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Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Satellite: The Cold War space race began with Sputnik--as did an American tradition of science fiction films both good and bad.
Remember When
Sci-Fi flicks fanned flames
By Cookie Curci-Wright
During the 1950s, America was reaching for the stars while its people were watching the skies. On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first manmade satellite. America countered by sending its own satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit on Jan 31, 1958. The Cold War race for control of the skies had begun.
Hollywood filmmakers, keenly aware of the public's fears and fascination with nuclear power and space travel, were producing films featuring world destruction and invaders from outer space. Director Roger Corman, a master of sci-fi , grade B films, produced a string of these movies that marked the beginning of the "day after" school of science fiction movies. Effective scare sequences, cheesy plots and frightening stories were enough to heighten fears and arouse disturbing thoughts in the mind of the moviegoer.
The Last Man On Earth (1952); The Day The Earth Stood Still (1953); The Day the World Ended (1953); The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1955); It Came From Outer Space (1956); and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) made the American moviegoer wonder just what was out there in the darkness of space.
By the 1960s the cold war between the United States and the Soviets intensified, fear of alien invasions took a back seat to fear of the bomb. A kind of doomsday mentality prevailed over most of the decade.
The Cuban Missile Crisis made it seem so. Was our greatest fear about to be realized? Was nuclear war coming? The crisis passed, but only after coming to a tense climax of the superpower standoff.
The confrontation inspired Stanley Kubrick's hit film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb (1964). Riding the wave of the "doomsday" films, Dr. Strangelove asked the movie audience to not only think the unthinkable, but to laugh at it, as well.
In 1968, another Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a harbinger of what man's technical creations might bring: That the fate of humans could one day rest in the hands of a cranky computer.
In 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it was inconceivable to most Americans that a man could actually walk on that golden harvest moon.
In fact, some believed we never landed on the moon; that it was staged on a Hollywood set. The film, Capricorn One (1978) starring James Brolin and Elliot Gould, gave sustenance to this theory. In the film, NASA's astronauts faked a trip to Mars to satisfy the political machine.
What we didn't know about the technology of space travel Hollywood was willing to show us. Kubrick's sobering 2001 showed us that we had more to fear from our own technology than we did from little green men from Mars.
Today, we're living in the future that was partly depicted onscreen. In the year 2001, our computers arrange our vacations, purchase our tickets and pay our bills. We are entertained by them, communicate on them and are educated by them. However, there are those who admit to being apprehensive about our dependence on computers.
I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit, lurking in the back of my mind, is the fear that one day computers will stop taking our commands and begin giving them, as that fictional renegade, HAL, the uncooperative computer aboard the Orion space ship in 2001.
But that's silly. Things like that only happen in the movies ... don't they?
Contact Cookie via email at cookie-wright@mymailstation.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
