As fresh as today

And you really had to see it on a big screen and an old fashioned theater for the full impact of the photography and music

And it still stands up in 2024.

You're not old, in the least. My dumbass waited too long to finally see this. And now, it's my favorite film ever. It completely changes how I see all science fiction that came after it. My Dad saw it in the theatre, in 1968, and it blew him away. My grandfather saw The Wizard of Oz, in the theatre, in 1939, and he said the entire audience was in shock, when the sepia film turned to complete color!

My dad took me to see it at the Town theatre in Hillsboro in 68

See the film today on the new 4K reissue, on a 65" OLED Samsung screen. Looks as good as when we saw it in CINERAMA, early April of 1968 in Manhattan. It was transformational. I was nearly 7 years old.

I got to see the movie in Cinerama format shortly after its release. Back then, movie theaters were big and plush, and we were seated in the balcony (yes, they had both orchestra seats and balcony seats). The Cinerama curved screen wrapped the action around you so it felt almost three-dimensional. To watch a spaceship moving by, you actually had to turn your head from left to right.

I saw this in Cinerama in Houston in 1968. I was 14 years old and was totally overwhelmed by what I was seeing on the big screen. The visual effects were so far ahead of anything else at that time. I remember Life magazine did a special edition with a lot of great photos. Come to think of it...I think I still have that magazine stored away.@@stevenlitvintchouk3131

and they're using side stick controls like an Airbus

​​@@billolsen4360on a recent airline flight, happened to look into the cockpit and noticed that the control consoles, rather than showing the dials, switches, and lights of my teenage years, were much simpler and had LCD screens. I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the cockpit of this space shuttle in the movie. There are so many screens! In the final part of this clip where the shuttle is being pulled into the underground hanger, you can see windows into different workspaces. They all have giant screens displaying various representations of status data. This vision was quite a departure from any kind of technical control room of the era. Flashing lights and buttons were the norm, whether you are looking at the controls of a nuclear reactor or an ocean liner. But Kubrick consulted with people who studied use your interface design in different industries, as well as people interested in the impact of technology on the future, and their vision always pointed to these types of interfaces. Interfaces that have now become the norm for this new century.

@@DanYHKim2 That's amazing that Kubrick got people who could see so far ahead!

JumboTron....hit stadiums in the early 80s. DiamondVision developed late 70s. Fairly ubiquitous only 15 years after this film, from Times Square to the Olympics, civic staduims, to even posh hotel lobbies.

You've apparently never read Clarke.

Imagine how shocked we were seeing this in the big screen theater at 15 in 68.

Go study the history of movie effects if is a fascinating study in how to make people suspend their disbelief. But as for this movie: rotoscoping, painted backdrops, and practical effects account for most of what you see here.

Hans Enfiet- My college student brother and his friend took me, a13 year old kid, to the very first showing downtown 3rd row center balcony. A little of the crowd reaction.... coming out of the theater passing by the 3 hundred or so waiting to get into the 2nd showing, with open mouth and dumbfounded mind numbed zombie faces sliding past the countlessly asked question..."was it good"...we could only, and I am serious here, mumble from our lips. One gentleman looked dead into my eyes and asked and all I could do was nod. I would pay some good money to watch that pristine, 70mm, 3 screen Masterpiece again.

@@u2mister17 It's a little known fact that Star Wars Episode IV featured 40 seconds of CGI. And all because Lucas wasn't satisfied with the effects he got using other methods.

2001 does not stand the test of time. Instead, it is the test other movies have to stand.

Middle of the Apollo moon landings. People watching this in 1968 believed this scene was entirely possible in real life by 2001 if not sooner.

Just like the moon landing

So am I, as it happens- Feb '68, it was all happening.

The model of this ship is the only one which survives.

@@Tadfafty wait they destroyed all the models

@@thegameranch5935 Yes, they wanted to avoid having a sequel made, so they destroyed all the model to make it harder to make a sequel.

@@Tadfafty at least give it to a museum or something People need to remember this movie

@@thegameranch5935 This model was recently discovered. Its 24-inches in diameter. Mobius models makes a fantastic 10-inch diameter model of this. Building it now. It has retractable landing-struts like the mechanized model in the film. A thing of beauty!

And Captain Blue

I think what I find most moving is the jump cut from bone to spaceship. The whole sequence is perfect, of course.

He had a little help from Arthur C Clarke.

Totally agree, absolutely beautiful. And all the more pleasing because they tried to show space flight as how it actually might be then, including weightlessness. not space fantasy. To be fair, the concept of the space stations and vehicles and whatnot is straight from Werner Von Braun’s work.

it is called By the Beautiful Blue Danube...

What our future could become? Beautiful space stations and lunar cities. What it did become. Ugly, crime infested cities and no space program. WOKE government officials and people dying because someone wants power! Yeah sign me up....NOT!!

