurgh
Inspired by the wood engraving “Other World” by M.C. Escher a Simurgh appears in a folly on the moon. Escher received a statue of this Persian mythical animal from his father-in-law at his wedding in 1924 and used it frequently in his prints. Escher's work had a major influence on me when I suffered a concussion as a child and was bedridden for three weeks during which time I intensively studied Escher's collected works. I recreated the statue for the movie.
The Vintage Toaster
The satellite that appears in the title sequence is actually a vintage collectible, the Inventum Toaster 286 from the 1950s. For those interested, it is for sale and comes complete with manual and in the original box.
