My love affair with Sci-Fi began when I was just a wee lad sitting
in front of a television inside a built-in three hundred pound wooden cabinet. Ah, those were the days. That's me there in the tartan jumper and the yellow turtleneck looking clueless and dazed (a look I excel at even today). My mom was a big fan of The Wild, Wild West with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin and it always seemed to be on the tv. It wasn't in its original run anymore but it was syndicated in the afternoons right before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. That, along with reruns of Star Trek and Lost in Space on the weekends, gave me a deep love of Sci-Fi that I have to this day, with a catch. And here's the catch: I don't really like any Sci-Fi after the seventies. The reasons are many, and almost all completely unsupportable by logic and reason. They're personal reasons, not cerebral ones. For instance,*I like my special effects to look good but not great.
*I love miniatures and models and matte shots.
*I love when you can tell they're miniatures and models and matte shots.
*I love that sci-fi writers really believed that in the future we would all wear either togas, tunics, aluminum foil jumpsuits, polyester jumpsuits or loose hanging garments or vests of different colors depending on one's station in life.
*I love that The Day of the Triffids took the idea of plants becoming mobile and attacking people seriously and actually made a good movie out of it.
*I love that the plants in The Day of the Triffids were men in tree suits.
*I love it when aliens are defeated because they can't comprehend something like love or poetry.
*I love that when Anne Francis in Forbidden Planet asks Robby the Robot why he took so long to show up he responds, "Sorry miss, I was giving myself an oil job."
*I love that Ed Wood was attracted to science fiction.
*I love that he was so bad at it.
*I love the speech Eros gives in Plan Nine from Outer Space describing Solaranite. You CANNOT purposely write something that bad. That Ed Wood wrote it thinking it made sense makes it all the more mesmerizing.
*I also love that Eros says, "In my land, women are for advancing the race, not for fighting man's battles." after explaining how advanced and superior they are.
*I love that when they made movies like Queen of Outer Space they weren't trying to make a bad movie. When they do something like it today they're doing it campy on purpose. It's not the same.
*I love that in Forbidden Planet the crew is described as "18 competitively selected super-perfect physical specimens with an average age of 24.6" and yet none of them have any muscle tone and the youngest of the group looks forty.
*I love that in the future at least one crew member aboard every spaceship is a complete yokel and a moron.
*I love that scientists always wear glasses and lab coats, no matter where they are.
*I love that computers always take up entire rooms and have lots of blinking lights.
*I love that the reason we had to claim the Moon for ourselves in Destination Moon is because the Soviets might use it to launch missiles at us.
*I love that in the entire lengthy process of writing, casting, production and post-production it never occurred to anyone that launching a missile from the Moon would give us a convenient three day advance warning, much more time than if it's launched from a sub or the arctic.
*I love that when characters observe some fantastic phenomena having nothing whatsoever to do with the General Theory of Relativity they exclaim, "Einstein was right."
*I love that George Pal was attracted to science fiction.
*I love that he was good at it.
*I love that rockets always appear to be molded out of one massive single piece of polished stainless steel like an over-sized bullet.
*I love shrinking men being chased by house cats.
*I love shrinking men fighting spiders with knitting needles.
*I love The Land that Time Forgot
*I love that the halls of Congress were filled with cats in Logan's Run. If only that could happen for real.
*I love that Box, the evil robot in Logan's Run, has managed to kill every human that has passed through his lair and yet when we see him he is slow, top heavy and easily out-manouvered.
*I love mad scientists.
*I love that when Claude Rains takes monocaine to turn himself invisible it makes him mad as well
*I love that "monocaine" is the drug name they came up with.
*I love Raymond Massey's over-sized flight helmet in Things to Come.
*I love that the giant machines in Things to Come are simple ordinary sized gears blown up.
*I love that the dinosaurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth are iguanas with ridges and plates glued to their backs.
*I love that 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined an astonishing world of technological advances 33 years in its future but didn't bother to change any of the fashions from 1968.
*And before this list gets any more out of hand, let me just say that I love that they all managed to do it (2001 excluded) in an hour and a half (hour and 45 minutes tops).
So there are my reasons. By the early eighties on the aliens were either cute and cuddly (E.T., Batteries not Included, Cocoon) or genuinely menacing (Alien, Predator), the movies started to get longer and the genre seemed to start taking itself very seriously. Now don't get me wrong, there are sci-fi films I like after the seventies (Blade Runner and Alien to name two) 
it's just that the ones I grew up loving don't get made anymore. And I don't expect them to. I like the innocence of the earlier sci-fi movies and that's something we'll never get back. On the plus side I get to watch them all over again as I write about them and hopefully sway some other people in their direction along the way. Of course, I don't expect everyone to like them. I'm more than aware that a good deal of this is nostalgia based and that if you didn't grow up with them there's less chance of you taking to them. But you never know. Scientists in lab coats, Zsa Zsa Gabor on Venus and giant masses of space plasma facing off against Steve McQueen are pretty hard to resist, once you let them in.