Never thought about it like that, interesting

Since the initial ship emerges out of the image of the broken bone, the rounded lunar transport ship can be seen as the evolution of the use of space from military applications to peaceful exploration.

@@rev.markcarrier1894 The initial ships shown in the space sequence all represent orbiting satellite weapons stations. They are basically a continuation of the bone in purpose.

Its an interesting idea makes a lot of sense. Up above i said some sequences (pod legs deploy, space port doming opening) remind me of flowers opening in stop-action video. That too brings an association with fertilization.

That would be "implantation" of the fertilized egg into the uterine lining

Yes! I’ve watched it too. You can also hear Ridley lighting cigars and pouring himself a brandy during the voiceover. Required viewing 👍👍👍

I disagree. Setting up on the moon means that we are truly a planetary civilization. That means we won't easily go extinct if earth gets shifted on. Furthermore, going to the moon allows us to expand even more out towards other planets. Besides, we don't even know everything about the moon yet. I promise u

Anti-Tik Tok Coalition building a base on the moon would be one of the most long term beneficial investments humanity could possibly do, this video explains it far better than I could so I highly suggest you watch it kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hNqBnt1hxriolWw.html

I was a kid back when this movie was out. I remember my mom had the paperback version of the novel & in the middle were stills from the movie. I was too young to appreciate the story but just looking at the pictures of the Orion landing on the moon & of the Discovery 1 with the HAL computer & the astronauts heading out to Jupiter filled me with wonder & awe. I was an Apollo era kid & back then it was so easy to believe this kind of future was a certainty. Back then in the late 60s & early 70s there was such a feeling of optimism in this country and a sense that the type of future portrayed in the film was a certainty & it excited me. The pessimism of the mid-late 70s hadn't set in yet. In the 80s there was a renewed sense of positivity to be followed once again by skepticism & pessimism in the 90s. The pendulum always swings. Today I'm once again optimistic about this country's future in space when I see SpaceX & other private companies establishing their own toe-holds in Earth orbit. I truly hope the government's monopoly of space is coming to an end. Space should truly belong to each of us.

@@johnnie2638 That was beautiful! I don't know if you recently heard about SpaceX's test launch of Starship yesterday, which is the rocket they plan to send to send the first humans to Mars! I think we are well on are way to reach both the Moon and Mars before the end of the decade!

@@andrewparker318 I know. It's very exciting. The launch of Starship SN8 earlier this week was a testament to a new generation of thinking. Watching the SN8 perform the belly flop maneuver and then reignite the engines to stand upright on the landing approach was an excellent example of thinking outside the box. That's something I don't think NASA would have ever tried. Even the crash landing will yield valuable information for the engineers. The test went beautifully.

The same fx expert Brian Johnson made the fx of Space 1999 in 1973

I've read that the music that ended up on the soundtrack were temp tracks, which is normal. SK commissioned a new soundtrack from Alex North, received it, but decided to use the original temp tracks. He didn't tell North, who found out at the premiere. He was a bit miffed. You can buy North's soundtrack.

@@GDM223SR North's soundtrack is terrible.

@@Beamshipcaptain I like Norths Soundtrack, it’s not that bad. But of course the classical masterpieces of the tmp track fit the epic and majestic style of the pictures much better.

@@tomhanhart5921 The music was well-chosen in the end. Gives me chills, its so good and so fitting. Like Hans Zimmer's incredible score for Chris Nolan's INTERSTELLAR (2014), a modern masterpiece.

You guys are discussing this music like you don't know that it's an extremely famous 19th-century waltz by Johann Strauss II

Indeed. I dont care if there isnt really a solid plot. It’s awesome

Try "Solaris" from Tarkovsky.

That is a bold statement but I see no arguments here.

Only _Starship Troopers_ exceeds it.

science fiction movies afterwards tried to copy and imitate this movie space sciences.

Star wars happened because of this. They use many for the same effects I think some special effects people who worked on this worked on star wars too. I've never watched this movie though only seen snipers because people think it's boring. I really need to watch it.

@@kaleholt It's my favorite SF movie of all time.

Computer screens (HAL) used MANIFOLD typeface, which was an IBM Selectric “typewriter ball”. The HAL Project recreated that typeface (electronically) in the past 2 years. That project has recreated every HAL 9000 screen used in film to 4K modern resolution !! The original 1960s special effect was multi-cells layered to achieve graphics and text.

Here everything worked out by coincidence: at that time it was more difficult (and more expensive) to show a dashboard with a lot of CRT screens, so Kubrick simply used frosted glass for rear projection from 16mm movie projectors. And thanks to this, the screens turned out to be flat and with right angles, which even now looks quite modern (and not convex, with oval corners, like on TVs of the 60s).

"The Blue Danube", by Johann Strauss. Very beautiful. Peace.

