The first in the Routledge Television Guidebooks series, Science Fiction TV offers an introduction to the versatile and evolving genre of science fiction television, combining historical overview with textual readings to analyze its development and ever-increasing popularity. J. P. Telotte discusses science fiction’s cultural progressiveness and the breadth of its technological and narrative possibilities, exploring SFTV from its roots in the pulp magazines and radio serials of the 1930s all the way up to the present. From formative series like Captain Video to contemporary, cutting-edge shows like Firefly and long-lived popular revivals such as Doctor Who and Star Trek, Telotte insightfully tracks the history and growth of this crucial genre, along with its dedicated fandom and special venues, such as the Syfy Channel. In addition, each chapter features an in-depth exploration of a range of key historical and contemporary series, including: -Captain Video and His Video Rangers -The Twilight Zone -Battlestar Galactica -Farscape -Fringe Incorporating a comprehensive videography, discussion questions, and a detailed bibliography for additional reading, J. P. Telotte has created a concise yet thought-provoking guide to SFTV, a book that will appeal not only to dedicated science fiction fans but to students of popular culture and media as well.
Science fiction films celebrate and critique the impact of a burgeoning technology on the world's cultural, political, and social milieu. The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer. What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema — as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair — is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus. The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult
In the wake of the juvenile space operas of the early 1950s, a groundbreaking series debuted and paved the way for one of viewers’ favorite genres today: adult-oriented science fiction. Science Fiction Theatre aired with a fresh anthology-style narrative from the vision of veteran producer Ivan Tors and with compelling narration by Truman Bradley. Created by industry-leading syndicator Ziv Television Programs, the show pioneered a scientifically based approach to aliens, telepathy, and the mysteries of the universe that provided a model for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and a myriad of acclaimed programs that followed, including The Outer Limits (1963–65), The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985–92),and Black Mirror (2011–present). This book contextualizes Science Fiction Theatre within the budding American television industry of the 1950s, as powerful networks and independent producers and syndicators vied to create and distribute programming to an audience eager to embrace this new, free medium. Including a complete videography of this historically neglected series, author J. P. Telotte illuminates Science Fiction Theatre as a touchstone for understanding the development of science fiction media and the dynamic nature of early television broadcasting.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company's network television series Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color. The series, part of Walt Disney's quest to re-create American entertainment, premiered October 27, 1954 on ABC and was the longest-lived program in television history. Over the years, Walt Disney's visions have evolved into family-oriented cinema, television, theme parks. From the lovable Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to magical places like Frontierland, Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color generated some of the most popular fads of the era. In Disney TV, J. P. Telotte examines the history of the Disney television series while placing it in context-the film industry's reaction to television in the post-World War II era, the Disney Studios' place in the American entertainment industry, and Walt Disney's dream to create the modern theme park. Telotte's guiding principle in this examination is to illustrate how Disney changed the relationship between cinema and television and, perhaps more importantly, how it affected American culture. The conciseness of Telotte's book is a major advantage over other leading Disney scholarship. Detailed, without including minutia, Telotte provides the reader with the key issues that surrounded the development of the Disney phenomenon. This book will attract a wide array of readers--scholars of television, media, and film studies, popular culture students, and all those touched by the magic of Disney.
From twentieth-century animations and comic strips to advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name.
A haunting fascination fuels our interest in the robot, the android, the cyborg, the replicant. Born in science fiction literature, the artificial human has come into its own in films, lurching to life, holding a mirror to humanity's soul. Beginning with a pre-history of the filmic robot, J. P. Telotte traces its development through early sci-fi landmarks such as Metropolis (1926), the alien films of the 1950s (including Forbidden Planet), and recent explorations of the artificial human in Blade Runner, Robocop, and the Terminator films. Replications also considers the tension between the technological wonders that science fiction depicts and the human values it champions. Film-makers employ the latest developments in technology to fashion ever more realistic human doubles, and then use them to explore what it means to be human. Telotte shows us how the sci-fi genre has always addressed changing cultural attitudes toward technology, the body, gender roles, human intelligence, reality, and even film itself.
