| Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon | |
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A poster bearing the film poster bearing one of the films alternative titles: Blast Off |
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| Directed by | Don Sharp |
| Produced by | Harry Alan Towers |
| Written by | Dave Freeman Harry Alan Towers |
| Narrated by | Maurice Denham |
| Starring | Burl Ives Troy Donahue Gert Fröbe Hermione Gingold Lionel Jeffries Dennis Price |
| Music by | John Scott |
| Cinematography | Reginald H. Wyer |
| Editing by | Ann Chegwidden |
| Studio | Jules Verne Films |
| Distributed by | Momentum Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 1967 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (aka Rocket to the Moon,Blast Off) is a 1967 British science fiction comedy film directed by Don Sharp and produced by Harry Alan Towers. It was released in the United States as Those Fantastic Flying Fools.
Towers (as "Peter Welbeck") devised the story, very loosely based on From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, and the script was by Dave Freeman. Burl Ives plays showman Phineas T. Barnum in a race to become the first man to reach the Moon. The comic style is in the vein of other star-studded caper movies of the era, such as It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). As such it has some clever moments. Lionel Jeffries as an engineer named Sir Charles Dillworthy shows a model of the machine to take the astronaut to the Moon. He is asked how it will bring him back. Jeffries, with a slight look of disapproval at the question says, "The project was to get a man to the moon. Nobody said a word about getting him back!" Terry-Thomas in another of his unscrupulous businessmen or scoundrel roles, drives Jeffries around in an early prototype of an automobile, but when it runs down he takes out a rubber tube and pumps gas out of a gas streetlamp into the engine. A horified Jeffries comments, "The whole concept of this car is immoral. It runs on stolen gas!". Unimpressed, Terry-Thomas replies, "You miss the point. It is very economical!"
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