The Future, The Past (Part Two: The Future--Television and Film).
This is the second part of the blog about my loves of history and science fiction. I talked about history the last time, so now it’s time to look at the future. But as I was thinking about what I was going to write about in particular concerning the movies, television shows, and books in the science fiction genre that have stayed with me over the years, I realized that the blog was going to end up being really long. So, my planned one blog about science fiction is becoming two. This one will be about the television shows and movies. The next one will be about the books.
I think that both history and science fiction have one shared element that perhaps attracts me to these two genres more than the others, including mysteries. Neither genre is about the present. History is about the past. Science fiction is, for the most part, about the future. Sometimes our present gets so complicated, so hectic, so depressing, that we need to escape. And if you choose your escape through reading or watching movies or television, than what better way to do that than to read or watch about a time not of the now?
My first exposure to science fiction was through television. It was THE JETSONS. Now, I have to ask all of those reading this that are my age (49) or thereabouts: Didn’t you really think all of what you saw on this show was eventually going to happen? The flying cars, the apartment houses on giant stilts, the robot maids? Well, the year 2000 came and we got none of that. Chris Rock had a great joke about this right after the year 2000. It went, “You remember how everyone thought the year 2000 was going to be like THE JETSONS? Hell, it’s not even THE JEFFERSONS!”
Another Saturday morning show about the future was a little show you might have heard of, called STAR TREK. But maybe not the version of the show you might immediately think about. I was too young to know about the original series on NBC that ran in the first few years after my birth. But I do remember 1973, when NBC brought back STAR TREK in an animated form on Saturday mornings. It was the first time I had seen Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, and the rest of the Enterprise crew (all except Chekov. Walter Koenig did not provide his voice for the animated show, though he did write an episode of the series). This Saturday morning show, with the exception of the Looney Tunes show, was the best memory I had of watching cartoons on the weekends on television. When the series came out on DVD back in 2006, the nerd in me freaked out, and I ordered it from Amazon. I spent several nights watching all the episodes again, and being just as entertained and mind-stretched as I had back in 1973 and 1974. I did not see the actual 1960s series until later in reruns, though I did have a toy set of the phaser, communicator, and tricorder from the show. Funny how that communicator came to resemble the cell phones that came into being.
The first live-action science fiction series I can remember watching was THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN on ABC in the Seventies. It was about an astronaut named Steve Austin (not Stone Cold) who is horribly injured in a crash and is repaired through bionics. The one thing about that show that I will always remember is how the film was run in slow motion anytime Steve Austin used his bionic powers. I used to pretend to move in slow motion and use my bionic powers. Back when I was a kid, of course. Not any time recently.
Another live action show premiered in syndication in 1975. It was called SPACE: 1999. The premise of the show was that in the year 1999, the Moon was jolted out of Earth orbit by an explosion of stored nuclear waste, out into space, journeying out of the solar system. The rest of the series focused on the adventures of those stranded on Moonbase Alpha. There was one episode in particular that has stayed with me all these years, mostly because of its ending. The episode was entitled “Earthbound.” The plot of this episode was that a mysterious alien spacecraft approached the Moon. When a team from Moonbase Alpha boarded the ship, they found the aliens, hibernating in chambers of what looked to be Plexiglas, heading towards Earth. The captain of the alien ship, Zantor, was played by the great actor Christopher Lee, who recently passed away. He was probably best known to recent audiences as the evil wizard Saruman in THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE HOBBIT films, and as Count Dooku in Episodes II and III of STAR WARS. I loved the facial makeup he wore, and the hair, which now reminds me of Nelson, the band consisting of Rick Nelson’s sons, Matthew and Gunnar. I’ve posted a link to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbound_(Space:_1999) that explains the plot of the episode in full, and then you will know why the dude inside the glass box is rather upset. Let’s just say he ended up trapped in one of the most nightmarish ways imaginable, and seeing it for the first time back in 1975 freaked me out, and still sort of freaks me out today watching it on DVD.
Another television show that scared this little kid was the 1974 television movie, THE STRANGER WITHIN, starring Barbara Eden (I Dream of Jeannie). I can tell you the plot of this movie in a few words. Woman gets pregnant, even though her husband has recently had a vasectomy. Woman starts acting really weird while pregnant (like craving raw meat, among other things). Woman has baby. Baby not of this Earth, and neither is the father. I’ve also posted a Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_Within for more plot details about this movie.
Before I get to the movies, there is one more television show I have to mention, and that was the live-action Saturday morning series on CBS called ARK II. The basic premise of this show was that the in the year 2476 (the show premiered in 1976, but just ran original episodes until the end of that year) Earth had gone to hell and these three young scientists and a chimp (I’m not kidding) went out in their futuristic machine and tried to repair what had gone wrong and spread a little hope out there in the post-apocalyptic remains of civilization. For a Saturday morning show, it was pretty bleak, but enjoyable. The leader of this band of young whippersnappers was played by an actor named Terry Lester, who went on to star as the original Jack Abbott on THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS. He left the show, appeared on a couple other soaps, then died at 53 of multiple heart attacks. The pretty young Asian lady, Jean Marie Hon, went on to become a pharmacist. As for the Hispanic young man, Jose Flores, and the chimp named Adam, I don’t know what happened to them.
