Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) Directed by Nicholas Webster. Written by Paul L. Jacobson based on the story by Glenville Mareth. Starring John Call, Leonard Hicks, Vincent Beck, and Bill McCutcheon.
By the time the villainous Voldar says, “One false move and your little ho ho ho man will be destroyed!” I had already decided this is the greatest movie ever made about Martians kidnapping Santa Claus.
I’m not much of a bad movie aficionado. I know there are people who seek out bad movies for fun. I am friends with and have hung out with such people, which is why I’ve seen such gems as Troll 2 (1990) and The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) and even Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977). That last one has lead to some awkward moments, because carelessly referencing Death Bed: The Bed That Eats in casual conversation raises questions one might not be prepared to answer in certain company, such as, “Why did you watch a movie about a demonic bed?” and “But how does the demonic bed eat people?” and “Are you sure that’s a real movie and not a weird dream you had?”
My point is, I don’t seek out movies with “so bad it’s good” reputations on my own, but I do understand and appreciate their appeal. Pretty much all I knew about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians before I sat down to watch it is that a lot of people put it in that category.
They are right to do so. This is not a good movie, but it is an amazing movie. It’s so incredibly stupid. It’s delightful.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is the brainchild of the film’s producer and screenwriter Paul L. Jacobson, who has no other film credits to his name. Not before, not after. In a 1964 New York Times article about upcoming films, Jacobson explains that he wanted to make a Christmas movie for kids: “Except for the Disneys, there’s very little in film houses during the season that the kids can recognize and claim as their own.” The same article notes that well-known film producer and financier Joseph E. Levine had agreed to distribute the film; Levine was the man who had brought Godzilla (1954) to the United States as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), and he would later be responsible for the distribution of movies such as The Graduate (1967) and The Producers (1967).
From the very small number of articles that mention the movie, it seems that having Levine linked with the film had people expecting a fairly normal Christmas movie, even if it came from a first-time producer and screenwriter. Jacobson hired Nicholas Webster, a well-regarded documentary filmmaker, to make the movie on a shoestring budget in two weeks at a studio on Long Island.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians made a healthy amount of money when it came out, but I haven’t been able to find any contemporary reviews, so it’s hard to figure out what critics thought of it at the time. It was released and promoted in November of 1964 and stayed in theaters across the U.S. for several months, even after the Christmas season was over; it would subsequently be rereleased at Christmastime over the years. The success led to more opportunities for Jacobson, but he fumbled every one and never made another movie.
From what I can tell, the film was in the public domain upon release because of the omission of a notice of copyright. That is not a terrible uncommon omission in the history of film; I’ve mentioned it before with The Brother From Another Planet (1984). In the case of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, its public domain status eventually led to the film getting a longer life in various television and home video releases, which is how it found its way into the childhood traditions of a great many people. It was eventually shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1991, thereby cementing its place among people who love to laugh about silly movies.
Because it is a silly movie. It is such a silly movie.
Here is the story: The people of Mars are worried about their children. The leader of Mars, Kimar (Leonard Hicks), and his wife Momar (Leila Martin), have noticed that their two children are acting glum and listless. Bomar (Chris Month) and Girmar (Pia Ziadora, about twenty years before her brief, unsuccessful Hollywood career and her more successful pop music career) have lost interest in eating, although eating meals on Mars consists of swallowing food pills, so who can blame them. They now spend all their free time watching television programs from Earth. This includes a news broadcast from KIDTV in which a reporter visits the North Pole to interview Santa Claus (John Call). A real news broadcast, that is—in the world of this movie, everybody knows Santa is real.
Also present in their household is Dropo, who is played by Bill McCutcheon, one of the very, very few recognizable actors in this film. I couldn’t figure out why he looked so familiar to me, not until I read his obituary and learned he had played the recurring character of Uncle Wally on Sesame Street during the 1980s. It’s not clear what role Dropo plays in the home of Kimar and Momar. He might be some kind of servant. Do the Martians have slaves? Is Mars a slave-holding society? Already I have so many questions.
Also, before we go any further, I just want to point out that “Kimar” is shortened from King Martian, Momar from Mom Martian, and Bomar and Girmar from Boy and Girl Martian. I have no idea if Jacobson thought he was being clever or just never bothered to give them names, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.
