Battle Beyond the Sun is the English-dubbed and re-edited U.S. version of Nebo Zovyot, a 1959 Soviet science fiction film. Roger Corman acquired the Soviet film for US distribution and hired a young film-school student named Francis Ford Coppola to Americanize it. It is still a tale of the "space race", of two nations competing to become the first to land a spacecraft on the planet Mars, but switches the competing nations, via the dubbing, from the USSR and the USA to the fictional future countries of North Hemis and South Hemis. The names of not only the Soviet characters, but also their performers, and the crew credits as well, were altered on the screen to American-sounding names in order to further disguise the film's origins: thus Soviet stars Aleksandr Shvorin and Ivan Pereverzev bec