In 1951’s sci fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) is told by the alien visitor Klaatu (Michael Rennie) to speak the command “Klaatu barada nikto” to his sentinel robot Gort if anything happens to him. This is of course an infamous bit of sci fi cinema, and those words have since become iconic, but what exactly do they mean?
Those who have seen the movie (and if you haven’t, go do it right now) know that—MAJOR SPOILER ALERT—the command prompts Gort to abstain from retaliating against the humans and instead retrieve the body of Klaatu to be resurrected. But do the words themselves have any particular meaning? Obviously, the first one is Klaatu’s name, but what do “barada” and “nikto” stand for? Writer Edmund H. North who penned the script for the film (based on the book Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates) also developed the alien language that is used during the movie. However, that particular phrase never had an official translation in the film, and North never offered the exact meaning at any point after the movie’s release. We have the general gist of what the phrase means based on Gort’s actions, but we just have to guess what exactly those two untranslated words stood for. There’s actually been a lot of thought put into this by film fans and philosophers (no really), with multiple essays written to speculate on the meanings of the words (more on that at this link). But director Robert Wise claimed that North once told him “it’s just something I kind of cooked up. I thought it sounded good.”
It has since became a famous and well recognized sci fi phrase, referred to by the Robot Hall of Fame (bet you didn’t know that existed) as “one of the most famous commands in science fiction” and Cinefantastique’s Frederick S. Clarke as “the most famous phrase ever spoken by an extraterrestrial.” It has shown up multiple times in other movies and TV shows, most notably used (or misused that is) by Ash in the third Evil Dead movie The Army of Darkness. Oh, and they used it in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but in a very different context. And the less said about that film, the better.
Source: Wikipedia
