It’s a five-person entomology seminar! Alan, Jim, PJ, Drü, and Drew dissect 1997’s Starship Troopers.

Alan is joined by Brent from the future to cannonball into a discussion of 1997’s Gattaca…or is it a belly-flop?

Alan and Paul talk about 1980's Flash Gordon. One of them loved it the other less so. Somehow it devolves into an argument about Zach Snyder's DC films (one of them hates them, the other MUCH less so), before coming back to say not everything is perfect, but there's fun to be found everywhere!

Derek Binns joins Alan and PJ from the future as the three of them talk about Rian Johnson's Looper

Alan and PJ take a look at Luc Besson's The Fifth Element.

Alan and Paul look at 2010: The Year We Make Contact. It's the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Alan and Paul are joined by Derek from Tasmania to discuss Stanley Kubrick's seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Summary:

Audience meets ape man. Ape man meets big black slab. Big black slab apparently teaches ape man to hit with a bone. Bone turns into spaceship. Spaceship docks to bicycle wheel while slow old music plays.

Nondescript American man walks on, calls very British-sounding daughter, walks to a bunch of other nondescript people, and finally goes to a briefing where there may be evidence that this movie has a plot. Nondescript man goes with yet more nondescript people to Tycho Crater and sees another big black slab. Black slab makes nasty noise.

Cut to spaceship. Much yadda yadda. AI misbehaves and three extras go bye-bye. Captain Kirk’s buddy dies…again. Last actor standing goes through acid trip and ends up in room where he watches himself get older and older until he turns into a very strange baby. The end.

Alan and Paul are joined by Jim Purcell of the Savage FinCast and Legion of Substitute Podcasters to discuss the 1968 film Planet of the Apes.

One reason Planet of the Apes is significant today is that it spawned a sci-fi franchise before either Star Trek or Star Wars (despite Star Trek having premiered on television in 1966). Planet of the Apes begat four sequels (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes) and two TV series (the live-action Planet of the Apes and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes).

Forbidden Planet was not the first sci-fi film of the 1950s, but its influence cannot be denied:

Filmsite lists a number of firsts that Forbidden Planet achieved:

• the first film to be set entirely on a foreign planet in interstellar space, arrived at via hyperspeed travel on a flying saucer moving at more than 16 times the speed of light

• the first Hollywood film to have an all-electronic music score

• the first film in which a robot had a personality (and sense of humor), was more than just a boxy 'tin-can', and was given his own onscreen credit

• the first high-budget sci-fi film from MGM studios, with first-class special effects

• the first sci-fi film with a widescreen scope aspect ratio

• the film that initiated many genre ingredients for future sci-fi films (and TV shows)

Staying on the HG Wells theme, we look at Time After Time, in which Wells is the main character, and he's got a time machine!

This film is Nicholas Meyer’s directing debut. Meyer had already started to make a name for himself as the writer (both novel and screenplay) of The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1978), which was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1982, Meyer became part of Star Trek “royalty” when he wrote and directed Star Trek II, the movie considered to have “saved” the Star Trek franchise.

Last week, we looked at HG Wells's reaction to Metropolis. This week we look at a movie made from one of Wells's own works, The Time Machine!

Things to Come began when H.G. Wells saw Metropolis…and hated it. Some choice bits from his review of the film:

"Originality there is none. Independent thought, none….

The word Metropolis, says the advertisement in English, 'is in itself symbolic of greatness'- which only shows us how wise it is to consult a dictionary before making assertions about the meaning of words." (H. G. Wells on "Metropolis" (1927))

Harsh words! Listen in for more!

Adam the Computer joins Alan and Jim to discuss 2020’s Tenet and throw a few hot takes into the mix.

• Metropolis was an attempt by Universum Film (Ufa) to stave off bankruptcy in the days of Weimar Republic Germany, Unfortunately, the film ended up bankrupting Ufa anyway.

• American film distributors were interested in distributing Metropolis in the US as a means of getting their hands on the import certificates that would allow the US studios to distribute films in Germany.

• American film distributors cut about a quarter of the film out right off the bat because they believed that American audiences wouldn’t sit through a two and a half hour film.

• For decades, large chunks of the film were thought lost forever, as it was cut and recut for art film houses and TV.

