TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Sci-Fi Adventures (Them! / The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms / World Without End / Satellite in the Sky)

I purchased this set in 2018 and it cost just under $10 then. Personally, I bought the DVD for Them! and the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms which made the set worth it. Today(26-Mar-2023) it's right around $40 and unless you need the other 2 movies, I would recommend getting a disc dedicated to the movies you want from this selection with the hope that there's bonus features included. There are no bonus features on the set I own. I did see the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms on this site for $17, but I have no idea about the quality of that DVD.

Bought this new TCM DVD collection on Amazon. I have seen 3 of the movies several times each on earlier media. Satellite In The Sky was new for me.Them! was a B/W classic "B" Sci Fi 50s movie about giant 9ft to 15ft ants attacking, killing and eating people in and around LA Cal., nine years after the first A bomb test in White Sands NM. Talk about mutations! The B/W film was put on DVD very well with good audio. Good plot and acting. 5 starsThe Beast From 20,000 Fathoms another B/W classic "B" Sci Fi 50's movie about a titanic dinosaur trapped in the Arctic ice freed by a nuclear explosion. First seen by two scientists in a scientific expedition to measure the results of the atomic blast. 1 member killed/ buried alive by an avalanche caused by the Beast. Ships at sea sank, lighthouse destroyed and NYC attacked and people eaten. Great 50s special effects.Good acting and great plot. Good B/W on DVD and good audio. 5 starsWorld Without End. A classic colored 50s Sci Fi movie about 4 scientists/astronauts with a mission to recon. Mars. Mission successful but on way back to Earth spaceship and crew go through a time warp at fantastic speed. The special effects for the spaceship going through the time warp were not good. Cheap and cheesy. 1 star. They crash/slide on snow and ice on Earth. The ship is damaged and the 4 scientists travel on foot about 12 miles and down to a warmer land in what was Colorado. They battle two mutated giant spiders in a cave. Again cheap cheesy special effects with big red eyed spiders...phony. 2 stars on this special effects. They battle 1 eyed mutated human beast men, mutated from radiation from a nuclear war around 2188. They find another cave and underground facility with regular humans with very beautiful women and find out its 2508 AD over 500 years in the future. The color and audio on the DVD was good. Excellent plot and acting. Great ending. Rated 4 3/4 stars due to the 2 scenes of poor special effects. The rest of the movie was 5 starsSatellite In The Sky was a British movie. Its a color movie about the first atomic powered spacecraft to reach Earth orbit. Unknown until the last minute the pilot and crew are to bring a nuclear bomb on the spacecraft more powerful than the H bomb and exploded it in space. A female reporter stows away. Dumb stupid security. Also a military professor gets on the crew in the last minute to detonate the bomb. Unfortunately they can't get the bomb away from the spaceship and the bomb is getting ready to go off. OK ending. The special effects were so so. Interesting idea about an atomic powered spacecraft. This was the first time I ever saw this movie. It never caught fire in the US. This movie INMO was a "C" movie rated 3 stars. OK but nothing special.I rate the combined 4 movie collection on DVD 4 1/3 stars. Very good for your collection especially Them!, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and World Without End. Satellite In The Sky just so so.

I grew up on these old sci-fi monster movies. I remember waiting on Saturday nights (with a big bowl of popcorn on my lap) for my local "Ghost Host" to introduce the weekly radiated monster to begin destroying mid-western or desert towns.Turner Classic Movies has packaged together four titles from those drive-in days of the late 1950's early 1960's in one cool little package. If you are a fan of these sci-fi B-movies, you should definately grab this set:"Them" (1954)- A genuine classic starring Marshall Dillon (James Arness) himself as "something" begins attacking a small desert town in New Mexico. Odd footprints are found around each scene of destruction. A pot-bellied scientist and his daughter are brought in to help solve the mystery (gotta love the old wise scientists/professors in these films). Also starring James Whitmore as the state trooper who stumbles onto the first attack by "Them!". Outstanding special effects, and a fun story make this a movie you will re-visit often."Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953) - Almost a decade before "Godzilla" stormed ashore in Tokyo, "Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" unleashes a huge lizard (actually a dinosaur called Rhedosaurus) on New York City. After being thawed from it's deep sleep in the Arctic Circle by a nuclear bomb test, the creature begins it's reign of destruction down the cost of Canada and onto New York City where it decides to visit Coney Island. The real draw here is the stop motion creature F/X by Ray Harryhausen which still look amazing today."World Without End" (1956) - This is a nifty, but kind of depressing time travel tale. Returning from a trip to Mars, four astronauts find themselves flung a couple centuries into Earth's future. They find Earth is now a nuclear wasteland and that it's inhabitents now live underground. The rulers of this new civilization don't want the astronauts to interfere with their world and look to get rid of them. A bit talky, and somewhat slow, but still a decent little flick."Satellite in the Sky" (1956) - This one is kind of a dud. Maybe toss it on as background noise, or on a sleepy rainy afternoon where you can doze off and on while it spools out. Britain wants to test out a new bomb in space, and launch a rocket with a full crew to conduct the test. They activate the bomb, but the ship can't get away. The crew has must try to defuse the bomb before it explodes. Lots of talk and cheezy 1950's space scenes, but pretty boring overall, and the reason this set doesn't get 5 stars.Still with the one dud, this set is well worth picking up for fans of the genre.

