The sets are gorgeous and magnificent. The 'special effects' are—VERY effective! The story is hallucinogenic and outrageous. The musical numbers are gratuitous and hilarious. The hairstyles, the clothes, the backdrops all may be nominally futuristic, but it's the future through a 1930's lens—my favorite decade in art and film. Everything is improbable and unbelievable—and it's all delightfully pre-code and 100% politically incorrect. What's there not to like?El Brendel is really quite engaging. He takes several deft falls and acquits himself as a decent visual comedian. He even gets to do a multi-personality skit, which I'm assuming came from his Vaudeville shtick, so there is some historical interest to this.And if you like Marjorie White, this is the movie for you! She has a pretty large roll in this movie. She mugs, she sings, she performs eccentric dancing, she pantomimes. As her usual spunky self, the first time we see Ms. White is on a tele-TV screen: she's in her underwear. Immediately upon appearing in-person, she takes off her clothes. Toward the finale she also gets a nice comic monologue. My only disappointment is that she doesn't manage to stow away on the spaceship to Mars… (As a "guilty pleasure" I will to admit: I love the exotically-dressed Amazonian outer-space women of early "sci-fi" cinema. So the Martian Women are a plus here, not a minus!)Admittedly, there are a few slow-ish shots. But even these work in the film's favor—as Ms. White suddenly grabs the rear-seat of a man walking too slowly through the set, and thrusts him forward with the admonition to "get moving!"Well, folks, "Just Imagine" now joins the ranks of much maligned movies that I actually enjoy enough to watch more than once, and which I will show to my friends—and of which they will heartily approve. This list includes: "Meet the Baron", "Three's A Crowd"; "A Pest from the West"; "Cuckoo on a Choo Choo", "Outer Space Jitters", "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars", and Larry Semon's "Wizard of Oz".All we need is a pristine print; and since one was recently projected at David Packard's "Stanford Theatre", I certainly hope a copy gets printed onto Blu-Ray sometime soon!

Here's a first for me - a pre-Hays Code science-fiction romantic musical comedy. Just Imagine, directed by David Butler, envisions a 1980 where everybody flies rather than use cars, are given numbers instead of names, eat food and drink alcohol in pill form, and have their life partners decided by a judge. Just Imagine is a true oddity, and should be seen by anybody interested in obscure curiosities or the evolution of sci-fi in cinema. Despite the wonderful Oscar-nominated set design, the film is also very, very bad, plagued by wooden acting, forgettable songs, and some plain old weirdness.J-21 (John Garrick) is in love with LN-18 (Maureen O'Sullivan), but the fact that he has reached the peak in his field - aviation - is stopping him from achieving greater things. Due to the limits of his field. the judge deciding on LN-18's ideal partner is the favouring smug and loathsome aristocrat MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson) instead. After witnessing a successful experiment to bring back a man, who dubs himself Single O (vaudeville performer El Brendel), back to life after being frozen in 1930, J-21 is approached by a scientist who has perfected a 'rocket plane' capable of reaching Mars, and wants J-21 to be the pilot. Joined by Single-O and his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson), J-21 sets out on a mission into the unknown in the hope of becoming a hero and winning the hand of his true love.Some early moments of Just Imagine are truly wonderful. Riding high above the city in their aircrafts, R-21 parks up next to LN-18 for a mid-air chat amidst the backdrop of skyscrapers. The special effects throughout are wonderfully charming and hold up well 75 years on. These brief delights are sadly few and far between, and the film spends the majority of its hefty 110 minute running-time churning out blandly-filmed song-and-dance routines, including a bizarre number about never killing a fly because it may be in love with another fly, Brendel's tiresome and unfunny shtick, and taking its sweet time to actually get into outer space. When we finally lands on Mars, we are in Ed Wood territory, with scantily-clad natives and plonky fight scenes. It flopped upon release due to the decreasing popularity of musicals at the time (pre-Busby Berkeley), but Just Imagine at the very least deserves to be seen once and never again.

This is a very early Sci Fi feature that is a blend of Buck Rogers and Busby Berkeley with a Josephine Baker type dance revue thrown in for good measure. The beginning is a fascinating jump in time by 50 year increments. Considering how much the world had changed between 1880 and 1930 its no wonder they expected 1980 to be much more advanced than it really was. The Art Deco architectural sets are great, the costumes are outstanding, any one of the women's gowns could be fashionable today. The plot is pretty lame, Ed Brendel is annoying, and the acting leaves a lot to be desired, but I couldn't take my eyes off of the screen. And when the martian dance troupe started doing a dance routine that was very similar to a Josephine Baker dance - and foreshadows Martha Graham I gave up. It's so bad its good, so trippy it will leave you amazed, and you will laugh at all the wrong spots. Quite frankly - its better than Land of the Lost - so if it shows up in a theater near you - go with a very open and receptive mind. And keep an eye out for "modern inventions" that are now part of everyones life.

This film is supposed to be what life will be like in the distant future of 1980! And, amazingly enough, they got almost nothing right--sort of like "The Jetsons" portrays the future--but even worse! Because of this and the very, very strange musical numbers, it's probably the weirdest film I've seen in years--and I've seen a ton of films! In this future, everyone flies about in airplanes instead of cars (sort of like Jetson's vehicles) and there are traffic cops directing people in their own private hover planes. People are numbers and letters--names are no more. Marriages are only allowed by the government and they decide who you marry--in other words, a eugenics program to weed out the "undesirables". Everyone uses videophones. And, people eat and drink in pill form. Oddly, at the same time, fashions are mostly that of 1930! One of the weirdest story elements is a guy who is brought back to life by doctors. He'd been dead 50 years and the doctors didn't seem to care one bit about the man--just that the experiment worked!! So much for professional ethics, but in the bizarro world of the future, ethics are really not especially important.But, by far the weirdest part was late in the film. Since the hero in the story cannot marry his beloved (as he was rejected by the government organization that approves marriages), he's decided to try to make himself famous in order to gain their approval. So, he agrees to take a trip to Mars!! This first Earth flight to Mars is a hoot, as not only is this the same spaceship from the Flash Gordon series of the later 1930s but the planet is hilarious. The Earth men can breath the air just fine and the planet is populated by scantily clad humanoids (mostly women) and each Martian has an exact double who is evil!! I love the evil twin angle as well as the silly Busby Berkeley-style song and dance numbers they do on Mars! It's too funny for a mere written description! And the costumes and set designs are like something out of an LSD trip!! The movie, despite having poor acting, terrible writing, a dumb script, horrible songs throughout and many dull moments is STILL well worth seeing for all the goofy moments and the absolutely insane way they anticipated the future would be. I know I said it before, but you just have to see it to believe it. My score of 2 is for the quality of the film--not the watchability. It is VERY easy to see and enjoy despite a constant stream of stupidity! In fact, it's a great film to watch with friends so you can make fun of the thing! Plus, it's fun looking for actors who were later respected (such as Maureen O''Sullivan and Mischa Auer)--so you can marvel at their ability to salvage their careers after this turkey.