Back in the days when VCR tapes were how we watched movies at home, I took my youngest son over to the nearby Blockbuster to cruise for videos. He was a science fiction fan and tuned into both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, equally available at the store. But as he browsed, I was delighted to find a section of 1950s era SF movies. I hadn’t realized until then how many older films were now making it onto VCR, and here I found more than a few old friends.
Films of the black and white era have always been a passion for me, and not just science fiction movies. While the great dramas of the 1930s and 40s outshone 1950s SF films, the latter brought the elements of awe and wonder to the fore in ways that mysteries and domestic dramas could not. The experience was just of an entirely different order, and the excitement always lingered. Here in the store I was finding This Island Earth, The Conquest of Space, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, Forbidden Planet, Rocketship X-M and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not to mention Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Note that I’ve linked to some of these but not others. Read on.
Image: Dr. Carrington and his fellow scientists of Polar Expedition 6 studying how the Thing reproduces in the greenhouse of an Arctic research station in 1951’s The Thing from Another World.
Naturally, I loaded up on the SF classics even as my son turned his nose up at this ancient material, with its wonky special effects and wooden dialogue. I never did make him a fan of older movies (not even after introducing him to the Quatermass films!), but just after I began publishing Centauri Dreams, I ran into an SF movie fan who far eclipsed my own knowledge of the genre. Larry Klaes was about the first person who started sending me regular comments on the articles here. That was just after I turned the comments section on in 2005. In the years since he has become a friend, an editorial confidant and a regular contributor.
Klaes on Film
Larry has been an author for most of his life, and he has demonstrated that for the past two decades with his extensive work for Centauri Dreams. His essays have ranged through astronomy, space science, and the history of humanity’s exploration of the heavens. Equally to our purposes, Larry has also had a life-lomg fascination with science fiction, which helped to spur his interest in space and related subjects from an early age.
You’ll notice that a number of the movies I mentioned above are linked to Larry’s articles on them. The ones without links are obvious targets for future essays. A look through the archives will demonstrate that Larry has tackled everything from 1951’s classic The Thing from Another World to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He’s written in-depth analyses (and I do mean in-depth) on more recent titles like Interstellar and 2010: The Year We Make Contact. I disagreed with him completely on Interstellar, and disagreements are what make film criticism so much fun.
Moreover, Larry is the kind of film enthusiast who isn’t content simply to put forth his opinions. He digs into the research in such a way that he invariably finds things I had never heard of. He finds clips that illustrate his points and original screenplays that clarify directorial intent. He finds connections that most of us miss (see his treatment of 1955’s Conquest of Space in relation to the Swedish film Aniara and the genre he labels ‘Angst SF’). His coverage of Avatar was so comprehensive that I began talking to him about turning his essays into a book, a project that I look forward to participating in.
Larry’s latest is a deep dive into Aniara, little known in the US, with its depiction of off-world migration and a voyage gone terribly wrong. The film possesses a thematic richness that Larry fully explores as the passengers and crew adapt to dire circumstances with the help of immersive virtual reality. When I read this, I decided it was time to give Larry space in a separate section, as the blog format is too constricted for long-form work. Have a look at the top of the home page and you’ll now see the tab Klaes on Film. The Aniara piece is there, inset into a redesigned workspace that offers ready navigation through the text.
Image: I loved the film but Larry’s look at Interstellar makes incsize points about film-making, public perception and the development of the interstellar idea.
All of Larry’s film essays are now available in the new section, but thus far only the current one on Aniara is embedded in the new format. I’ll be seeing to it that all of the essays are reformatted going forward, so that the disadvantages of the blog format for longer writing are eased.
The goal is to create a space for film criticism that acknowledges the hold the SF genre has acquired over the general public, in many cases inspiring career choices and adjusting how the average person views the interstellar challenge. This is a long-term project, but my web developer Ryan Given at StudioRTP is brilliant at customizing the site’s code and he knows where we’re going from here. I couldn’t keep this site going without Ryan’s expert guidance.
As my own passions in film are by today’s standards archaic (I’m still a black and white guy at heart), I’m glad to have someone who can tackle not just the classics of the field but also the latest blockbusters and the quirky outliers. And I wouldn’t mind seeing Larry’s thoughts on the TV version of Asimov’s Foundation either. Let’s keep him busy.
I will look forward to reading some of his critiques and information on a number of my old SciFi film favorites. I collect SciFi movies and TV shows, some of which are really good. Sadly, US Sci-Fi movies have generally become of rather poor quality of late, rehashing the same basic plots. But there are exceptions, sometimes by Indie titles with low budgets, but with real Sci-Fi ideas.
Some TV shows are now lost forever, especially those from the UK’s BBC archives, due to the transition from film to videotape that was subsequently wiped (this was before anyone thought that viewers wanted to rewatch old shows. The Quatermass TV shows from the first miniseries, “The Quatermass Experiment” only have 2 surviving episodes of the 6 broadcast episodes. Other TV SciFi series were almost lost completely, or have some surviving episodes. “A for Andromeda” is a good example. Early Doctor Who episodes were often lost, although some have been recovered or reconstructed in various forms from film stock, audio, scripts, and on-set photographs.)
As forvideo, before rental stores appeared in the mid-1980s, I recall new movies on VHS were priced at 80 pounds sterling. I bought my first, as a used copy, for 20 pounds, from a store in London’s Tottenham Court Rd. It was Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan. Once DVDs appeared, it was off to the races, especially as prices declined both in real and absolute terms.
Online streaming services and YouTube offer a good cache of old Sci-Fi, although they can be transient, as they can be removed. If you want to watch them again, they should be downloaded to preserve access. I recommend some Russian and Eastern European titles of the 1950s/1960s, with either subtitles (best, IMO,) or English dubs. With AI, subtitles can now be generated without effort, although they can be poorly done. As a Stanislaw Lem fan, there was a Hungarian short-run show of Lem’s character, Pilot Pirx. It has now been translated. Hokey “special effects”, but they adhere quite well to the short stories in Lem’s “Tales of Pirx the Pilot”. There is also “The Inquest”, a Russian-Polish movie about one of Pirx’s missions. Several East German movies were quite good, although the Communist propaganda can be rather too obvious. (I expect Hollywood movies shown in the Soviet bloc were thought too blatantly capitalist propaganda!). Some were butchered by Roger Corman to make US versions, where the plot and dialog was almost ridiculous, especially when one can compare the 2 versions.
May we be watching these movies and TV shows for as long as we can enjoy them. I am reminded in an early ST:TOS, in which Spock remarks that TV was a transient technology that disappeared. Little did Roddenberry know that fans wanted to rewatch episodes indefinitely. TV, at least VOD libraries, seems to be a growing market, not a disappearing one!