Watch This! Space!

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 daughte...

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...

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 sco...

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 “royalt...

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...

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 distributo...

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...

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 w...

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: Die Geburt des Homunculus ( The Birth of the Homunculus ) Das geheimnisv...

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...

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 th...

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