Fantasy, Superhero, and Sci Fi Films - The 70's!

The 70’s started off with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) which I find to be a superior movie to One Million B.C. in terms of story and effects. Victoria Vetri is the heroine in the fur bikini this time wearing a blonde wig; she’s surprisingly funny. The Hammer film had nudity which Walmart didn’t know when it placed the DVDs in the bargain bins. Disney released Bedknobs & Broomsticks (1971) which I saw recently, it is surreal, Angela Lansbury is a witch who uses suits of armor to defeat a Nazi invasion. Still, the most charming fantasy was Gene Wilder as the lead in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). The Oompa Loompas were disturbing to me. There was a Tim Burton movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), but it did not have the magic of the original or the Roald Dahl novel. 

1972 had an interesting sci film, Silent Running, directed by special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull, it featured Bruce Dern trying to care for the last of Earth’s plant life with the help of three waddling robots; Huey, Louie, and Dewey. We had a dystopian future with resources exhausted by the greenhouse effect in Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973). Charleston Heston knows the secret ingredient! The year also had Michael Crichton’s brilliant future, Westworld, which had Yul Brenner's Gunslinger pursuing guests Terminator-style in a theme park, 44 years before the HBO show! 

Harryhausen returned to Arabian legends with The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), great fun. Doug McClure entered The Land That Time Forgot (1975), an Edgar Rice Burroughs sci fi adventure that used puppets for the creatures. 1976’s Logan’s Run showed a future that was a paradise, but it becomes a dystopian parable on agism with a sci fi euthanasia and the Sandmen retiring people at 30. 1977 brought us Disney’s Pete’s Dragon which I also saw recently, it is bizarre, a huckster wants to cut up the dragon, Mickey Rooney is the town drunk, but there is Helen Reedy singing. I like the more recent version, 2016, with Bryce Dallas Howard. 

Another Harryhausen film filled out the Arabian tales, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. The last of the Sinbad movies, kinda risqué with Jane Seymour disturbed by a peeping Cyclops. 1977 was the year of Star Wars, it brought a new level of blockbuster from George Lucas that combined his love of old Flash Gordon serials, John Ford westerns, and Akira Kurosawa inspired story and directing. Lucas created legions of Star Warriors taking visual effects to the next level with ILM and also making movie merchandising essential to popular films. The film made me a sci fi fan and reader looking back into the inspirations for Lucas. It also increased my love of fantasy and myths since Lucas read up on Joseph Campbell. 

In November, Steven Spielberg directed and wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which provided his suburban setting mixed with a UFOlogist’s dream of aliens and John Williams’ haunting score. 1978 was also the Ralph Bakshi animated film, The Lord of the Rings, 23 years before the Peter Jackson live action film. What was mind blowing was Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie, I heard him speak about the movie (I was sitting next to his wife, producer Lauren Schuler-Donner and heard her correct him!), this brought comic books to the big action spectacle of the screen. It won the Oscar for Best Achievement for effects. The decade finished with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) that introduced us to the bio-mechanical designs of H.R. Giger and the horror of the alien. Star Trek joined the Star Wars films with a made for tv movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was for a proposed series brought to the theaters. The year ended with Disney’s Black Hole that had Star Wars action grafted on a Captain Nemo space adventure with a surreal ending.  We have one fantasy classic, but again more sci fi films, with Superman leading the way with superhero movies.

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