New Footage Added
The film was rushed to market in order to be in theaters before the more lavishly produced Destination Moon that was released a short while later. A lack of both time and budget forced RX-M 's producers to omit special effects scenes and substitute stock footage of V-2 rocket launches and flight to complete some sequences that otherwise would have been made using the Rocketship X-M special effects model; the V-2 inserts created very noticeable continuity issues.
In the 1970s the rights to the film were acquired by film exhibitor (later movie theater owner and video distributor) Wade Williams (Wade Williams Productions/Englewood Video/Wade Williams Collection), who set about re-shooting some of RX-M 's special effects scenes in order to improve the overall continuity; the VHS tape, laser disc and DVD releases incorporate this re-shot footage.
The film was a favorite of young Williams, who as an adult acquired the rights to this and many other 1950s science fiction features he enjoyed. He funded the production of new RX-M footage to replace the stock V-2 shots and missing scenes. The new footage was produced for Wade Williams Productions by Bob Burns III, his wife Kathy, former Disney designer/artist Tom Scherman, Academy Award winner Dennis Muren, Emmy Award nominee Michael Minor, and Bob Shotak. Costumes were re-made that closely replicated those worn by the film's explorers, and a new, accurate Rocketship X-M effects miniature was built.
The new replacement shots consist of the RX-M flying through space; it landing tail first on the Red Planet; a different shot of the crew heading away from the RX-M to explore the stark Martian surface; the surviving explorers quickly returning to their nearby spaceship; and the RX-M later blasting off from Mars into space. These six replacement shots were filmed near Los Angeles in color, then composited in black-and-white and re-tinted where necessary to match the original film footage. Unlike the DVD release, the earlier laser disc of Rocketship X-M contains extra bonus material documenting the creation of this new footage. The production of these new scenes were covered in two RX-M feature articles in Starlog magazine and in the first issue (1979) of Starlog's spin-off special effects magazine CineMagic.
Rocketship X-M is available on-line at the Internet Moving Image Archive. This print contains a mixture of both original Lippert footage ("lab splices" made for movie theater 35mm reel change cues and V-2 stock footage can be seen), as well as all six of Willliams' new scenes. This version also retains Lippert's sepia tinting, instead of the brighter reddish tinting used for the laser disc and DVD releases from Image Entertainment.
Image's 50th Anniversary DVD release (2000) is missing two of Williams' new Mars scenes: Lippert's original matte painting scene, that has tiny matted-in figures leaving an obviously painted RX-M, is used instead of the Williams' re-shot replacement scene that has the five explorers heading away from a convincing RX-M effects miniature standing on a barren Martian plain. A new bridging scene, set at the end of the Mars sequence, showing the surviving explorers hurriedly returning to the RX-M is also missing from Image's DVD.
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