While there is admittedly significant overlap, there are films with a lot of special effects that are not SF, and SF films without a lot of special effects. Even at that, the biggest advance in special effects isn’t so much in being able to do things that couldn’t be done before, but in doing them cheaply: The tornado in The Wizard of Oz, for instance, still looks fine even today, but it almost broke their budget.
And Bambi = Vietnam!
If Godzilla is the US, and Bambi is Vietnam, then the short “Bambi meets Godzilla” was wishful thinking. In reality, Godzilla repeatedly stomped on a Bambi that wouldn’t die, until Godzilla limped away with a bleeding hole in his foot.
When the first Star Wars movie first came out, everyone said it was fantastic. So my girlfriend and I went to see it – and I was seriously underwhelmed.
I eventually figured out that I had gone expecting to see a good science fiction movie, and Star Wars was, at best, sci-fi. I went to see the movie again with more appropriate expectations, and enjoyed it quite well.
See Bambi’s Revenge.
I guess Bambi II could be Vietnam in the post-Soviet world economy and political order?
“Long live the revolution, comrades!..oh, and we’ll have to work through lunch. Nike Corporate’s getting fussy about performance metrics this quarter.”
It’s from 1964 and the plot is kind of hokey, but I always liked Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It was visually impressive to me as a kid at the movies.
That’s one of my favorites as well.
Me too!
This just isn’t so. The special effects in The Time Machine, for instance, are superior to those in the recent remake, and there are plenty of current films with bad CGI effects (actually, CGI effects are unrealistic and phony but people are so used to them that they think other, far more realistic effects are “cheesy” because the, for instance, actually get the effect of gravity right.) The effects on The Incredible Shrinking Man and Tarantula are still quite good and only suffer because they’re more realistic than CGI.
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). Of course, it does suck, but that’s what makes it so good. It’s hilarious but not supposed to be.
That’s likely to be a huge factor, yes. My sister in law pretty much hadn’t watched any movies made before she was born until a few months before she married my brother (yes, they did have a TV, but one and if her father was watching he demanded absolute silence so the kids scooted; if her mother was, it wouldn’t be movies). My father almost had a heart attack when she claimed that some detail in Stagecoach was “so totally cliched!” “young lady, this is the movie where it came into being. It is this movie that begat the cliche!” She was saved from a several-hours speech with showings from his extensive video library only by his desire to marry my brother off.
Yes, very impressive. And more-or-less hard sci-fi, too, until about halfway through. I was so happy when this came out on DVD!
I think the OP has a point. I recently watched The Last Man on Earth at hulu, and what really stood out was how low budget it was. Except for the rare film like Forbidden Planet or the Incredible Shrinking Man, sci-fi didn’t get big budgets until relatively recently. I think it was pretty rare to find good actors there either.
Hey, until the 1960s, it was rare to find good writers, in the literary sense, working in SF. That does not mean Golden Age SF is not worth reading.
(See the TVTropes page SciFi Ghetto.)
I submit “It, the Terror from Beyond Space”.
The title is awful but the plot is basically the one stolen by the writers of “Alien”, namely
a crew stuck on a spaceship as a creature slowly slaughters them. Alien even stole the ending. The main difference is how it gets on board; Alien wins in that regard.
I love that movie! the astronauts are innocently visiting another planet, thank god they remebered to bring guns and grenades and bazookas. I even remember one astronaut opening a locker, it was filled with cigarettes! Yea! That’s how to travel, daddyo