What impact did the new art of film have on the development of another new art, the emerging science fiction genre, during the pre- and early post-World War II era? Focusing on such popular pulp magazines as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories, this book traces this early relationship between film and literature through four common features: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editorial matters and readers' letters commenting on film; and the magazines' heralded cover and story illustrations. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early science fiction discourse, we can begin to see the key role that a cinematic mindedness played in this formative era and to expand the early history of science fiction as a cultural idea beyond the usual boundaries that have been staked out by its literary manifestations and the genre's historians.
Animators work within a strictly defined, limited space that requires difficult artistic decisions. The blank frame presents a dilemma for all animators, and the decision of what to include and leave out raises important questions about artistry, authorship, and cultural influence. In Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E, renowned scholar J. P. Telotte explores how animation has confronted the blank template, and how responses to that confrontation have changed. Focusing on American animation, Telotte tracks the development of animation in line with changing cultural attitudes toward space and examines innovations that elevated the medium from a novelty to a fully realized art form. From Winsor McCay and the Fleischer brothers to the Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., and Pixar Studios, Animating Space explores the contributions of those who invented animation, those who refined it, and those who, in the current digital age, are using it to redefine the very possibilities of cinema.
How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself. For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction. Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, and The Blob, as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.
This book offers the first specific application in film studies of what is generally known as ecology theory, shifting attention from history to the (in this case media) environment. It takes the robot as its subject because it has attained a status that resonates not only with some of the key concerns of contemporary culture over the last century, but also with the very nature of film. While the robot has given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of otherness, and increasingly for asking questions about the very nature and meaning of life, this image of an artificial being, typically anthropomorphic, also invariably implicates the cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the human. Looking across genres, across specific media forms, and across closely linked conceptualizations, Telotte sketches a context of interwoven influences and meanings. The result is that this study of the cinematic robot, while mainly focused on science fiction film, also incorporates its appearance in, for example, musicals, cartoons, television, advertising, toys, and literature.
The American film noir, the popular genre that focused on urban crime and corruption in the 1940s and 1950s, exhibits the greatest amount of narrative experimentation in the modern American cinema. Spurred by postwar disillusionment, cold war anxieties, and changing social circumstances, these films revealed the dark side of American life and, in doing so, created unique narrative structures in order to speak of that darkness. J.P. Telotte's in-depth discussion of classic films noir--including The Lady from Shanghai, The Lady in the Lake, Dark Passage, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and Murder, My Sweet--draws on the work of Michel Foucault to examine four dominant noir narrative strategies.
“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.
How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself. For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction. Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, and The Blob, as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.
“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.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company's network television series Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color. The series, part of Walt Disney's quest to re-create American entertainment, premiered October 27, 1954 on ABC and was the longest-lived program in television history. Over the years, Walt Disney's visions have evolved into family-oriented cinema, television, theme parks. From the lovable Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to magical places like Frontierland, Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color generated some of the most popular fads of the era. In Disney TV, J. P. Telotte examines the history of the Disney television series while placing it in context-the film industry's reaction to television in the post-World War II era, the Disney Studios' place in the American entertainment industry, and Walt Disney's dream to create the modern theme park. Telotte's guiding principle in this examination is to illustrate how Disney changed the relationship between cinema and television and, perhaps more importantly, how it affected American culture. The conciseness of Telotte's book is a major advantage over other leading Disney scholarship. Detailed, without including minutia, Telotte provides the reader with the key issues that surrounded the development of the Disney phenomenon. This book will attract a wide array of readers--scholars of television, media, and film studies, popular culture students, and all those touched by the magic of Disney.
This book offers the first specific application in film studies of what is generally known as ecology theory, shifting attention from history to the (in this case media) environment. It takes the robot as its subject because it has attained a status that resonates not only with some of the key concerns of contemporary culture over the last century, but also with the very nature of film. While the robot has given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of otherness, and increasingly for asking questions about the very nature and meaning of life, this image of an artificial being, typically anthropomorphic, also invariably implicates the cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the human. Looking across genres, across specific media forms, and across closely linked conceptualizations, Telotte sketches a context of interwoven influences and meanings. The result is that this study of the cinematic robot, while mainly focused on science fiction film, also incorporates its appearance in, for example, musicals, cartoons, television, advertising, toys, and literature.