Kimar wants to help the depressed children of Mars, so he does what any parent would do, which is get together other community leaders and go to a cave to summon and talk to an 800-year-old man named Chochem (Carl Don). (“Chochem” is a variant spelling of hakham, a Hebrew word for a wise man or scholar, and more proof that Jacobson did not bother actually naming his characters.) Chochem tells Kimar and the others that the children of Mars are so unhappy lately because they have information beamed into their brain from the moment they are born and have forgotten how to be kids who run around and play and have fun. Chochem does not turn to stare pointedly into the camera while he says this, but it feels like he does, even watching from a safe distance of 61 years in the future.
Chochem also says that children need a Santa Claus-like figure to teach them the whimsical wonders of childhood. So Kimar and the others do what any responsible leaders would do and head to Earth to kidnap Santa. Among the group of abductors is Voldar (Vincent Beck), who does not think Mars needs Santa Claus, does not want children to be whimsical and playful, and wants Mars to regain its glory days as a planet of war. How and why actual Martians, who have never visited Earth, not only know that Mars is named after the god of war but also take pride in that fact, is never explained. Maybe their ancestors interacted with the Romans in the past? In any case, Voldar spends the entire movie trying to murder Santa.
(Beck is the other recognizable actor in the film, as under his Martian antennae is a character actor who had parts in dozens of television shows through the ’60s and ’70s.)
Upon arriving on Earth, the Martians encounter siblings Billy (Victor Stiles) and Betty (Donna Conforti), who helpfully explain that the innumerable Santas ringing bells on city streets are merely helper Santas, while the real Santa is toiling away in his North Pole workshop. Naturally, the Martians decide to go to the North Pole, but they have to abduct the children to stop them from telling anybody.
When they arrive at the North Pole, Billy and Betty overhear the Martians talking about kidnapping Santa Claus, so they sneak out of the spaceship to warn him. They endure the freezing cold, encounter the greatest polar bear puppet in the history of cinema, narrowly avoid being crushed to death by a robot named Torg, and still don’t manage to warn Santa Claus in time.
The Martians successfully kidnap Santa and head back to Mars, but they leave Mrs. Claus (Doris Rich) and several elves behind as witnesses. They also abandon Torg the killer robot, because it malfunctioned upon entering Santa’s Workshop and is now, according to the Martians, a toy. What happens between Mrs. Claus and the seven-foot-tall robotic “toy” in Santa’s absence is left up to the viewers’ imaginations and PornHub search histories.
The movie then spends about five minutes of its 70-minute runtime showing scenes of planes taking off, which is how we know the whole of Earth has mobilized to get Santa back. It never leads to anything, though, because the rest of the action takes place on Mars.
On the journey through space, Voldar tries to murder Santa and the kids by putting them in the spaceship airlock. Santa finds this to be a very amusing escapade. I am beginning to have my doubts about Santa’s mental stability and risk assessment capabilities.
It turns out that Santa’s plan to bring the magic of Christmas to Martian children is to get both the Earthling children and the human children to work in a Martian toy factory. Santa even complains that the work is too easy because it’s all automated; he merely pushes buttons while the children do the work of future Amazon warehouse employees and fulfill the orders. I am fascinated by the ethical and philosophical implications of deciding that children toiling away at unpaid labor is more beneficial to their childlike senses of whimsy than watching TV about life on other planets or learning how to travel through space.
Meanwhile, Voldar is still trying to kill Santa and the kids, but he’s bad at it, so he and his henchmen accidentally abduct Dropo, who is wearing a Santa costume. They also sabotage the Martian toy factory so that it produces only scrambled up toys, such as a doll and a teddy bear with swapped heads. By pure coincidence, two weeks after Santa Claus Conquers the Martians premiered in theaters in 1964, the Rankin/Bass stop-motion film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer aired on television for the first time. I hereby propose the theory that the Martian toys out of the sabotaged factory are the ones that populate the Island of Misfit Toys.
There is a bit of a fight in the Martian toy workshop, but of course Voldar and his henchmen are overpowered, and Kimar agrees to send Santa, Billy, and Betty back to Earth. And that’s the very abrupt end of the movie. It just ends.
Do the Martian children learn to frolic and play? We have no idea. We only ever see Martian children working in the toy workshop. Does Dropo become the Martian Santa? Probably! Do Santa and the children get home safely? We don’t know. Did Earth actually send astronauts to Mars in an untested spacecraft? Maybe! What happened to them? No idea! Maybe they died! We never find out.
Did the Martians just leave their killer robot at the North Pole for good? It’s possible. Did Santa’s workshop really produce toy rockets with real rocket fuel? I hope so. Why did the elves already know what Martians look like? I suspect a conspiracy. Why did the Martians invent a device called the Tickle Ray? I have so many questions, but I might not want the answer to that one.
