Posted on 05/24/2016 12:33:44 PM PDT by EveningStar
Were the 1950s the Golden Age of Science Fiction Cinema? I think so. What do you think?
List of science fiction films of the 1950s
A list of science fiction films released in the 1950s. These films include core elements of science fiction, but can cross into other genres. They have been released to a cinema audience by the commercial film industry and are widely distributed with reviews by reputable critics.
This period is sometimes described as the 'classic' era of science fiction theater. Much of the production was in a low-budget form targeted at a teenage audience. Many were formulaic, gimmicky, comic-book style films. They drew upon political themes or public concerns of the day, including depersonalization, infiltration, or fear of nuclear weapons. Invasion was a common theme, as were various threats to humanity.
Two of the films from this decade, The War of the Worlds (1953) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) won Academy Awards, while Destination Moon (1950) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) won Hugo Awards.
Saturday night was the night we watched horror movies when I was growing up. KGUN TV channel 9 in Tucson had a show called “Chiller” on at 10:30 Saturday night.
Amen.
Has anyone mentioned Twenty Million Miles to Earth?
Saturday nights for my Brother and I was filled with Bob Wilkins on cable TV.
Great fun film!
That looks like the bird villain voiced by Paul Frees in “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year!”
One of the teachers where I also taught, gave her students an assignment to write a letter to their favorite author. One of the kids wrote a letter to Bradbury. Several weeks later they got a response to their letter. It was a scathing letter directed towards the teacher for forcing her students to write a letter to their favorite author.
They might have been able to salvage that film if after the monster “dies”, they found it was a robot, then cut to dozens of more flying toward the earth.
The special effects weren’t anything to brag about, but the flicks were great, great, great!
” “The Giant Claw” described in the “Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film” as “Woodenus Puppetus” “
Yeah, I hear you. But I’ve often thought that if someone could CGI in better special effects (aircraft, big bird, etc.,) it would be a passable flick.
anything by Ed Wood
That doesn’t sound like something Bradbury would do. Why was he so upset?
It is up there with the best, but not in my top five. It is probably the most remade modern movie in SF history, though. The 1956 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", based on a short story by Jack Finney, has been remade at least five times, the latest a movie called "The Invasion" in which Dr. Bunnell has been rewritten as a female psychiatrist who starts noticing changes in her patients and their families after the deliberate crash of a space shuttle. It has no pods, no exchange of human bodies for artificial replacements, but the basics are all there and it has a lot of reference scenes to the original movie.
It was, however, the only movie from that age that instilled a continuing scare into me for months following after I saw it at age seven in a theater, causing me to check under the bed, in closets, in drawers, for any strange, large pods. LOL!
My list of SF movies:
As you might tell, I was not into the monster of the month SF type, although I did have a soft place in my heart for"The Blob" and "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" but the don't make my top ten, much less my top five.
The top of my list movie: "Earth v. the Flying Saucers".
What's funny is that the movie was supposed to be about a Gorilla running amok. However the costume company could not find the gorilla costume's head mask, so they producer said use the space helmet instead and changed a few lines in the script and the name of the film to make it fit! Violá! Hit movie. . . er, well, at least a movie they could get filmed in two weeks and hit budget. Well, like any proper movie they went over budget. LOL!
I saw GOG on TV as a kid in the late 50s, and it spooked me for years, thinking that the overhead light in my room was going to turn into a Death Ray, and I could almost hear GOG and MAGOG coming down the hall to my bedroom in the middle of the night.
Pretty scary stuff back then, but these days we have Hillary causing even worse nightmares...
Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" was made into a movie in 2013. You can apparently watch it online for free:
Not too sure on the copyright status of the above link, but there are several more such links.
"Invaders From Mars" scared the ever living cr@p out of me when I was a kid.
How about "The Crawling Eye"...
And of course, the monster always got to carry the girl! 50s were fun for sci-fi!
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