Well now, I bought this because of one these films -World Without End (1956) - which I'd seen as a kid in the 50's and have never seen since, though I have brief memories of it and just wanted to see it again. Having Them (1954) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) in one set was an added bonus. Satellite In The Sky (1956), however was completely new to me and sounded like creaky low-budget crap.Beast was stop-motion animation giant Ray Harryhausen's first full length movie and for a small studio. Made for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, the producer accepted Warner Bros offer of twice the budget for all the rights and went on to tear his hair out when it proceeded to make millions at the box office. Harryhausen was still learning his craft and had to do a lot on a small budget so what we get is brief glimpses of the monster throughout the movie until it attacks New York in the last 15 minutes.Of course it's creaky by today's standards though that is hardly a fair criticism as it couldn't be anything else. What it does have is an honoured place in the history of Science Fiction and monster movies.The opening sequences of Them are quite eerie with its desert scenes, moaning of the wind, and obscuring wind-blown sand. There's the mute, blank-faced, doll-clutching little girl wandering in from the desert and the contorted body of the elderly shop-keeping in the basement remains of his store. All this builds well to the first shot of a giant ant looming above our heroine. The pace keeps up well until the ants nest is destroyed and we get a long period while the two escaped queens are searched for before the final climax in the Los Angeles storm drains which doesn't match up to the first part of the film.Unlike the rhedosaurus of Beast, the ants are (often large) animated models which inevitably means they tend to be rather slow moving and, this being the 50's, never bite anyone in half with their large powerful pincers. According to the jacket there are supposed to be extras about making the movie but I couldn't find any. A shame as I was interested in how the ants were done.Proceed with caution. Spoilers for World without End.As I said, I remember actually going to the cinema to watch this one when I was a kid and remember the following things about it: the spaceship going through a timewarp; landing in the snow; attack of a giant caterpillar in a tunnel; attacked by big hairy men; rescued by underground dwelling civilised humans; a happy end of hairy people and undergrounders getting together to live in peace on the surface.Actually, as it turns out, that's just about pretty much the entire movie. Not bad for something I haven't seen in around 55 years or more, so it obviously made an impression. Now, the differences. It wasn't a caterpillar it was a very fake (rubbery) giant spider thrown at a member of the cast from offscreen by the movie's crew. The hairy men were mutants with only one eye and other facial disfigurements. Our heroes spent a lot of time talking with the undergrounders (a bunch of wimps) and falling for their feisty women. Then they go outside for a fight with the cyclopses, kill their leader and let the nicer non-cyclopses (the majority) learn to become civilised.So basically I remembered the good bits. Still good though.I wasn't going to watch Satellite In The Sky at all until this afternoon, a wet and windy Sunday, when I thought I'd give it a go and was glad I did. Far from the low budget b/w American cheapie I was expecting, I got a widescreen in colour with a decent budget and decent actors British film. Just look at the main cast which is highly recognisable for persons of a certain age: leading man Keiron Moore, vivacious Lois Maxwell (before her Miss Moneypenny days), Brian Forbes (before he started directing), Jimmy Hanley, Donald Wolfit, and several others, like Bernard Breslaw, in smaller roles who I recognised from tv appearances. It's a very English film of the period which is quite fun for those fond of nostalgia. Needless to say, everyone (as in all the others except World without End) smokes like chimneys.The plot is simple, the title misleading. It's the first journey into space. The big secret is that it only got the funding so that a super-duper dangerous bomb could be tested in space without endangering the earth. Needless to say things go wrong and they can't get the bomb away from the spaceship (which has become magnetised to it) because the bomb's propulsion system is faulty. And it's not just the engineering that's a pile of crap. The security is worse as Lois Maxwell, whose cranky anti-space flight journalist, sneaks on board and this is at a supposedly secure installation. But it's all good stiff upper lip British entertainment.Given that, in my time, I considered myself somewhat of an expert on science fiction and science fiction movies, I'm just puzzled as to how I didn't know that this was a British sf film, especially when one of the three scriptwriters was, now long forgotten, British SF writer J T McIntosh.Highly recommended collection of vintage SF and monster movies.

C'est l'atome qui caractérise les 4 films de ce DVD. THEM!: Dans le désert du Nouveau-Mexique, des gens affrontent des fourmis géantes qui ont grandi à cause de l'explosion de la bombe atomique d'Alamagordo neuf ans auparavant. THE BEAST FROM 20 000 FATHOMS: Un dinosaure vieux de 100 millions d'années est réveillé par une explosion atomique dans l'Arctique. À remarquer dans ce film les effets spéciaux de Ray Harryhausen. WORLD WITHOUT END: Des astronautes sont projetés dans l'avenir de la Terre où la race humaine a été divisée en deux suite à une guerre atomique: des mutants voraces et sanguinaires et de baux humains qui se laissent littéralement vivre sans rien entreprendre. À remarquer la ressemblance du scénario avec ''The Time Machine de George Pal en 1960. SATELLITE IN THE SKY: La première fusée spatiale contenant les premiers êtres humains allant dans l'espace doit transporter une bombe atomique dans l'espace et l'y faire exploser. Les ennuis ne manqueront pas de s'accumuler pour eux. Bref, ces films, malgré qu'ils aient vieilli, se laissent très bien regarder.

Of course, the movie "Them" is the reason to purchase this DVD however I would rate this collection higher but the "cast and crew" special feature lists the actors but does not provide any discography about them. Without them, it's less convenient to note other films which star these actors who you may want to follow on other projects. I guess it's back to IMDB for that purpose.

We got this collection after seeing "Them" on TCM and just couldn't resist adding it to our collection. All of these old Sci-Fi classics set are typical of those produced in the 1950s. They are so bad they are inspired -- corny and always with the love interest. What fun!!! Great actors in all of them.

I love this collection just like these movie though im not a big fan of world without end and satellite in the sky is okay the other two are the BEST!the beast of 20,000 fathoms was great and as for THEM Its classic 50s scfi the ants were Good Ray did an excellent work on the best