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They have taken the form of immigrants, invaders, lovers, heroes,
cute creatures that want our candy or monsters that want our flesh.
For more than a century, movies and television shows have
speculated about the form and motives of alien life forms. Movies
first dipped their toe into the genre in the 1940s with Superman
cartoons and the big screen's first story of alien invasion (1945's
The Purple Monster Strikes). More aliens landed in the 1950s
science fiction movie boom, followed by more television appearances
(The Invaders, My Favorite Martian) in the 1960s. Extraterrestrials
have been on-screen mainstays ever since. This book examines
various types of the on-screen alien visitor story, featuring a
liberal array of alien types, designs and motives. Each chapter
spotlights a specific film or TV series, offering comparative
analyses and detailing the tropes, themes and cliches and how they
have evolved over time. Highlighted subjects include The Eternals,
War of the Worlds, The X-Files, John Carpenter's The Thing and
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.
More than 400 films and 150 television series have featured time
travel - stories of rewriting history, lovers separated by
centuries, journeys to the past or the (often dystopian) future.
This book examines some of the roles time travel plays on screen in
science fiction and fantasy. Plot synopses and credits are listed
for TV series from England, Canada, the UK and Japan, as well as
for films from around the world. Tropes and plot elements are
highlighted. The author discusses philosophical questions about
time travel, such as the logic of timelines, causality (what's to
keep time-travelers from jumping back and correcting every
mistake?) and morality (if you correct a mistake, are you still
guilty of it?).
L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wizard of Oz, has spawned 39 official
sequels, over 100 unofficial sequels, well nearly 40 films, several
TV series, music videos, commercials, computer games, radio shows
and more. It has received a number of different interpretations: an
African-American slant, a Turkish low-budget fantasy, Japanese
anime, and American pornography, among others. This book provides
synopses and basic bibliographical information for the forty Oz
books in the original series and a number of related books by the
Royal Historians of Oz; synopses and credits for live performances
(videos and made-for-television performances are included here)
based on the Oz books and on Baum's non-Oz fantasies; comic book
and comic strip adaptations of Oz; synopses and credits for radio
shows and dramatic performances on audiobook or vinyl records;
synopses and credits for theatrical films and shorts; documentaries
and educational films; synopses and credits for television series
and episodes based on Oz; video and computer games; useful
websites; and short scenes on television or in movies that have an
Oz element.
American films, like America itself, have long been fascinated by
the threat of outsiders posing as citizens to destroy the American
way of life. This book tracks real-world fears appearing in the
movies--Nazi agents, Japanese-American spies, Communist Party
subversives, Islamic sleeper cells--as well as the science-fiction
threats that play to the same fears, such as alien body-snatchers
and android doppelgangers. The work also examines fears inspired by
World War I German spies, the Japanese-American internment and the
McCarthyite witch-hunts and shows how these issues, and others,
played out on screen.
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