Your top 5 sci-fi movies (and why)

[...m...]

Good list! Although Alien was '79.

...oh darn it, you're right!..i'll have to chew on that for a bit: aliens is too action-adventure for my science-fiction, so maybe i'll give lynch's dune adaptation the nod if i can resist tapping akira...

 

[Autumnal]

You might try see what happens if you count decades after the end of WE2: 1945-55, 1956-65, and so on. I don’t know what effect this would have, but it’s sometimes fun to fiddle with the brackets.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You might try see what happens if you count decades after the end of WE2: 1945-55, 1956-65, and so on. I don’t know what effect this would have, but it’s sometimes fun to fiddle with the brackets.

Its notable that as a fan of what's often called "50's SF movies" that the look-and-feel there doesn't quite start to trail off until 1964. On the other hand, Rocketship XM came out in 1950 proper, and likely has much more the feel of that than most movies of the prior half-decade I can find (once you get outside the pulpy cases and combined serials, its actually fairly hard to find SF movies in English in that period where whatever SF element is present is more than a gimmick supporting other parts of the movie. Its actually a little odd how sharp the demarcation is.

 

[Autumnal]

I have a story about Rocketship X-M. Dad and I had talked about MST3K but he hadn’t watched any. One time he and Mom were visiting me, and I was watching an episode in rerun while they did some other stuff. He came in, listened a minute, enjoyed the jokes, then did a double-take. “Is that Rocketship X-M they’re making fun of?” I confirmed it was. “Oh, good!” he said, and sat down to enjoy the rest of the episode with me.

It turns out that when Rocketship X-M first came out, it had advertising intended to look very much like the contemporary, vastly better Destination Moon. Dad was already in rocketry at the time, as well as being a lifelong sf fan. He wanted to see Destination Moon. He did not want to see Rocketship X-M. But thanks to enthusiasm and not paying enough attention up front, he ended up seeing it anyway. And he still had a grudge against it forty-odd years later, a grudge finally soothed by seeing it mocked by Joel and the robots.