Castle Films were little 8mm or 16mm copies of Hollywood-type movies you could once purchase and run on your home movie projector. In the decades before home video recorders, that was a big deal.
Someone at the Castle Films company was very facile at trimming whole features down to one-reel lengths. Abbott and Costello Go To Mars (1953) was a 77 minute film…but Castle edited it down to a little under nine minutes and did surprisingly little damage to it.
They retitled it Rocket and Roll, perhaps because the original title was inaccurate. Amazingly, in Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, Abbott and Costello do not go to Mars. In Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, Abbott and Costello go to Venus.
I'm guessing what happened was that someone thought the Mars title was commercial and they started planning the film under that name. Then someone else decided it would be even more commercial to fill the movie with beautiful women in abbreviated costumes…so they worked that into the script, having Bud and Lou land on a planet ruled by gorgeous amazons. (One of them, though you probably won't be able to spot her in this, was Anita Ekberg.) At some point, someone decided the planet then should be Venus, so they made it Venus, even though it was too late to change the title. So what you wound up with was the biggest "misnaming" of a movie ever until some studio exec was unaware that Krakatoa was not East of Java.
This is the sound version that Castle issued. In a box in a closet downstairs, I have the 8mm silent version that I purchased around 1964. I haven't compared but I think it's the same cut but with title cards dropped in here and there…