That sort of sucks

Actually, Kubrick was watching preliminary versions of several special effects shots, like this one, and Alex North hadn't provided his music yet. So Kubrick just had some classical music played to cover the sound of the projector. It was pure luck that the classical music worked so incredibly well. So classical music was used from that point, and the shots reedited to fit the music. BTW, a lot of the original 2001 Alex North music ended up in the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman.

@@PointyTailofSatan And a bit of it in Dragonslayer too.

That composer was Alex North, who had earlier written the original music for Kubrick/Douglas “Spartacus”. Sadly, Alex only discovered the switch at the film’s premiere. However, Mr. North reworked un-used pieces of his score for “The Shoes of the Fisherman” (Anthony Quinn), which received an Academy (Oscar) Nomination and WON The Golden Globe for that Original Score.

The Music of the Spheres, in a cosmic waltz...

You can safely remove the "One of" (but keep your helmet)

@@LaurentDuval Wise advice (about keeping the helmet) as you don't want Hal to lock you out in the vacuum of space!

Not in PITCH, but in TEMPO. Poco Retard, I believe is the musical terminology.

Sea turtles, mate....

Edward Wood Precise maneuvering and a good computer system will get you that..

NASA has a lot of smart people

Its easy with today's technology of 2022. Look at Elon Musk and Space-X. The boosters and the entire ship like the new starship land right back on their launch pds, or on barges off the coast of Florida. Even Hobby Drones have gyrostabilizers, and GPS and your phones and tablets have GPS, etc. and the equivalent of an HD film-studio is in your pocket, razor-thin. Imagine today's cell-phone or tablet, in 1968!

Apollo 12 landed 600 feet away from Surveyor III (sent much earlier) to demonstrate target landing on the moon. And that was just on the second manned lunar landing... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12#/media/File:Surveyor_3-Apollo_12.jpg

what was watching the ending like

The same was true for the depiction of Jupiter in the film. It was shown with washed out colors, but that was only the faithful reproduction taken from Earth-based telescopes. This was something that was corrected in the sequel, 2010, having the benefit of the Voyager photographs showing Jupiter in its full glory.

Stanley would have been so surprised at all the attention FMJ Crew.

An idiotic slow plodding movie that took forever just to show one scene. A real sleeper.

55 years - 1968 - however next year will be the 60th anniversary of 2001’s initial conception of the project which began in April 1964 when Stanley Kubrick wrote a letter to Arthur C. Clarke, declaring that he wanted to make ‘the proverbially good science fiction movie…’

And Howard Johnsons!

@@Beamshipcaptain And Hilton

Who's to think they'd ever break-up Ma Bell?

This film clearly influenced a lot of Sci-Fi Space movies and TV series that followed. The lunar shuttle rocket bus was the inspiration for Space 1999's Eagle space craft. The scene where you see Heywood Floyd's space plane approaching the wheel shaped space station viewed from inside the docking area looks eerily like a scene from Star Wars.

Yes the moonbase in 2001 is similar to moonbase Alpha in Space:1999!

Gerry Anderson hired the same people who worked on 2001, such as expert miniature-effects man Brian Johnson. Living legend. RIP SPFX legend Derek Meddings (THUNDERBIRDS, UFO, SUPERMAN:THE MOVIE, JAMES BOND, etc).

It also influenced countless aerospace engineers as aviation moved to “fly by wire” and glass cockpits. Look at the differences between space capsules by: Lockheed Orion; Boeing Starliner; and SpaceX Dragon. When SNC’s Dreamchaser migrates to manned spacecraft by end of decade - it may be more advanced. SpaceX is almost all Touch screen, while Boeing was more conservative (787 cockpit). The Pad used by Frank Poole (and Star Trek original series) influenced Apple’s iPad design !

I admire your optimism. When I see the news, my optimism gets crushed more and more daily. 😔

Ou o Cinerama Majestic 70mm em São Paulo em 1968 quando com apenas 10 anos meu pai me levou para assistir 2001. Que momento magico e inesquecível.

Lucky you! There was talk of an effort by Sony to restore that cut footage. However, the Kubrick estate is against any changes.

alec cap The good sci fi now is video games like halo...

@@cancelanime1507 or the cartoon Avatar that many people thought was CGI,

I agree

Interstellar was good, but yes this far more superior!

Arrival tho

Today this scene by a modern director would a be a gooey amorphous CGI ejaculate with no artistic or aesthetic component.

Did you notice the picture-in-picture in the center of the screens on the left? The backlit cockpit windows in the Aries lander look like eyes, and the venier thruster between and below them looks like a nose. The deep red color is thought to evoke the womb, as us the emergency airlock and Hal's brain room on the Discovery Jupiter spacecraft. Did you see the people inside those side rooms? Those windows, exposed to the vacuum, are huge.

And models. The precursor of motion control, plus lots of rotoscoping and animation on an oxberry stand, front-projection, rotating sets, etc.