There are brief zero-G combat scenes in both Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (aboard a Klingon warship) and Star Trek: First Contact (on the exterior of the Enterprise’s hull). The Klingons prove to be such total wusses in zero-G combat in TUC that even now I can only go :rolleyes:
One has to assume the gimbals are designed to be as close to frictionless as possible so you don’t waste a ridiculous amount of energy keeping the things spinning during the years-long trip to Mars and back. Unless there was some kind of mechanical seizure, in which case the ship would rip itself apart, I’d expect the spinning and the gravity to gradually lessen.
IIRC, the pilot episode of Firefly (“Serenity”) used a little bit of zero G. At the beginning when the ship goes to “black out” so they aren’t detected by the Alliance cruiser, all the systems are turned off, including gravity. They restart the gravity when they start everything up again so they can flee the area. They don’t really show much of people in zero G in the scene - it’s mostly implied (probably too expensive to film).
I don’t remember anything that is obviously zero-G on board ship. The one bit that sticks out, actually, is Kaylee climbing onto something to hit the shutoff and then complaining, in the dark, ‘and now I can’t get back down’, which might seem to imply that gravity was still a factor, but that’s picking nits.
The EVA sequence with Mal, Zoe, and Jayne doing the salvaging did seem to convey a sense of free-fall, but that’s a bit of a different thing.
I might have read too much into it - I guess I always assumed that Kaylee saying she couldn’t get down was due to lack of gravity and not due to the lights being out, since she probably knows the engine room so well I think she could climb down in the dark (and it wasn’t really pitch black). Also, when Mal, Jayne, and Zoe climb back into the airlock their crates float around at first until they engage the gravity within the airlock by flipping a switch.
And didn’t the bounty-hunter episode have an EVA bit showing zero-G?
Mike Jittlov (of The Wizard of Speed and Time fame) made a brief movie in the Vomit Comet, or one of its cousins. I’ve seen it – they start with the pretense of Jittlov and a female assistant going into a “zero G” chamber. They really did film in a “weightless” situation (parabolic arc trajectory). Jittlov said the stuff they didn’t use was more interesting.
With that in mind, I understand that a brief clip on one of those Girls Gone Wild videos was done in the same circumstances. I wish I knew which one – that would be worth seeing.
The movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space seems to be set o a spaceship trabvelling at 1 G, since there is apparent gravity, although in the long shots of the ship it doesn’t seem to be. Nevertheless, when they walk on the outside of the ship with magnetic boots they seem to be in a weightless environment.
That also seems to be the case in The Phantom Planet, and other cheap 50’s space flicks – it acts like artificial gravity inside, but zero G outside. Probably because of that “cost” argument (It costs to make sturdy, “live” sets that you can rotate and put wires through panels of, but it’s cheap to put wires on the outside of a ship.
In fact, it always bothers me when I see the interior of such a ship – it always seems to be filled with loose objects that would make tremendous missiles if the ship suddenly accelerated in any direction. Things are better stowed on a 15-foot sailboat than on your typical 1950s spaceship. Forbidden Planet is a notable exception.
Lots of cheap old flicks have moments of weightlessness, but they soon forget about it. One example is the unbelievably awful From the Earth to the Moon.
Of course, it should be much easier to simulate zero-g with today’s special-effects technology and CGI technology.
Here’s an obscure one, although I violates two of the OP’s requirements, being neither space opera, nor good, but…
The 1985 movie Moving Violations, starring Bill Murray’s spectacularly less talented brother, John, and created by the visionaries responsible for Police Academy, featured a scene where John Murray bangs the class hottie (played by Jennifer Tilly, apparently) into a “zero-g chamber” at a NASA testing facility that he somehow has access to. Unsurprisingly, the scene is so lame that it carries a genuine risk of physical harm to the viewer.
Girls Gone Wild Ultimate Rush - they took Joe Francis’s jet (yes, he had is own damn jet!) and flew some parabolas with some nakie Girls Going Wild. Could only get about 5 seconds per parabola though. Maybe 30 seconds floating total.
I…I… I read about this somewhere. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
A similar thing several years ago from an outfit called Key West Mile High Club. They gutted their plane and put in a bed, and people would charter them to have sex and join the mile high club. They had a video of a naked woman masturbating while the pilot was flying some parabolas. But one day somebody tried to hijack the plane to Cuba and it crashed in the ocean.
I read about that too.
It’s b/c Jennifer Tilly’s character was a rocket scientist.
“It’s not like she’s a rocket scientist…so, what do you do?”
“I’m a rocket scientist.”
I’m a nitpicker, but that doesn’t bother me. I can easily imagine that the systems are set up so that the gravity is the absolute last thing that’s going go to fail. Especially since the inertial dampeners (rarely referred to, but clearly implied) are probably part of the same system. If the G-IE system goes out during manuevers at the speeds the space opera ships must be travelling (even sublight), the crew will be dead before they notice. I also imagine that the hyperdrives are set up so that they won’t even begin to engage if there’s a gravity problem.
A lot of not-so-cheap spaceflight movies undoubtedly don’t have artificial gravity, but they don’t seem to dwell on it. I’m thinking of:
**Marooned
Countdown
Riders to the Stars
The Right Stuff
** and the Disney TV special from the 1950s and early 1960s on spaceflight.
And there were plenty of old cheap SF flicks that depicted astronauts, usually in crowded capsules:
The Quatermass Xperiment (aka The Creeping Unknown
**The First Man Into Space
The Crawling Hand
The Incredible Melting Man
Monster a Go-Go**
And all those old Twilight Zone and Outer Limit episodes featuring astronauts.
Absolutely. And in examples that show the craft cruising at well-sub-light, it is important for the crew to operate in an approximately-1-G environment so they don’t turn to jellyfish in normal gravity.
In Private’s porn flick Mission to Uranus 1 (nominated for a Nebula award!) Sylvia Saint and a male actor actually have sex in free fall. The premise is that they are astronauts on a space station or a space ship. The effect was created on board of a Russian counterpart to the Vomit Comet.
The minute I heard about this film I of course rushed to buy the DVD. It is … interesting. Sylvia Saint is always lovely to watch, but I think the crew needed some more practice filming in free fall, and I don’t think preparation and set-up for the scene were quite up to scratch.
Nonetheless it was definitely educational and well worth the money. The ejaculation scene looks positively weird but it’s a shame they didn’t use an actor who could produce a high volume of ejaculate - in the interest of science, of course!
Cal- I searched for this and could only find mention of something on TV from 1982, which was long before the general public was allowed on any parabolic flights. Is this what you are talking about? Any links you can give?
They are going to make a movie based on the Stardance novel, which was about dance in zero-g. They have explored filming on parabolic flights but sounds like they are going to use computer effects instead. But don’t hold your breath - this has been in the works for a few years now and they are having one problem after another.
I attended a lecture Jittlov gave a small SF con back around 1981, at which he showed a LOT of short films he made that haven’t been generallt released. Of course, I haven’t seen them since. It almost certainly wasn’t on TV in 182. That’s about the time they released his made-for-Disney film Mouse Mania, which might be what you’re thinking of:
While most of it takes place on the ground the majority of the space sequences in Odyssey 5 take place in zero-g. (They’re in space shuttles most of the time. One scene takes place in an alien spacecraft which does has (unexplained) gravity.)
The commentary on the DVD spends a bit of time talking about how they faked the zero-g effects.
The only thing I could find that sounded like what you are talking about was a TV program called The Future: What’s Next, which had a segment called Weightless Love. Anyway, what you were talking about sounded really interesting, just wondered if was possible to see it. Sounds like no. Oh well…