Is the entire message of this movie about how toys are the true meaning of Christmas? Sure seems like it! Does Santa Claus conquer any Martians? No! Nobody gets conquered at all!
And finally: Will I now incorporate “One false move and your little ho ho ho man will be destroyed!” into my holiday vernacular at every possible opportunity? YES. Obviously.
It’s so, so ridiculous. The ridiculousness is never-ending. Voldar is so determined to straight-up murder Santa and those kids. Santa is so jolly about everything, even attempted murder, that it starts to look like pharmaceutical mood enhancement after a while. But most of all I can’t get over how the whole premise of the movie is that Martian kids need to learn how to be kids, but we never see them playing. They just work to make toys for other kids. It’s so unintentionally bleak that it goes right back around to being funny.
There was a brief period in the late ’90s when there were rumors of a remake, to be produced by David Zucker and written by Ben Edlund. A lot of places say Jim Carrey was attached to the project, but I can’t find a proper source for that, just a lot of people repeating the rumor. In the years since, the rumors have evolved to involve Cynthia Webster, daughter of director Nicholas Webster and a film cinematographer in her own right, as the director, and based on the IMDb page there might be a treatment or a script in existence, as there are screenwriters listed, but nothing else.
I have no opinion about this. I don’t actually care about Christmas movies, and now that I’ve watched one (1) this year, I’ll go back to not caring about them. The movie business is gonna do what the movie business does.
In conclusion, I can easily see why Santa Claus Conquers the Martians has been both a childhood favorite and a movie snarking favorite. It works on both levels. It’s so stupid, and it gave me a great many laughs, and that’s more than enough.
What do you think of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? Is that obnoxious jingle now stuck in your head? It’s stuck in my head. It has been for days.
With Cops Like These, Who Needs Criminals?
The Science Fiction Film Club is now taking a break for perfectly normal and innocent reasons, and definitely not to go kidnap Santa Claus and bring him to Mars. We’ll be back in January to watch a selection of films about the dark, disturbing, and violent overlap between science fiction and law enforcement.
January 7 — Mad Max (1979), directed by George Miller
Remember how the original Mad Max was a highway patrol officer? Yeah, I forgot too, until recently.
Watch: Check streaming sources. A lot of streaming sites shuffle things around at the start of the year.
January 14 — Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg
In 2002, the idea of walking into The Gap and having the store’s computer recognize you and immediately give you targeted ads was science fiction.
Watch: Check streaming sources.
January 21 — Outland (1981), directed by Peter Hyams
It’s High Noon in space.
Watch: Check streaming sources.
January 28 — RoboCop (1987), directed by Paul Verhoeven
Pretty much the only sci fi satire about American law enforcement that matters.
Watch: Check streaming sources.
One has reason to believe that Walter White could make a fortune in the catering market on Mars.
In the ’60s, it was still somewhat common for middle-class and upper-class households to have servants — even into the ’70s, as seen with characters like Alice on The Brady Bunch. (Even my middle-class family had a live-in housekeeper for a couple of years in the late ’70s.) So Dropo being a housekeeper or valet or the like wouldn’t have been seen as odd or needing explanation.
We watch this every year and we find new things to laugh about every time. One of my favorite things is how absolutely deadly serious the dude who plays Kimar is.
I may have mentioned this before but my first introduction to this movie was seeing it on MST3K and then noticing at the same time comedy central was playing the MST3k version the sci-fi channel was playing the movie straight up, but JUST far enough ahead that you could watch a scene or two on the sci-fi channel then go see MST3K make fun of it. I have yet to decide if this was amazing cross scheduling or amazingly stupid. I don’t see a world where both channels didn’t know what was going on.
SCCTM also had the first film appearance of Mrs. Claus, although the character had been around since the 19th century.
Also, I’d like to congratulate the Reactor community for not just quoting the MST3K version ad nauseum.
I caught this when I was in junior high during the early seventies. I was just entering my geek phase (that sadly lasted through college) and really embracing the joy of truly bad movies. Many people think that this sort of thing didn’t kick into existence until Mystery Science Theater 3000 but it was very much a hip thing on college campuses and with teenagers at locally owned theaters and drive-ins dating back to the fifties. I distinctly remember hearing young adults talk about it at the time.
It was also the era when local television stations had their own film libraries and ran afternoon and evening films. If it was a cheap title in the public domain, all the better. This sucker was all over the airwaves for decades and pretty much anyone who wasn’t a tight-ass had seen it growing up.