Then came the biggie. Not only in my opinion the greatest science fiction movie ever made, but the greatest movie ever made, period. My very first memory of seeing or hearing the title of this film was in the movie section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, probably back around 1975 or so. This film was released back in 1968, but was still playing in theaters across the world (You have to remember this was an age before you could buy a movie on either video or disc and watch it at home). The movie was 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Just the title captured my young imagination, already being weaned on science fiction from what I had already seen on television. Then, on February 13, 1977 (Yes, folks, I remember the date), 2001 made its one and only run on network television on a Sunday night on NBC, and I finally got to see what this film was about. After three hours (counting all the commercials, of course), I didn’t know what in the hell I had just seen, but I loved it! Between that night, and August of 1984, when the movie was on television again (this time on a Sunday afternoon on an Evansville, Indiana television station) I dreamed of the day when I could see that movie again. In either 1980 or 1981, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of 2001 from my high school library (Clarke had also co-written the movie’s screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick). In 1982, Clarke published 2010: ODYSSEY TWO, and I finally got to read it in April of 1983. Read it in one day, on a Saturday. It answered a lot the mysteries left by the original film, but left several more of its own. I have watched 2001 39 times in my life. Ever since that second viewing in 1984, I have seen the movie at least once a year. And I know exactly that I have watched the movie 39 times because I keep a record of every time I’ve seen it. The date, whether it was a television or video viewing, whether it was in full or wide screen (Never watch this movie except in the wide screen, or letterbox, edition. Full screen does not do it the justice it deserves). I actually watched it soon after midnight on January 1, 2001. Yes, I truly LOVE this film. I will someday soon give 2001 its own blog, because it would take another blog to try to explain what influence this film has had on not only my conscious, but subconscious as well. It is no accident that the film is mentioned in ASIAN HAZE.
Between the release of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in April of 1968, and STAR WARS in May of 1977, most of the science fiction films released between that period were very dark, very pessimistic. Some of them I got to see on television a year or two after their theatrical release, some I’ve seen many years later. But it is interesting to see the tone of nearly all of these films. The world was going to hell in a hand basket and we had better get ready for it. Whether it was nuclear war, overpopulation, pollution, or whatever boogeyman the screenwriters could imagine, our future back then looked pretty bleak. Here are a few of the films of that time period that exemplify what I’m talking about.
Actually, the first film I will mention was released in theaters just before 2001. It was PLANET OF THE APES. The original version, with Charlton Hesston (who would appear in a couple more of these pessimistic sci-fi films in the early Seventies: SOYLENT GREEN and THE OMEGA MAN). The ending of that movie is one of the most famous, and shocking, endings in movie history. It blew my young mind back then, and even though I’ve seen it enough times since then for the shock to be gone, it is still an impressive and disturbing image of Charlton Heston’s character Taylor, riding along the beach with his pretty but non-talkative lady friend Nova, coming upon the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, and Taylor realizing to his utter shock that this planet run by intelligent apes is actually his own planet Earth, hundreds of years in the future. Its sequel, BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, isn’t quite as good as its predecessor, but it too has an ending never to be forgotten, of a dying Taylor pressing the button to launch the super nuclear weapon that will ultimately destroy the Earth, and all those damn dirty apes along with it.
Other movies that captured my imagination, along with making me afraid to become an adult in such a dark future, were SILENT RUNNING, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, NO BLADE OF GRASS, SOYLENT GREEN, THE OMEGA MAN, THX 1138 (the first movie from an up-and-coming filmmaker named George Lucas), WESTWORLD, LOGAN’S RUN, ROLLERBALL, DEATH RACE 2000, and A BOY AND HIS DOG. If you read the posters of these films, you will see what I mean by their bleak future outlook. I love all these movies, but my favorite one from this period I actually just saw back in 2008 on IFC. It was the Soviet version of SOLARIS, back from 1972. A remake with George Clooney was done a few years back, and is actually very good, but the original stands out in the same sort of way that 2001 does. It’s cerebral, slow moving at times, but ultimately very satisfying.
Another film from that period did not have the doom and gloom attitude of the other just mentioned films. THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH from 1976 starred David Bowie as an alien who has come to Earth to obtain enough water to save his dying planet. If you remember David Bowie from the 1970s, you know that the casting as an alien was perfect. The film itself is very strange at times, very melancholy. I just saw the film for the first time a few years ago, and while it is not as pessimistic about the Earth's fate as most of the sci-fi films from that time, it still manages to fit in with the weird tone and feeling of 1970s science fiction.
And then in 1977, everything changed.
