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The Bootleg Files: K-9000: A Space Oddity

BOOTLEG FILES 633: “K-9000: A Space Oddity” (1968 animated short).

LAST SEEN: On YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It is uncertain what the problem is with this title.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.

Fifty years ago this week, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” had its theatrical premiere. It inspired controversy, debate and (for many moviegoers) a great excuse to get stoned in the cinema. It also inspired a cute animated short called “K-9000: A Space Oddity,” which was quickly produced and released within months of the Kubrick film.

“K-9000: A Space Oddity” opens with a title sequence that parodies the fabled RKO Radio Pictures logo, except in this case there are two transmission towers instead of one atop a spinning Earth. The opening title reads “Haboush Electrical Talking Picture Company Proudly Presents” – in reality, the production company behind this was simply The Haboush Company, an industrial film and television commercial production outfit that occasionally dabbled in cinematic fare. The credits also cite Eadweard Muybridge as being among the creative participants, and you won’t get that joke if you don’t know your motion picture history.

The film opens in a strange place: a few bare trees dot a mostly bleak open landscape, and the only evidence of life is a dog sitting next to a gramophone that is playing music. The pooch and his musical source are an obvious riff on the RCA Victor logo. From a distance, a limousine comes driving up to the dog and captures him, taking the captive canine to a mountain on the far horizon. From there, a rocket is launched into space, and we soon learn that the dog, now wearing a pointy helmet, is piloting the craft into the heavens.

And, boy, the heavens are a real late-60s head trip: an angry moon shoots eye darts at the space craft, carnivorous planets gobble each other, gigantic fountain pens drip red ink (or is it blood?), and oversized pumpkins, eyeglasses and ice cream float through the cosmos. The spaceship finally lands on a planet pockmarked with craters. The dog sets foot on the surface and falls through a trap door that sends him to other side of the planet. The dog looks into one of the craters and sees a train arriving in a station and disgorging millions of passengers. One-eyed orange aliens that resemble bipedal cats appear, and the dog floats to a female canine-type creature who luxuriates on a chaise lounge hovering over the surface. But this outer space cutie turns into a machine, and the spaceship conveniently arrives to retrieve the dog.

In a belated recognition of the film’s purpose, a “2001” parody kicks in with the floating monolith replaced by a giant gramophone. The dog’s spaceship goes through a quickie take-off of the Kubrick Stargate sequence, and the dog winds up in a strange room where he finds himself aging rapidly – we know is growing older because he develops a white beard that grows to ridiculous proportions. The dog is then transformed into a pup before he winds up back on Earth in his original state. The gramophone appears and dog listens happily to the music, and the short abruptly closes as the kidnappers’ limousine suddenly appears again from the far horizon.

“K-9000: A Space Oddity” was co-directed by Robert Mitchell and Robert Swarthe. Mitchell was reportedly an uncredited artist who contributed to the pre-production phase of the animated feature “Yellow Submarine,” and that may explain why the dog’s initial odyssey through droll intergalactic sight-gag imagery looks a lot like the Sea of Monsters sequence from the Beatles flick. Mitchell had been in the animation field for 10 years before making this film – he started his career with a fey two-minute offering called “Andrew, A Sort of a Story” about a spider who is unable to weave a web. He had worked for a number of animation studios before landing at The Haboush Company, and three years after “K-9000: A Space Oddity” he co-directed the Haboush-produced Oscar-nominated short “The Further Adventures of Uncle Sam.” He passed away in 1985 following a bout with malaria.

Robert Swarthe would start his own animation studio after completing this film, and he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Subject for his 1975 “Kick Me.” But he moved away from animation into the more lucrative realm of special effects for feature films, most notably “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” snagging an Oscar nomination for the latter. “K-9000: A Space Oddity” was submitted for Oscar consideration in the Best Animated Short Subject category, but was not nominated.

“K-9000: A Space Oddity” played in film festivals and in midnight movie screenings for a number of years and it was packaged into the 1977 premiere of “Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation.” It also had a decent run in the educational market, where 16mm prints were sold to schools around the country. The educational value of this offering can be debated, but it is an amusing piece of pop art that mixes the psychedelic joy of the late 1960s with a good-natured ribbing of Kubrick’s challenging masterwork. The lucky kids who got to see this in school were given an 11-minute lesson in wonderfully daffy comedy.

For no clear reason, “K-9000: A Space Oddity” has yet to show up in the home entertainment market. A decent copy can be found on YouTube, which helps to save this nutty-but-nice short from undeserved obscurity.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.

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