An atonishing return : 20 millions miles to Earth

I suggest we take a look at the color version of this film, which Ray Harryhausen described as the film he would have made, if he had had the budget at the time. The black and white photograms displayed here will serve as evidence.

A group of American astronauts return to Earth from a journey to Venus. This long journey is shown during the short prologue of the movie, as was the usual practice in science fiction movies at the time.

This prologue is intriguing. We find the same techniques used to create an impression of depth of field: stellar smoke, zooming in, dissolve, framing which emphasizes perspective, aerial shot of a cloudy sky, landing of the spaceship over the sea (it is the Mediterranean Sea in this shot). To the extent that the montage and composition of these shots are a partial reproduction of the credit titles of The Day the Earth Stood Still !

The same galaxy...
The same field of stars...

The same view of Earth...

Several questions arise in our black box. Does the prologue of 20 Million Miles to Earth plagiarize Robert Wise’s film? Or is The Day the Earth Stood Still also a copy of a previous film?
Or did the studios of the time, as they usually did for B-series movies, use the same archives for interstellar journey scenes? There are so many questions in the black box. I hope the readers’ sagacity will help us throw light on these questions.

The black box’s hypothesis : The prologues or credit titles are an imposed practice and a cliché in 1950s Hollywood science fiction movies. It was not about innovation, the technical and financial resources were rare back then. The budget was reserved for the special effects at the heart of the story.

The prologues could be rhetorical element of the science fiction genre, a way to tell the audience that they were watching a science fiction movie which takes place on an Earth threatened by alien (communist) invasion and governed by (atomic) fear, etc. The audience is transported by the prologue to a mindset ready to accept alien invasions and mutant monsters.

The prologues are definitely part of the film set.