Science fiction films celebrate and critique the impact of a burgeoning technology on the world's cultural, political, and social milieu. The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer. What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema — as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair — is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus. The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult
Cinematic influence shaped the experience and cultural understanding of science fiction during the formative pre-World War II period. Each chapter focuses on representations of film in pulp magazines -film-related advertisements; a film-related rhetoric that surfaced in science fiction stories; fans' and editors' discussions of film; and the covers and story illustrations for which the pulps were infamously known. The book's final chapter considers how, during the war and the decade immediately following, that cinematic influence shifted due to the recession of the modernist agenda and an array of new technologies, including television. By looking at those pulps during the key period in the development of science fiction, this book lays out film's early imprint on the genre and suggests the extent of its influence--an influence that would culminate in both SciFi film and literature coming into separate but equally impressive cultural prominence at approximately the same moment during the 1950s"--
In the wake of the juvenile space operas of the early 1950s, a groundbreaking series debuted and paved the way for one of viewers’ favorite genres today: adult-oriented science fiction. Science Fiction Theatre aired with a fresh anthology-style narrative from the vision of veteran producer Ivan Tors and with compelling narration by Truman Bradley. Created by industry-leading syndicator Ziv Television Programs, the show pioneered a scientifically based approach to aliens, telepathy, and the mysteries of the universe that provided a model for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and a myriad of acclaimed programs that followed, including The Outer Limits (1963–65), The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985–92),and Black Mirror (2011–present). This book contextualizes Science Fiction Theatre within the budding American television industry of the 1950s, as powerful networks and independent producers and syndicators vied to create and distribute programming to an audience eager to embrace this new, free medium. Including a complete videography of this historically neglected series, author J. P. Telotte illuminates Science Fiction Theatre as a touchstone for understanding the development of science fiction media and the dynamic nature of early television broadcasting.
Animators work within a strictly defined, limited space that requires difficult artistic decisions. The blank frame presents a dilemma for all animators, and the decision of what to include and leave out raises important questions about artistry, authorship, and cultural influence. In Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E, renowned scholar J. P. Telotte explores how animation has confronted the blank template, and how responses to that confrontation have changed. Focusing on American animation, Telotte tracks the development of animation in line with changing cultural attitudes toward space and examines innovations that elevated the medium from a novelty to a fully realized art form. From Winsor McCay and the Fleischer brothers to the Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., and Pixar Studios, Animating Space explores the contributions of those who invented animation, those who refined it, and those who, in the current digital age, are using it to redefine the very possibilities of cinema.
The first in the Routledge Television Guidebooks series, Science Fiction TV offers an introduction to the versatile and evolving genre of science fiction television, combining historical overview with textual readings to analyze its development and ever-increasing popularity. J. P. Telotte discusses science fiction’s cultural progressiveness and the breadth of its technological and narrative possibilities, exploring SFTV from its roots in the pulp magazines and radio serials of the 1930s all the way up to the present. From formative series like Captain Video to contemporary, cutting-edge shows like Firefly and long-lived popular revivals such as Doctor Who and Star Trek, Telotte insightfully tracks the history and growth of this crucial genre, along with its dedicated fandom and special venues, such as the Syfy Channel. In addition, each chapter features an in-depth exploration of a range of key historical and contemporary series, including: -Captain Video and His Video Rangers -The Twilight Zone -Battlestar Galactica -Farscape -Fringe Incorporating a comprehensive videography, discussion questions, and a detailed bibliography for additional reading, J. P. Telotte has created a concise yet thought-provoking guide to SFTV, a book that will appeal not only to dedicated science fiction fans but to students of popular culture and media as well.
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America's political institutions underwent radical changes as they adapted to comprehensive security reforms. While the media exhaustively covered new security protocols in the executive office, little attention was paid to other federal agencies and branches that overhauled their systems to accommodate heightened security requirements. As a congressional fellow living in Washington, D.C., Jocelyn Jones Evans was an eyewitness to the institutional culture of Capitol Hill before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as well as during the subsequent anthrax.
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