You probably won't want to watch all of this, either. It's almost an hour and back when we watched this in junior high school, it felt like it ran about eleven weeks.
This is Our Mr. Sun, a film made for the Bell Science Series in the fifties. Frank Capra directed and is credited as writer, though it's believed that others, including Willy Ley, did a lot of it. Bill Hertz directed the animated sequences, which were produced by the UPA Cartoon Studio. The live-action material features Dr. Frank C. Baxter and Eddie Albert, and the cartoon voices were done by Marvin Miller, Sterling Holloway and at least one other person…
Among folks who study voicework, there seems to be some argument as to whether the role of Father Time was actually performed, as credited, by Lionel Barrymore in his final acting gig. The skepticism probably flows from the fact that Mr. Barrymore passed away in November of 1954 and this film debuted on television in November of 1956. That seems like too much lead time for it to have been Barrymore…but research has determined that Capra finished the film in April of '54. So it could easily have been Lionel Barrymore and probably was.
Even though it preempted a pretty boring teacher back in junior high, I found the movie agonizing in its ability to cause my eyes to glaze over and my eyelids to plunge. It's a bit more interesting to me today, though only a bit. It now has the interesting aspect that you can score its predictions about energy usage and production as to their accuracy. Some hold up pretty well but there are a few wild pitches in there…
