Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)



Directed by Nicholas Webster

In a world where martians live similar to humans, they eat hamburger, mashed potatoes, chocolate cake and pudding (in pill form). There is kindergarten and televised programs to watch, but somehow no Santa Claus! All the children on Mars are addicted to Earth programing that is watched on the Telstar and through that, Santa Claus of Earth has become well known within them. Due to this, the children will not sleep at all during the month of Septober (December here on Earth), and frustrated martian parents don't know how to handle this. Thanks to the marvelous main martian male group, a plan finally was made to resolve the issue. They will go to Earth and kidnap Santa Claus so that he may come back to Mars and make all the children happy with his glorious gifts. With the children happy, they will sleep at their own will and all is well.

Things go as planned and the martians land on Earth right before Christmas. They ammediately find a boy and his sister that help them out with info on Santa. Not only did they give tips on ol' St. Nick, but they ended up stowing away (thanks to Dropo the lazy, foolish martian) in the space ship and went to the north pole along with the martians. Once landed, we find that Voldar, the ass of the martian group, has a few tricks up his sleeves. He plans to abolish Santa because if Santa comes to Mars to make the children happy, then their military would end up becoming a disaster considering kids are taught to think and act as adults so they are smarter and stronger. This is where we also get to meet the boxy robot. It was taken along to capture Santa and when it caught the two kids sneeking about, it catches them and Voldar comands it to crush them! Voldar's wrath was foiled by the leader of the group when he comes into the scene and states that he figured Voldar was up to no good and he programed the robot only to capture Santa and do no one else harm. What good is a robot if he can't crush humans? Not only did that let me down, but the robot failed to capture Santa as well. He waltzed right into Santa's workshop only to be lead to believe he was a toy. This has to be the worst robot in history. However, Santa was still kidnapped and brought to Mars along with both the boy and girl.

Now settled on Mars, Santa, who is completely naive and trustworthy of everyone around him, is made to create a mass of toys by machine for all the children. Now that it grows closer and closer to Christmas, Santa begins to panic and the Earth kids begin to get homesick. What could the martians do? They can't let Santa go, he needs to make their own kids happy and yet, things start to go wrong everywhere. The toys become mixed up, Voldar tries to kill Santa and the two kids (again), and every minute hounds them with the thought of Christmas coming with no Santa on Earth to deliever presents. Who saves the day? Of course it is Dropo. Remember him? That foolish, childish, lazy martian that is around for no reason at all. He stole Santa's extra suit and after a while, everyone realizes he could serve as Santa there on Mars. Yes siree, it's Dropo Claus! All in all Dropo saves the day, Santa is shamefully naive, the boxy robot was a wuss and Voldar was the only entertaining one of the group.