A UFO lands on the Washington Mall, and two figures emerge: a silver-clad humanoid and a giant faceless robot. The humanoid, Klaatu, goes into hiding in the city posing as an eloquent visitor at a boardinghouse. He befriends a single mom (Patricia Neal) and her young son while trying to get throught to an Important Scientist (Sam Jaffe) and deliver his message: Stop making war, earthlings, or we’ll stop you!

How do you introduce children to science fiction, a genre that can pull the rug out from under their world in all the best ways? Genuine science fiction tells a good story and screws with your head. It makes you reexamine preconceptions about yourself, society, our place in the universe. It forces you to ask some of the bigger questions out there, all under the guise of a rip-snorting tale.

Presuming you want you children asking questions (and sorry, they’ll do it anyway), THE DAY THE EARTH is an ideal first sci-fi movie. It has an alien who looks like us and a ginormous robot who doesn’t. It has a boy who’s right at the center of the action, a surrogate for young viewers. The lot widens from the specific (alien craft lands in Washington DC to the fetchingly allegorical (Earth must get its act together NOW). The robot needs a catchphrase to come to life, and that catchphrasse is one of the great secret handshakes of old-movie lovers. The score is groundbreaking in its use of the theremin, the go-to electronic instrument for 50’s sci-fi weirdness and psychedelic Beach Boys songs. The philosophical dilemma of the movie is simple- can’t we all get along, and if not, why not? but vast n its implications, and it honors a kids’s nascent desire to ponder the Big Ticket Items. And the robot’s cool- did I mention that?

Ty Burr, 2007-  THE BEST OLD MOVIES FOR FAMILIES