That way, see, you can sucker the kids into the theater without them even noticing they were being cultured. Let Pal toss in his trademark heavy-handed Christian subtext, and everyone was happy: kids, parents, the studio, the censors… everybody.Īn even neater trick, it turned out, was to slip the audience a literary mickey, disguising a classic play or novel as a wild, colorful and imaginative sci-fi film with lots of explosions and spaceships, and robots and shit. As a result we ended up with George Pal’s versions of War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and Philip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide. One neat trick that was used to justify taking the dive while preserving a bit of pride and self-respect was to produce lavish, big budget Technicolor adaptations of established sci-fi literary classics. When it became apparent just how much money could be made with sci-fi, however, most eventually relented. Despite the sudden and unexpected explosion in the popularity of science fiction films in the early 1950s, a number of major studios were resistant to the trend, considering the genre to be B-film fodder at best, and at worst childish gutter trash that was beneath them.
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