The characters and isolated setting have been compared to those in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the plot contains certain happenings analogous to the play, leading many to consider it a loose adaptation.

Morbius appears and tells Adams and Ostrow that he has been studying artifacts of the Krell, a highly advanced race that mysteriously perished in a single night 200,000 years before.

Adams erects a force field fence around the starship, but the unseen intruder easily passes through and brutally murders Chief Engineer Quinn, who was repairing the damaged communications equipment.

An Earth expedition headed by John Grant is sent to the planet to retrieve Dr. Adams and his daughter Dorianne, who have been stranded there for twenty years.

The film was shot entirely indoors, with all the Altair IV exterior scenes simulated using sets, visual effects, and matte paintings.

The starship was surrounded by a huge, painted cyclorama featuring the desert landscape of Altair IV; this one set took up all of the available space in one of the Culver City sound stages.

According to a "Behind the Scenes" featurette on the film's DVD, a close look at the creature shows it to have a small goatee beard, suggesting its connection to Dr. Morbius, the only character with this physical feature.

Instead, Meador simply sketched each frame of the entire sequence in black pencil on animation stand translucent vellum paper; each page was then photographed in high contrast, so that only the major details remained visible.

"[26] Variety wrote: "Imaginative gadgets galore, plus plenty of suspense and thrills, make the Nicholas Nayfack production a top offering in the space travel category.

[24] Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film was "more than another science-fiction movie, with the emphasis on fiction; it is a genuinely thought-through concept of the future, and the production MGM has bestowed on it gives new breadth and dimension to that time-worn phrase, 'out of this world.

'"[28] John McCarten of The New Yorker called the film "a pleasant spoof of all the moonstruck nonsense the movies have been dishing up about what goes on among our neighbors out there in interstellar space.

The Criterion Collection later re-issued Forbidden Planet in CinemaScope's original 2.55:1 aspect ratio for the first time, on a deluxe laserdisc set with various extra features on a second disc.

In the novel, he repeatedly exposes himself to the Krell's manifestation machine, which (as suggested in the film) boosts his brain power far beyond normal human intelligence.

While not stated explicitly in the film (although the basis for a deleted scene first included as an extra with the Criterion Collection's LaserDisc set and included with both the later 50th anniversary DVD and current Blu-ray releases), the novelization compared Altaira's ability to tame the tiger (until her sexual awakening with Commander Adams) to the medieval myth of a unicorn being tamable only by a virgin.

The tiger, deer, and monkeys are all conscious creations by Dr. Morbius as companions ("pets") for his daughter and only outwardly resemble their Earth counterparts.

The novel also differs somewhat from the film in that it does not directly establish the great machine as the progenitor of the animals or monster; instead only attributes them to Morbius' elevated mental power.

[41] MGM producer Dore Schary had been approached by them at a nightclub in Greenwich Village while on a family Christmas visit to New York City, where they asked if he was interested in listening to a demonstration of their electronic music.

[43] While the theremin had been used on the soundtracks of Spellbound (1945) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the Barrons are credited with creating the first completely electronic film score, preceding the development of analog synthesizers by Robert Moog and Don Buchla in the early 1960s.

Using ideas and procedures from the book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) by the mathematician and electrical engineer Norbert Wiener, Louis Barron constructed his own electronic circuits that he used to generate the score's "bleeps, blurps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums, and screeches", making heavy use of ring modulation.

[44][45] Since Bebe and Louis Barron did not belong to the Musicians Union, their work could not be considered for an Academy Award in either the "soundtrack" or "sound effects" categories; this also necessitated the "electronic tonalities" credit.

Rose was originally hired to compose the musical score in 1955, but his main title theme was discarded when he was discharged from the project by Dore Schary in late December of that year.

A decade later, in 1986, their soundtrack was released on a music CD for the film's 30th Anniversary, with a six-page color booklet containing images from Forbidden Planet, plus liner notes from the composers and Bill Malone.

[44] A tribute to the film's soundtrack was performed live in concert by Jack Dangers, and is available on disc one of the album Forbidden Planet Explored.

[49][50] Many costume and prop items were reused in several different episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone, most of which were filmed by Rod Serling's Cayuga Productions at the MGM studio in Culver City, including Robby the Robot, the various C-57D models, the full-scale mock-up of the base of the ship (which featured in the episodes "To Serve Man" and "On Thursday We Leave for Home"), the blaster pistols and rifles, crew uniforms, and special effects shots.

In late September 2015, several screen-used items from Forbidden Planet were offered in Profiles in History's Hollywood Auction 74, including Walter Pidgeon's "Morbius" costume, an illuminating blaster rifle, blaster pistol, a force field generator post, and an original Sascha Brastoff steel prehistoric fish sculpture seen outside Morbius' home; also offered were several lobby cards and publicity photos.

While this was not the intent of the show's producer, the special effects crew, tasked with creating the imagery, stated that the Krell's machine was a definite influence on their Epsilon III designs.

The Outer Limits episode "The Man with the Power" revisits the premise of a person's subconscious manifesting as a destructive, murderous entity.

Author George R. R. Martin cites Forbidden Planet as his favorite science fiction film and states that he owns a working full-size Robby the Robot replica.

Robby was also featured in the films Cherry 2000, Gremlins, The Invisible Boy, Invasion of the Neptune Men, Hollywood Boulevard, and Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam.

Straczynski met with people working in astrophysics, planetary geology, and artificial intelligence to reinterpret the Krell back-story as a film trilogy.