Barely escaping with your life, you come in for a landing on an alien planet, through clouds, over an alien landscape and through a green and pink canyon, dodging bolts of green lightning until you reach a red swamp swarming with fireflies.

A huge crab-like creature materializes out of the fireflies and lunges toward your ship.

You head for a nearby cave and make it just in time. Inside the cave, you are growled at, stoned and incinerated by a variety of prehistoric cave dwellers. Retreating in haste, your ship then floats over a moonlit plain towards what appears to be a city, an abandoned, ghostly city, taken over by the horrible crab creatures, who try to grab at your ship with their deadly claws and slimy tentacles.

Back through hyper-space, under the moon. You are coming in for an emergency landing in a North Hollywood park. You made it back safely, right? Think again. You have brought one of those horrible crab creatures with you. Yikes!!!

The Astro-Liner is a hydraullically controlled ride whose moves are synchronized to a film that the passengers view from inside the rocket. The film is projected from behind a rear projection screen, which serves as the cockpit window. The film, combined with the hydraullic movements of the vessel create the feeling of truly travelling through space.

Various films have existed for the Astro-Liner, but none have been as complex or fascinating as Monster Planet.

Jerry Wisdon contracted CPC Associates to create the three-and-a-half minute film, which utilizes just about every special effect in the book, including flat-bed animation, optical effects, miniature sets and , of course, Stop Motion Animation.

Filmed in 35mm, the film was then printed down to Super-8, which used to be the projection system for the Astro-Liner until video came along. Now the ride uses a video projection system.

The effects artists raided Pic & Save, a local department store, purchasing plastic greenery and other materials that could be used for the project. Tom Scherman purchased a toy human brain there for the head of his crab monster.

Most of the creatures, though, were borrowed. Making cameos in the film, though in a slightly altered form, are an alien from Laserblast, the plesiosaur from The Crater Lake Monster, and the Beetleman from Flesh Gordon.

David Allen gave a hand in animating a whacky bird creature, which was designed and build by Tom Scherman, Tony Doublin and Randy Cook especially for the film. All the borrowed creatures were touched up and changed by Harold Miles at CPC.

The animation shots in the film are quite complex, since the camera moves are animated as well.

CPC did their own optical effects in-house using the "Costaflex", originally built by Bob Costa for Flesh Gordon, which is pretty much a jury-rigged contraption with exposed lenses, lighthouse and other elements mounted on what appears to be a cast-iron base.