I’m not sure how it would have been received in the 1930s, but the interesting part of this question to me is the comparison to “Star Wars”. “Avatar” sold a lot of tickets, and was genuinely beautiful, but does it have the same impact that “Star Wars” had? I can’t even remember any character names from “Avatar”, whereas I know most of them from “Star Wars”. That may just be because “Star Wars” came out when I was a kid though.
Avatar could only have been a serialized novel in the '30s. As Chuck alludes, sci-fi was nothing the big studios wanted anything to do with. Thanks were due largely to Metropolis (1927), which bombed at the time yet is a classic today - and Mysterious Island (1929), an ill-advised undersea epic that took 3 years to make and had to be crudely dubbed with sound before release to a newly-all-talking market.
Given the 1930s climate it would still have had a strong (some would say heavyhanded) message about tolerance for other cultures but would have had a shuffling black character running around bug eyed and scared of the aliens.
Were there any reports on how people over the age of 80 responded to Avatar? That’s one possible source for a 1939 view.
He said 1939, not 1949. 
I think much of the movie would have been confusing for a 1939 audience, not so much for the plot itself, but what the plot and other story elements assumes the audience knows. If I recall correctly (I only saw the film once), the film assumes the audience has some basic familiarity with Gaia theory, computer networks, and post-Vietnam anti-militarism, none of which a 1939 audience would be familiar.
Oh, Americans throwing around accusations of communist sympathies definitely goes back to 1939 and earlier. It was only during American involvement in WW2 (and the uneasy alliance with the USSR) that these were (barely) nudged aside for the sake of necessity.
there’s the issue. i took my nephews to see it and they came out of that cinema with faces like :eek:
it didn’t have the same lasting impact on them as star wars had on me, but that’s about as close to me seeing star wars as i have seen on a kid’s face after going to the cinema
Do they remember the character names? Do they play with Sigourney Weaver dolls? Do they have Avatar paraphernalia?
Partly too, Star Wars was more melodramatic. The good guys were basically teenagers, and the bad ones were Nazis. British Nazis! Maybe Avatar’s impact will be more subtle … a different attitude towards nature and its preservation. Hey, I can dream.
My guess is that it would be received well-just like “Flash Gordon”.
Only in those days, the bad guys were vaguely oriental- “Ming the Merciless”-and they had the flying Hawkmen.
Space opera hasn’t changed all that much-heck, even ER Burroughs’ “Gods of Mars” featured the brain-switching surgeon (Ras Thavas)-though thgis was not as sophisticated as the human/alien body transfers on Pandora/“Avatar”.
The first red scare was back in 1919.
*Lawsy, Massa Jake Sir, why you knows ah don’ know nothin’ bout flyin’ no dy-no-sowrs!
*
But don’t worry about the special effects being off-putting. In 1939, the “flyin’ dy-no-sowrs” would be paper-maché, with occasionally-visible fishing line making the wings flap ponderously.
Yeah, but the racist undertones of Avatar would fit in well with the time. After all, the natives are hopeless until a white man shows them the way and is able to live in their world better than they are. It is pretty much Tarzan with blue people.
There is some techno jargon in the dialog that modern folks are familiar with (genetically designed Na’vi puppet people, for example. What’s genetics, and what’s being manipulated?) that may need to be explained a little more onscreen for a '39 audience.
I wonder if there is a difference in “plot pacing” in todays films compared to older ones. Folks from '39 might be offput by what seems like a frantic pacing in Avatar.
I don’t think the '39 audience would be “whooshed” by the “Noble Savage” plotline. It’s an old concept.
Sci-fi that we consider classics today have a root in the thirties, which flowered in the fifties. Telepathy, and space craft, and a poisonous atmosphere would be graspable stuff. The computers the various characters use would be seen as amazing, once they saw what those tools could do.
Of course, the audience might be asking “where are the 1920’s style death rays? They are still using guns?!?” 
George Lucas did it in the 1970s for Star Wars.
I’m pretty sure George Lucas never invented the microchip.
It would have been compared to Snow White, which Disney had released in 1938. I think the main reaction would have been “Cameron has better artists, but Disney has better writers.”
Studio execs would have balked at the length and the pacing. The fast-paced editing might have turned off some viewers. Then again, the younger viewers might have loved it.
None of the plot elements was new. Most of the gadgets would have been familiar to readers of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. “Genetic engineering” would have been an unfamiliar term, but the concept of growing critters in a lab would have been familiar to fans of Burroughs’ The Synthetic Men of Mars. Also the concept of transferring a mind from one body to another ( The Master Mind of Mars. )
The “noble savage” had been around at least since Rosseau, and had been part of American pop culture since The Song of Hiawatha and The Last of the Mohicans. The Romantic poets had been whining about the evils of industrial capitalism for nearly a century.
Probably the same way I viewed Blade Runner when it came out.
People wouldn’t understand a goddammed second of it.