Before establishing himself as the "master of disaster" with the 1970s films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allen created four of television's most exciting and enduring science-fiction series: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. These 1960s series were full of Allen's favorite tricks, techniques and characteristic touches, and influenced other productions from the original Star Trek forward. Every science-fiction show owes something to Allen, yet none has equaled his series' pace, excitement, or originality. This detailed examination and documentation of the premise and origin of the four shows offers an objective evaluation of every episode--and demonstrates that when Irwin Allen's television episodes were good, they were great, and when they were bad, they were still terrific fun.
Though science fiction certainly existed prior to the surge of television in the 1950s, the genre quickly established roots in the new medium and flourished in subsequent decades. In Channeling the Future: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Lincoln Geraghty has assembled a collection of essays that focuses on the disparate visions of the past, present, and future offered by science fiction and fantasy television since the 1950s and that continue into the present day. These essays not only shine new light on often overlooked and forgotten series but also examine the 'look' of science fiction and fantasy television, determining how iconography, location and landscape, special effects, set design, props, and costumes contribute to the creation of future and alternate worlds. Contributors to this volume analyze such classic programs as The Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as well as contemporary programs, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Angel, Firefly, Futurama, and the new Battlestar Galactica. These essays provide a much needed look at how science fiction television has had a significant impact on history, culture, and society for the last sixty years.
Essays in this work examine treatments of history in science fiction and fantasy television programs from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Some essays approach science fiction and fantasy television as primary evidence, demonstrating how such programs consciously or unconsciously elucidate persistent concerns and enduring ideals of a past era and place. Other essays study television as secondary evidence, investigating how popular media construct and communicate narratives about past events.
“A richly detailed and critically penetrating overview . . . from the plucky adventures of Captain Video to the postmodern paradoxes of The X-Files and Lost.” —Rob Latham, coeditor of Science Fiction Studies Exploring such hits as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, among others, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader illuminates the history, narrative approaches, and themes of the genre. The book discusses science fiction television from its early years, when shows attempted to recreate the allure of science fiction cinema, to its current status as a sophisticated genre with a popularity all its own. J. P. Telotte has assembled a wide-ranging volume rich in theoretical scholarship yet fully accessible to science fiction fans. The book supplies readers with valuable historical context, analyses of essential science fiction series, and an understanding of the key issues in science fiction television.
The Authorized Biography of a Classic Sci-Fi Series, Volume 1 documents the early career of Irwin Allen. It is a true rags-to-riches story, as Allen ventures from a humble beginning in the Bronx to his later incarnations in Hollywood as an entertainment journalist, radio and television host, a literary agent - all before becoming a successful motion picture producer and director. After winning an Academy Award in 1954, Allen entered the fantasy genre with films such as The Lost World and Voyages to the Bottom of the Sea. He then rolled the dice again with a move into television, creating and producing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and, one year later, Lost in Space.Lost in Space was the first primetime weekly series to take viewers into outer space's strange new alien worlds - something the networks believed impossible on a TV budget and schedule. In this book you'll be whisked back in time to the production offices, writers' conferences, and soundstages for the making of this iconic series. Included are hundreds of memos between Allen and his staff; production schedules; budgets; fan letters; more than 200 rare behind-the-scene images; and the TV ratings for every episode.
"It's back, the comic book adaptation of one of the most famous and popular sci-fi television series of the late 1960's: Irwin Allen's Land of the Giants. This collection presents the complete reprint of the entire series of Gold Key comic books featuring Captain Steve Burton, Dan Erikson, Mark Wilson, Valerie Scott, Betty Hamilton, Alexander Fitzhugh, Barry Lockridge, and the Spindrift."--Cover.
Black and white / 710 pages / Adult content and strong language To look at the world of the past through films can be a sobering insight into how things have changed, but to look at the world of the 20th century through sex films is to witness a world that is almost inexplicable. In no decade is this experience more bizarre than the 1970s, and yet it is less than half a century in the past. Was society really so strange and different only forty years ago? These films were often not pornography, as we understand the term. But what were they? Who made these films and why, and who were they made for? What did they say then, and what do they tell us now? In some cases, what were we thinking But in others, what have we lost? Nothing even remotely like these films is being made today. What has replaced them, and how, and why? JON ABBOTT, born in 1956 and a teenager in the 1970s, looks back at the era through over two hundred films exploiting sex and nudity, some of which he loved, and some of which he... liked a little less! This opinionated and fact-filled history looks at the strange new world that adults of both sexes and all ages found themselves in during the 1970s and surrounding decades, from the 1950s to the present day. It looks at films from all around the world, including America, Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Czechoslovakia, China, and Japan, at sci-fi, horror, crime thrillers, comedies that weren't funny, and serious-minded films that were hilarious. Some of the best-known masters of sexploitation are well represented--Stanley Long, Greg Smith, Joe Sarno, Russ Meyer, Mac Ahlberg, Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Tinto Brass--as are some of the sex films' most beautiful and prolific practitioners--Sylvia Kristel, Gloria Guida, Lina Romay, Maria Forsa, Edwige Fenech, Felicity Devonshire, Christina Lindberg, Joelle Coeur... and such mainstream movie names as Jane Fonda, Jenny Agutter, Julie Christie, and Pam Grier. JON ABBOTT has been writing about films and TV for over thirty years in a variety of publications, trade, populist, and specialist. This is his fifth book.