• Around 2001, a newly restored print of Metropolis, which included pretty much everything except that quarter cut out by the American distributors, was entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register as a significant cultural artifact of the 20th century ("without doubt famous testimony of German silent film art, a testimony that made history").

• In 2008, a copy of the complete film was discovered in Argentina; however, because it was a “safety print” made when a negative started to disintegrate, there are still some sections of the film that are deemed too damaged to be restored…for now. The most complete version of the film, including the original score written for the movie, was released around 2011.

• Metropolis is now in the public domain thanks to its age.

Hitler loved Metropolis, and it convinced him to send Goebbels to recruit Lang for the Ministry of Propaganda–and Lang left for America.

In which we learn all Alan and Paul's secrets.

You may be wondering why we’re talking about Nosferatu on a podcast about science fiction films. I added this movie to our list for a couple of reasons:

• As with its German Expressionist “siblings,” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis, Nosferatu has influenced subsequent horror and science fiction films, including “the post-apocalyptic scavengers in I Am Legend, the ravaging blood-suckers in Guillermo del Toro's Blade 2 and TV series The Strain, the Pale Man in del Toro's Pan’s Labyrinth, and the gliding, grinning Gentlemen in ‘Hush,’ the spookiest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (Nosferatu: The monster who still terrifies, 100 years on). The list of characters influenced by the design of Count Orlok also includes Petyr from the film What We Do in the Shadows, Baron Afanas from the TV show of the same name, Kurt Barlow from the 1979 version of Salem’s Lot—and who can forget the Vorvon from the old Buck Rogers TV series?

• But it isn’t just Nosferatu’s influence on later cinema that prompted me to suggest it. Stories of vampires, like all folklore, were an attempt by people to make sense of phenomena they didn’t understand—almost an allegory, in fact, like Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (among so many others).

Today we’re going a little further afield of standard science fiction by looking at the 1920 German Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari!

The writers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, who are said to have set out to write a story denouncing arbitrary authority as brutal and insane, although that’s under some debate (more on that later).

The film’s plot was inspired by several events in the writers’ lives, which included

• A circus sideshow  the writers saw called "Man or Machine?" in which a man performed feats of great strength after becoming hypnotized

• The 1913 murder of a young woman near an amusement park in Hamburg, which one of the writers believed he’d witnessed when he saw the woman disappear into the bushes and a respectable-looking man emerged a few moments later

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is considered to be the first German Expressionist film. What’s Expressionism? The site StudioBinder describes it this way: 

German Expressionism is a particular artistic style that first appeared in poetry and theatre around 1910. It became popular in film 10 years later after WWI. It comes partly from German Romanticism and gives a subjective view of the world. It visualizes the country's collective anxiety through distorted and nightmarish imagery. Expressionists had little interest in their work being aesthetically pleasing. This style flourished after the horrors of WWI, and the inevitable economic devastation that followed.

It’s also one of the first films to employ a twist ending, although the frame tale containing the twist ending isn’t what the writers intended. Janowitz and Mayer claimed that they wanted the story to be told in a straightforward manner without the twist ending. A recovered script proved the film did indeed have a framing sequence, but the last pages of the script are missing, and we don’t know how the frame tale ends.

The frame tale and twist ending drew criticism from Siegfried Kracauer, author of From Caligari to Hitler, who felt it undermined the anti-authoritarian nature of the main story. It should be noted, however, that not everyone agrees that the story is intentionally anti-authoritarian; while Janowitz, in 1941, said it was only years after the film was released that he realized exposing the "authoritative power of an inhuman state" was the "subconscious intention" of the writers, film historian David Robinson suggested Janowitz's recollection may have changed in response to later interpretations of the film (kind of like how Groucho’s favorite Marx Brothers film seems to have changed over time).

Homunculus was originally a series of six films based on an epic poem of the same name written by Robert Hamerling in 1888, created by the German studio Deutsche Bioscop GmbH. Each film was approximately an hour long, and they were released in 1916 (except for part 6, which came out in 1917). The original episode titles were:

1. Die Geburt des Homunculus (The Birth of the Homunculus)

2. Das geheimnisvolle Buch (The Mysterious Book)

3. Die Liebestragödie des Homunculus (The Love Tragedy of the Homunculus)

4. Die Rache des Homunculus (The Revenge of the Homunculus)

5. Die Vernichtung der Menschheit (The Annihilation of Mankind)

6. Das Ende des Homunculus (The End of the Homunculus)

Although the serial was very popular in Berlin, the only remaining copies of the original films are part 4 and a fragment of part 5.