Like 2001, I first saw the title, STAR WARS, in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch ad. But my reaction to this was very different from the one I had over 2001. I saw the ad for this movie called STAR WARS and thought, This movie is going to be a bomb. Not sure why I thought that, but that’s what I thought.
Boy, was I off on that one!
This movie, which actually a lot of people supposedly in the know thought would be a bomb, was not only the biggest movie of all time up until that time, but changed the science fictional landscape, not only for movies, but television and books as well. It captured the collective imagination of the world, and let everyone into a new world, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away. And it is still capturing our imaginations, almost forty years later. And if you don’t believe that, just look at the reaction earlier this year to the trailer for the upcoming STAR WARS: EPISODE VII.
Then, later that same year, in November, another big movie was released. It would be Steven Spielberg's follow-up to his mega-hit, 1975's JAWS, the movie that ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster movie. This movie was not about a shark, but about aliens. And not those like in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS or INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS back in the Fifties, coming to Earth to conquer humanity. These aliens came in peace, came with love in their hearts. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is my second favorite film of all time. It is a near-perfect film from opening credits to clsoing credits. And in between is an unforgettable film with images forever burned into my psyche, like the majestic image of the alien mother ship over Devil's Tower in Wyoming (a scene actually shot in a massive airplane hangar in Mobile, Alabama). If aliens in reality did decide to visit the Earth, this is how I would want it to transpire.
Most of the films and television shows that I liked the most came from either the late Sixties or Seventies, but there have been a few in the last thirty years that I’d like to mention before wrapping this up. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE from 1979 I think gets a bad rap, but I really like this film. Maybe it tried too much to be a big event film and not like the original series, but I think it still works. And, as I will talk about in the blog about the sci-fi books next time, this movie in a strange way actually helped to plant the seed of the idea that I might want to write. And STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Or as I sometimes jokingly call it, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF CHAKA KHAN) might be the best of the STAR TREK films over the years, along with STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME. STAR TREK II was more in the spirit of the television series, and features one of the most memorable villains in history: Ricardo Montalban’s Khan. And it maybe has one of the best death scenes ever between Spock and Kirk. For a long time, I teared up watching that. It was just so well done and heartbreaking, even though you knew in the back of your mind that Spock did actually come back to life in the third film.
A couple of Ridley Scott films, ALIEN from 1979 and BLADE RUNNER from 1982, have to be mentioned. ALIEN of course is not only one of the best science fiction films ever, but one of the scariest. The chest bursting scene with John Hurt (who I just recently sadly heard was battling pancreatic cancer) still has to rank as one of the most shocking moments in movie history. And BLADE RUNNER, though it wasn’t a big hit at the box office when it came out in the summer of 1982, has grown over the years to be considered one of the great sci-fi films of all time. And of all the great films Harrison Ford has been in over the years, I actually have to say BLADE RUNNER might be my favorite one. I think if I had to rank my favorite films, BLADE RUNNER would end up third, behind CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and 2001.
1982 was actually a great year for science fiction films. There was of course ET: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, which though I love, probably would not rank in my top ten all time. And there was THE ROAD WARRIOR, which is certainly one of the best action sci-fi films ever made.
And I would be remiss if I did not mention the two follow up sequels to STAR WARS in the early Eighties, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and RETURN OF THE JEDI. EMPIRE in particular, because that is when this story started to get dark. And that lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker? What else needs to be said about that? RETURN OF THE JEDI is great, but would have even been greater if George Lucas hadn’t decided to make it cute with those damned Ewoks. Seriously, the Empire is going to be knocked off its throne by a bunch of Care Bears? Please. But I love it despite that. As for the three movies after that, they were good. The last one, REVENGE OF THE SITH, is the best of the three. That final hour or so when Anakin Skywalker goes over to the Dark Side, that super epic lightsaber duel between he and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the moment when the physical transformation from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader becomes complete makes up for any deficiencies that the earlier two films might have had. Except for Jar Jar Binks. Jar Jar must die, and die violently. The fact that he did not do so over the course of these three films is an outrage.
THE MATRIX is a phenomenal film that looks like a science fiction film should. The two sequels, not as good, but I probably liked them more than others did. And INCEPTION has to be mentioned just for making a conscious effort to be a smart film, a film that isn’t just eye candy, but one where you actually have to use your brain. Same can be said for MOON.
Three final films that I will mention from the 1950s that I love: FORBIDDEN PLANET and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. And a little film from the 1950s that is just around seven minutes long: DUCK DODGERS IN THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND A HALF CENTURY. Yes, it’s hilarious, but it also looks so great. Chuck Jones was a genius, and the look he gave to this cartoon short was classic science fiction, just as much as any of the live-action films that had come before or was to come.
The one science fiction film I have not ever seen, but would love to? METROPOLIS, the 1927 silent film, considered the first great science fiction film. I will have to take care of that omission here in the near future.
OK, so that’s it for now. Hope you once again enjoyed my self-indulgent typing. Next time, the science fiction literature that captured my imagination. And until next time, may the Force be with you.
