plot details of that earlier feature. That film offered 3D as its big attraction, but all its male characters were middle-aged. The 1958 remake opted to better appeal to a teenage audience by adding a pair of youthful escaped convicts, one a good kid who had made a mistake, the other an incorrigible crook, and providing them with lunar love interests in due course. In the 1953 film, the bit players portraying the minor Moon maidens are described as "Hollywood cover girls"; in the remake, they are credited as "international beauty contest winners". A red camera filter was used to make the blue sky photograph very dark on the black-and-white film, but the result is still far from the ideal starry black. Bits of scrubby vegetation can be seen in the background of some shots. No attempt is made to convince the viewer that the Moon is an airless void where humans would weigh one-sixth their normal Earth weight. When one of the space-suited astronauts is forced into direct sunlight, unshielded from its intensity, he bursts into flames, despite the lack of an external oxygen atmosphere; in seconds he is reduced to a skeleton. The large, slow-moving rock creatures have a passing resemblance to the shape of Gumby, the popular stop motion clay animation children's television character introduced in 1955. The giant spider prop is wire-controlled from above; it is exactly the same "Moon spider" used five years earlier in Cat-Women of the Moon. Nina Bara, who plays the evil, scheming, back-stabbing Alpha, was familiar to genre audiences from her role as Tonga on the television series Space Patrol (1950-1955). Popular 1960s/1970s television and film star Leslie Parrish also co-stars, billed under her real name Marjorie Hellen. Reception and legacy The film is regarded as a drive-in camp classic. Film historians Kim R. Holston and Tom Winchester noted that the film was "... (a) low-budget, scientifically inaccurate hoot ..." Film reviewer Glenn Erickson commented that "... 'Missile to the Moon' is nobody's idea of a good movie ... a hoot, a real knee-slapper, born MST3K material ... how can the worst space movie ever made, be the worst space movie ever made, if it's such a delight?" Speaking of which, RiffTrax spoofed the film twice (one with Michael J. Nelson and improvisational comedy legend Fred Willard and the second time with Mike, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett; each in 2007).