It is truly an awful movie. I’d say it’s so bad it’s more just sad. Even with my high crap tolerance I’ve never been able to sit through all of it although that could also be because the film stock and processing of the prints out there are so noxiously cruddy they make me physically ill at a glance.
I’m glad to read you got a big kick out of it and commend you for the diligence in researching the movie’s history. Now, please, go wash your eyeballs out.
“Many people think that this sort of thing didn’t kick into existence until Mystery Science Theater 3000 but it was very much a hip thing on college campuses and with teenagers at locally owned theaters and drive-ins dating back to the fifties.”
Oh, yes. The idea of doing the 1966 Batman as a campy sitcom was inspired by the popularity of audiences making fun of the 1943 Batman serial upon its re-release. MST3K just made a show out of the established practice. Plus of course there had been all the local and syndicated horror-movie TV hosts of the ’60s and ’70s who’d make jokes about the cheesy movies before and after the commercial breaks; MST’s innovation was to have the jokes continue during the movies.
The entire reason RHPS was so popular was the audience participation.
I thought of bringing up Rocky Horror, but it’s kind of the opposite thing, since it’s acting out/singing along with the movie rather than making jokes at its expense.
Some of the audience participation, at least in the DC area, involved shouting thigs like “Don’t touch the hair!”, or “Weisssss” (which I understand was different on the west coast)
“Hey Riff! Show us your mother!”
The three layers of RHPS are still very much a thing. The movie on the screen, the shadowcast, and the audience callbacks. Sometimes all three work together well and sometimes they don’t.
Although the strange thing is that the callbacks are almost a liturgical call and response with the movie. One that changes overtime but I had an almost 20 year and 1000 mile gap between going and about half the callbacks were the same.
Sure, but people who talk back to RHPS aren’t doing it out of scorn or condescension. They’re immersing themselves in it, not mocking it. There are similarities as cultural phenomena, but they aren’t the exact same thing by a long shot.
I mean every time I watch RHPS I am certainly aware how cheesy it is – but it is a fun cheesy that I enjoy being part of…so yeah I guess you are right it isn’t mocking in the same way as “Will you buy me a Golden Globe then” or “their ship runs on a Simon game”
An additional side effect of the copyright issue are stage productions of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians that range from mostly straight reenactments to surreal.
And let’s be honest Santa Clause did conquer the martians. He did it the way The Beatles conquered the United States.
Someone made a stage show of this… ….? Seriously….oh man what the heck was that like I wonder…?
He conquered the Martians by achieving concord with the Martians.
LOL. This brings back good memories of a “Worst Movie Festival” at college in 1983 which was “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” “Billy the Kid Versus Dracula,” and “Godzilla Versus the Thing.” And there was only a charge for people who left early. My friends and I stayed through all three movies. I don’t remember any of the audience shouting anything during “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” but during “Billy the Kid Versus Dracula,” someone yelled “Get some coffee!” when the actress from the Folger’s commercial appeared.
Amazing that they’d put the movie more properly known as Mothra vs. Godzilla in a “Worst Movie Festival,” because it’s easily one of the best Showa-era Godzilla movies (although it’s really more of a Mothra sequel with Godzilla as the special guest villain). I’d expect a bad-movie festival to go for something like All Monsters Attack or Godzilla vs. Megalon or the terrible English dub/re-edit of King Kong vs. Godzilla.
I fired this up on Tubi a few years ago, although I think what prompted me was seeing it listed as playing on MeTV, and oh boy did I find it unwatchable. No shade to those who… appreciate?… it for any reason. I just couldn’t even get into enjoying how bad it was and I ended up skipping through the bulk of it despite that being my absolute last resort, in the rarest of circumstances, before simply turning it off.
Minority Report: “In 2002, the idea of walking into The Gap and having the store’s computer recognize you and immediately give you targeted ads was science fiction.”
In 2025, in the the UK at least, it’s nostalgia. Gap closed all its physical stores here in 2021 and went entirely online. Now that would have been science fiction back in 2002, when just1.2% of all sales were online.
It’s definitely not a good movie, but I’ll give it props for this: Everyone fully commits to the bit–and that’s vital, because if even one person came at it ironically, it would absolutely fall apart. (Even one person in the movie, I mean. My intro to it was MST3K, and I have no regrets or complaints about that.)
Vincent Beck, in particular, plays it absolutely straight, which couldn’t’ve been easy while wearing a false mustache that was one of the fakest-looking ever filmed and was also trying to fall off the whole time. But all of the actors do what they’re asked to do, as ridiculous as it all is, and more power to them for it.