head. It reveals that it represents the collective consciousness of all Martians. They were an old race who once ruled a good part of the galaxy, but who retreated to Mars to ponder. To give themselves time to think, they took their city out of time, in an eternal present. Eventually they discovered that they had a further destiny, but could not reverse the process, being then incapable of physical effort. The city had been previously entered by other sentient aliens, who thought to plunder, instead of help. It directs them to a sphere, which must be replaced in the mechanism, in order for time to begin moving forward once again. Steve drops the sphere, revealing a model of the city. They return to where the others have been cutting a hole in the wall and complete the task. Behind the wall is a giant metal pendulum. Charlie, with help from Steve, manages to replace the sphere in the clockwork above the pendulum. The pendulum begins to swing once again. They escape as the city begins to crumble, eventually fading away. They eventually collapse by the stone road and vanish. They then reappear in their orbiting spacecraft, dirty and exhausted, where they discover to their surprise that only two minutes have ticked by. Production David L. Hewitt had previously co-written the screenplay of The Time Travelers and had turned a 33-minute-long Monsters Crash the Pajama Party into part of an interactive stage show. Hewitt met a group of vending machine operators who wanted to produce films with Hewitt convincing them that science fiction had potential. Their company American General Pictures' first full-length film The Wizard of Mars was made using an optical printer for special effects and was filmed for $33,000 in Great Basin National Park and Fallon, Nevada. The mask of the title character was made by Don Post and reused in Space Probe Taurus. Jerry Rannow claims the producer of the film still owes him $500. The film was first acquired for television viewing with the film cut to 78 minutes. Hewitt reacquired the work for a stage show presentation with a variety of special effects used on the audience. Retitlings In the early 1980s, the film was released on videotape under its original title, by NTA Home Video (an imprint of Republic Pictures). It was released as Horrors of the Red Planet in 1988 by Genesis Home