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http://www.flammer.com/Projects/Survey_of_Popular_Culture/30's/flash_gordon_pics.htm

Visitors from other worlds, humanoid robots, space travel, fantastic landscapes inhabited by an incredible array of impossible beings, have electrified and energized the imaginations of successive generations of sci fi fans, crossing age, gender, racial, cultural, economic and any other categorical boundary that we tend to line ourselves up behind. The modern day mythology that now replaces the legends of old, still helps address that need for the mysterious and unexplainable, helped along with an equally startling level of technological wizardry.

Long gone are the weekly Saturday afternoon episodes of Flash Gordon mixed in with the full length ‘B’ movie features at the neighborhood theater. There, kids, popcorn, candy and soda pop overflowed into the aisles, faces occasionally buried behind hands (in response to the truly horrific shots that nobody admitted to being frightened by) when the lights came back on. Of course, in retrospect, those nightmare inducing clips have become a lot tamer when considering how the sci fi and fantasy images of the 50s and 60s looked in comparison to what we are capable of creating for today’s consumer.

The forays into the sci fi world that I remember early on mostly had to do with crudely orchestrated monster films that are sometimes celebrated as ‘cult’ films today: “Godzilla”, “The Mummy Walks”, one eyed octopus aliens in flying saucers, ray gun touting, and other face-painted ‘creature feature’ antagonists. Thre actors wore obviously uncomfortable, cumbersome and often poorly constructed full body costumes. Almost always better were the novels available at the local bookstore whose flashy, exotic covers teased one’s inner eye into coming up with much more effective mental illustrations of the worlds being visited and the entities who occupied them. No disappointing, low-end technological special effects ended up being an obstacle to the enjoyment that such tales provided the avid literary traveler.

http://www.flammer.com/Projects/Survey_of_Popular_Culture/30's/flash_gordon_pics.htm

Many readers found themselves hooked into the spell cast by stories written by such notable masters of this genre such as Harlan Ellison, Clifford Simak, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, J. R. R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, C.S. Lewis, Andre Norton and Ursula LeGuinn. Each of these authors and countless others were ever at the ready with passports into limitless spaces where adventure and wonder abounded in limitless quantity.

http://harlanellisn.com/gallery/photos.htm [1]

And then there came the era of “Star Wars”.... go to part 2

notes
[1] Illustration by Leo and Diane Dillon - book cover illustration from The Essential Ellison by Harlan Ellison.

Kevan Nitzberg is an art educationalist and Minnesota Educator of the Year, 2000. To suggest a subject matter you would like searched, click here to send a message.