Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a 1964 American science fiction film directed by Byron Haskin and produced by Aubrey Schenck that stars Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, and Adam West.

Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper, USN, and Colonel Dan McReady, USAF, reach the red planet in their spaceship, Mars Gravity Probe 1.

They are forced to use up their remaining fuel in order to avoid an imminent collision with a large orbiting meteoroid; they descend in one-man lifeboat pods, becoming the first humans on Mars, but are separated.

He figures out how to obtain the rest of what he needs to survive: he burns some coal-like rocks for warmth and discovers that heating them also releases oxygen.

When Mona gets thirsty, he lets her out and follows her to a cave where he finds a large pool of water in which are growing edible plant "sausages".

As the days grow into months, Draper slowly begins to crack from the prolonged isolation, at one point imagining an alive, but unspeaking, McReady appearing.

He also watches helplessly as his spaceship, an inaccessible "supermarket", periodically orbits overhead; without fuel, it cannot follow his radioed order to land.

Believing it might be a rescue ship from Earth, he heads towards the landing site the following morning, only to see alien spacecraft darting about in the sky.

He approaches cautiously and sees human-looking slaves being used for mining by human-shaped captors wearing spacesuits and bearing weapons.

[1] Special effects by Lawrence Butler and Academy Award-winning matte artist Albert Whitlock gave the film the benefit of "big-studio resources usually lacking in movies about outer space".

Whitlock provided the matte paintings used in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, as he commented that "some scenes of spacecraft in motion were created with the kind of flat animation seen in official NASA promotional films".

[3] Byron Haskin told interviewer Joe Adamson: Robinson Crusoe on Mars was so obviously a director's tour de force, that there was nobody to interfere and tell me how to shoot ...

I can't think of any other film I've made, unless it was The War of the Worlds, where I had such complete autonomy ... that I had as much genuine pleasure and fulfillment from as Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

They formed a perfect traveling matte[4][5]With past experience producing special effects, Haskin even hand animated photos of the slave ships that terrorize the protagonist which were patterned after Japanese visual effects designer Albert Nozaki's Martian ships' design in Haskin's earlier film, War of the Worlds.

[7] Paul Mantee was chosen out of approximately 70 actors (including Vic Lundin) based on his being an experienced unknown,[8] and by Haskin, because he resembled Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars received its first home media release in the United States in December 1993 on LaserDisc by The Criterion Collection, a video company known for its painstaking restorations of films.