However, the story of the film doesn’t end there. In spring 1920, Deutsche Bioscop merged with Decla-Film to form Decla-Bioscop, and the new amalgamated studio edited the six films down to three and released the new version with colored tints and intertitles in September 1920. The titles of the shorter version were:

1. Der künstliche Mensch (The Artificial Man)

2. Die Vernichtung der Menschheit (The Annihilation of Mankind)

3. Ein Titanenkampf (A Titanic Fight)

The easiest version to find online is an even more heavily edited 76-minute tinted version with Italian language intertitles, which was found in the George Eastman Museum film archives. This is the version we’ve linked to on YouTube.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, was inspired by the life and deeds of William Brodie (1741-1788), who was a paragon of high society by day but a criminal by night. A highly renowned Scottish cabinetmaker and locksmith, Brodie would create and install locks for the houses of Edinburgh’s rich elite, while creating copies of the keys to break into their houses at night to steal money and valuables to fund his secret gambling habit and provide for the two mistresses and the five children he’d had with them.

• This isn’t the first adaptation of the story to film: the first was in 1908, with 25 versions produced before 1925. This version is actually the first version by Universal Studios (then the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, Incorporated), making it one of the first Universal Studios monster movies, predating the famous Frederic March version of the story by 18 years.

• The original version of the story was a commentary on Victorian society, but what other interpretations have readers and viewers applied over the years?

• What other adaptations of the story have you seen?

• Some celebrities associated with various film versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

• John Barrymore, brother of Lionel Barrymore (Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life), and grandfather of Drew Barrymore, played the title character in 1920.

• FW Murnau, who was also responsible for 1922’s Nosferatu, also created a version of the film in 1920.

• Wally Westmore, uncle of longtime Star Trek makeup artist Michael Westmore Jr., created the iconic Mr. Hyde look for the 1931 version of the film.

• A fun, quick overview of the story and film is on YouTube at The Bizarre Truth of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

This week's episode stays in the world of silent films. Still, it crosses the line between science fiction and horror as we look at an early adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, produced in 1910 by the Edison studios.

• Note the "fires of creation" that birth the Creature and how it's footage of a fire burning a papier-mâché (or something) prop run backwards.

• At least this version of Victor is smart enough to do the creation in another room, although he needs to learn how to bar a door more securely.

• Victor sure faints a lot.

• The Creature is less goofy-looking in motion than the classic still would have you believe.

• Nice work with a mirror and filming, especially when the Creature disappears into the mirror at the end.

• The Creature is more like the version from the novel than the later Karloff version in terms of intelligence and ability to express itself.

Recommended: Check out the Library of Congress's curated online collection, Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies.

From History of Edison Motion Pictures:

Edison's laboratory was responsible for inventing the Kinetograph (a motion picture camera) and the Kinetoscope (a peep-hole motion picture viewer). Edison's assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, performed most of this work in 1888. Motion pictures became a thriving entertainment industry in less than a decade, with single-viewer Kinetoscopes giving way to films projected for mass audiences. The Edison Manufacturing Co. (later known as Thomas A. Edison, Inc.) built the apparatus for filming and projecting motion pictures and produced films for public consumption. Most early examples were actualities showing famous people, news events, disasters, people at work, new modes of travel and technology, scenic views, expositions, and other leisure activities. As actualities declined in popularity, the company's production emphasis shifted to comedies and dramas.

From Decline of the Edison Company:

The Edison Company tried to improve its image through several initiatives. Imitating its competitors, Edison developed a stock company of actors in 1910. The company also tried to cultivate an image of respectability by making films for public service organizations like the American Red Cross or the New York Milk Committee. Famous literary works or historical events became the inspiration for film plots.

Points to ponder:

• The crossover between horror and science fiction: Does it say something about a society when scientific stories become cautionary tales against science gone wrong?

• The religious question: Is this version of Frankenstein another cautionary tale about playing God, or is it a different kind of warning?

• The curse of adaptation: How liberally can you adapt a work before it isn't an "adaptation" but some other kind of derivative work?

Introduction

Join us as we look at the history of Science Fiction Film.

Welcome to Watch This! SPACE! Dive through the airlock of reality and into the universe of speculative cinema as we look at what was, to see what could be.

