Ib Jørgen Melchior (born September 17, 1917, died March 13, 2015) was a novelist, short-story writer, film producer, film director, and screenwriter of low-budget American science fiction movies, most of them released by American International Pictures. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.
As a filmmaker, Melchior wrote and directed The Angry Red Planet (1959) and The Time Travelers (1964). His most high profile credit was as co-screenwriter (along with John C. Higgins) of Byron Haskin‘s critically acclaimed Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). He cowrote the screenplays for two U.S.-Danish coproductions, Reptilicus (1961) and Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), and provided the English language script for Mario Bava‘s Planet of the Vampires (1965).
For television, he wrote “The Premonition” episode for the second season of the original The Outer Limits series. The episode was broadcast in 1965.
Melchior’s short story The Racer was adapted as Paul Bartel‘s cult film favorite, Death Race 2000 (1975), starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone and produced by Roger Corman. It was later remade as Death Race (2008), starring Jason Statham and Joan Allen, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and produced by Tom Cruise.
The son of the Wagnerian tenor and film star Lauritz Melchior, Ib Melchior was born and educated in Denmark. After graduating from the University of Copenhagen, he joined the English Players, a British theatrical company, and toured Europe with the troupe, first as an actor and later as stage manager and co-director. Just prior to the outbreak of World War II, Melchior came to the U.S. with the troupe to do a Broadway show. After 1941’s “Day of Infamy”, he volunteered his services to the United States Armed Forces, operating with the “cloak-and-dagger” O.S.S. and the United States Military Intelligence Service. He also served in the European Theater of Operations as a military intelligence investigator attached to the Counter Intelligence Corps. For his work in the E.T.O., Melchior was decorated by the United States Army as well as by the King of Denmark. After the war, Melchior became active in television, directing some 500 New York-based TV shows ranging from the musical “Perry Como Show” to the dramatic documentary series “The March of Medicine.” Beginning in the late 1950s, he wrote a number of low-budget science-fiction films, among them “The Angry Red Planet”, “Journey to the Seventh Planet” and “The Time Travelers”. In 1976, he was awarded a Golden Scroll for Best Writing by the Academy of Science-Fiction (for body of work).
He was also the writer of a script entitled “Space Family Robinson,” (1964) which, along with the Gold Key comic “Space Family Robinson” (1962) that predated it, was claimed to have been the inspiration for Irwin Allen‘s TV series Lost in Space (1965). Details were revealed in Ed Shifres‘ book “Space Family Robinson: The True Story” (Windsor House, 1996), re-published as “Lost in Space: The True Story” (Windsor House, 1998). The book was extremely controversial and critically acclaimed, with excellent reviews from notable Hollywood writers. Neither Melchior nor the creators of the “Space Family Robinson” comic series received recognition as original contributors of what became “Lost in Space”. At one point Prelude Pictures hired him as a consultant on its film Lost in Space (1998), but Melchior never received his contracted royalty payment and the Supreme Court refused to even review the case.
