Back in 1968, this movie ran to empty theaters. Studio executives, reviewing the low takings, advised the theater owners to take it down. But the theater owners had something else to report. Slowly, a steady stream of stoners were taking up the front seats - nine one day, eleven the next, 21 the day after that - and sitting in rapt attention.
Some industry observers now say that if it weren't that LSD was such a rage at the time, this movie would have been buried in the vaults of MGM.
This sequence, and the movie as a whole, are remarkable also because this was well before CGI.
An excerpt from the Wikipedia article:
"The colored lights in the Star Gate sequence were accomplished by slit-scan photography of moving images of paintings. The shots of various nebula-like phenomena were colored paints and chemicals in a tank of water, a device known formally as a cloud tank, in a dark room."
