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Comparatively uncommon for the 1950s, Riders to the Stars is a science fiction drama, as distinguished from scifi thrillers or scifi fantasies like The Thing From Another World or Forbidden Planet. Riders is also notable for a brief but animated appearance by James Best, who is wildly underrated as a dramatic actor an,d for better or worse, most associated with the Dukes of Hazzard which hit television some 20-plus years after this movie. Riders to the Stars is also notable for a relatively strong female character, one of the medical officers associated with the trip to capture an asteroid and bring it back to Earth. While certainly her role remains in some ways trapped in gender stereotypes, in that it never occurs to her or anyone else in the movie that she could actually be one of the pilots to go up and nab an asteroid, nonetheless there are some key moments in which she is in charge of a given test, is clearly intelligent and capable, and with less of the subservient role that we usually see in science fiction films and so many other films of that time ( not to mention in current films).