Mission Stardust (1967)

Review:

Perry Rhodan is the first man on the moon, well, the first human anyway. Because shortly after touchdown he discovers a shipwrecked spaceship of the Arkonides. Those are the rulers of a huge interstellar empire, their technology is advanced beyond human imagination, yet they have become so lame and lazy that they don’t even think of fixing their ship or even cure the cancer of their commander Crest. Rhodan thinks that it might be a good thing if the aliens owed him one, so he offers to take Crest to an African oncologist. Together with Thora, a hot tempered alien Amazon, they use an arkonide shuttle to land in Africa, where soon African army and a gang of gangsters are after the extraterrestrial technology.

Well, that’s the story of the movie, anyway. In the original story, Rhodan landed the shuttle in the desert Gobi and had a hard time preventing world War 3 when China, America and Russia tried to have the alien technology all for themselves. Trouble was that in 1967 nobody even thought of big budget space operas, so the plot was downsized to what the budget would permit, and it showed. The owners of the franchise never sold any movie rights ever again.

Oh well, the movie sure doesn’t do any justice to the biggest science fiction franchise ever, but in comparison to other space flicks of that Era it isn’t even too shabby. Yes, I’ll say that it’s entertaining in its own way.

⭐⭐⭐

And just for the hell of it: a Playlist with a selection of official and inofficial Perry Rhodan Music.