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by Rick Norwood
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SF on TV | ||||
I decided to find out for myself if The Last Airbender really is as bad as everyone says, and review it
for SF Site if they were wrong. They weren't wrong. M. Night Shyamalan is a fine director, but he insists
on writing his own scripts. I hope the next time he makes a movie he hires a writer. If there is a next
time. The production values and some of the acting, notably by Daily Show regular Aasif Mandvi,
are excellent. The script the kind of thing you see on Saturday morning television.
Between the time the original Star Trek went off the air and the time Star Trek: The
Next Generation began, Gene Roddenberry pitched three other television series that were made into
tv movies: The Questor Tapes, Genesis II, and Spectre. Genesis II is finally
out on DVD, along with two sequels, Planet Earth and Strange New World, the first produced
by Roddenberry, the second not. Genesis II is excellent and Planet Earth is worth watching.
From time to time I wonder what people born after Star Wars think of old science fiction movies. A
case can be made for consigning to the dustheap every sf film made before Stanley Kubrick's three
blockbusters, Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, and A Clockwork Orange
in 1971. After these, in 1977, came Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and George Lucas's Star Wars, ushering in the era of the modern sf blockbuster.
Before Kubrick, sf films had simple plots and even simpler science. Star Trek, on television in the mid-60s,
was much more like written science fiction than anything on the big screen. A case could be made that all sf
films before Dr. Strangelove were boring. Stanley Kubrick certainly thought so. And yet, I love
them, or at least some of them. Can modern viewers feel the same way?
And so I have a mission (should you care to accept it) for readers of this column who have
not watched a lot of old movies. Below is a list of my picks of the ten best sf films before
1976 (and I've seen more than once every film that has even a chance of being on that
list). Watch a couple, send an e-mail to f.norwood@att.net
and let me know what you think. I'll report back in the mid-August column.
Top Ten Pre-1976 SF Films:
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Rick Norwood is a mathematician and writer whose small press publishing house, Manuscript Press, has published books by Hal Clement, R.A. Lafferty, and Hal Foster. He is also the editor of Comics Revue Monthly, which publishes such classic comic strips as Flash Gordon, Sky Masters, Modesty Blaise, Tarzan, Odd Bodkins, Casey Ruggles, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Barnaby, Buz Sawyer, and Steve Canyon. |
It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone. No, make that a quiet month in Mountain Home, Tennessee, my home
town. I've been enjoying the new Doctor on Doctor Who, very smart, very fast, sometimes too fast
for me to understand what he's saying, but let that go. Even better than Doctor Who is the
old 1950s tv series I'm watching on DVD, Have Gun – Will Travel, with scripts by Gene Roddenberry
and Harry Julian Fink.
1936: Things to Come
 
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