For the first week, we watched four early, early examples of science fiction films:

1. The Astronomer’s Dream (1898); see  https://scifist.net/2018/02/28/the-astronomers-dream/

2. A Trip to the Moon (1902); see https://scifist.net/2018/02/21/a-trip-to-the-moon/

3. A Trip to Jupiter (1909); see https://scifist.net/2018/03/24/a-trip-to-jupiter/

4. A Trip to Mars (1910); see https://scifist.net/2018/03/25/a-trip-to-mars/

From The Origins of Science Fiction Film (1900s - 1920s):

The origins of film began in the early 1900s with short black and white films created to extend the magic of theater on screen. Science fiction cinema is one of the first genres to be translated to film, but as a way for magicians to use illusion, theatrics, and trickery to stun crowds. One early pioneer of cinema, Georges Méliès was a magician by trade and used cinema to create dozens of films, including Le Voyage dans la Lune (A voyage to the Moon) (1902) based on stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. All of Méliès' films are applauded for exploring special effects and creating worlds of fantasy and whimsy. Science fiction literature continued to influence the new medium with films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), Frankenstein (1910), and The Lost World (1925). Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) is one of the first films to utilize stop-motion animation by special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien. Science fiction film became a vehicle for prediction and social commentary in Europe with films like Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) and Metropolis (1927). Metropolis, directed by German expressionist Fritz Lang, is widely celebrated as the important and influential science fiction film.

Discuss science fiction and its literary roots, including how it intertwined with fantasy (medieval romance, Gulliver’s Travels, etc.) and horror (Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, etc.)

Acknowledge the major source of the week: Janne Wass’s site scifist 2.0.

Points for discussion:

• Early sci-fi films expanded the realm of special effects beyond the work of stage magicians and theatrical productions with effects like superimposition, jump cuts, crossfades, etc. From the article on The Astronomer’s Dream:

Repeated in print, the films seems a mess, and in a sense it is. But just like modern action film directors use fast cuts and special effects to thrill a viewer, so did Méliès. In his first five years of filmmaking he more or less developed most of the tricks that made up the bulk of special effects up until the birth of computer graphics. These included double exposure, superimposition with a black background creating what would later be called “blue screen” or “green screen” photography, time-lapse photography, stop tricks, forced perspective with moving cameras and pulleys, dissolves, and early animation done by hand-painting directly on the film frames. To all this Méliès added beautifully realized sets, complicated and sometimes gigantic puppeteered props, extravagant costumes and stage effects like smoke and fire.

• In the earliest films, scientists look like wizards. What’s the significance of that? Is it connected to the fact that some of the early sci-fi filmmakers came from stage magician backgrounds?

• Sci fi films as a vehicle for showing “the possible,” not just what filmmakers can do but, as the era progressed, what could be possible with society (true golden age science fiction).

• Traveling to other planets: Although A Trip to Jupiter is a dream, both A Trip to the Moon and A Trip to Mars involve actual travel and use methods with some literary history to them (From the Earth to the Moon and The First Men in the Moon).

Jim brings another Drew on to talk about 1984’s The Last Starfighter, computer graphics in the 1980s, and video games in the movies, while Alan tries to tie in The Music Man with no success.

Derek drops in from the future (ouch!) to talk about 1981’s Time Bandits with Alan.

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• #watchthis!space!

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Alan, Jim, and Drü talk about Galaxy Express 999.

Tetsuro, orphaned by Cyborgs, lives in a slum in the shadow of their megapolis. With the help of his little band of thieves, he steals a boarding pass for Galaxy Express 999.

Alan and Jim talk about Tron.

Tron premiered in 1982, the same year William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome” and novel Neuromancer were released, more or less birthing the whole cyberpunk genre and introducing the concept of cyberspace.

Alan and Paul are joined by Jim Purcell, who can't believe that neither of them have seen Mad Max before now!

This week, Alan and Paul dive into yet another movie from 1979 as they discuss the oft-maligned Star Trek the Motion Picture.

You can write to us at watchthisspacemail@gmail.com, follow us on Instagram at watchthis_space_sf, or find us on Bluesky at watchthisspace-sf

Alan and Paul look at another film from the late 70s/early 80s. This time it's The Black Hole as Paul breaks out his cereal toys and... wait, isn't that Norman Freaking Bates?!?