news:billvan-DA133A...@shawnews.vc.shawcable.net:
> In article <
XnsA5709C7402A89sn...@213.239.209.88>,
> "Sneaky O. Possum" <
sneaky...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> bill van <
bil...@delete.shaw.ca> wrote in
>>
news:billvan-838B96...@shawnews.vc.shawcable.net:
>> >
>> > It was 1959, and Serling was trying to bring a mix of science
>> > fiction, fantasy and horror to an audience that for the most part
>> > wasn't familiar with any of those genres.
>>
>> What audience would that have been - people released after decades in
>> solitary confinement? Popular culture was rife with science fiction,
>> fantasy, and horror in the 1950s.
>
> How far back does your familiarity with these genres go?
As far back as I can remember. Why?
> "For most of its existence as an identifiable genre ... science
> fiction has been a popular literature enjoyed by a relatively few
> intensely involved readers."
>
> "It was (a genre) which could exist only on the margins of the
> literary and economic worlds."
>
> -- James Gunn in the foreword of his 1988 first edition of The New
> Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
>
> The so-called Golden Age of science fiction spanned the 1930s through
> 1946, but its readers were Gunn's "relatively few". The 1950s started
> well, but the pulp magazines that kept the SF publishing business
> afloat collapsed one by one and only a fraction of them survived into
> the late 1950s.
That has nothing to do with the popularity of science fiction in other
media. Serling wanted viewers, not readers. Horror movies had been widely
popular in the United States from the 1930s onwards, and science-fiction
movies and television programs were common during the 1950s.
> SF movies did well in the 1950s, but with titles such as The Day the
> Earth Stood Still, Radar Men From the Moon and It Came From Outer
> Space, they created a market for the kind of hokum that Serling was
> selling in 1959.
In fact, /The Day the Earth Stood Still/ and /It Came from Outer Space/
were more thoughtful than most of the science-fiction movies made during
the 1950s, and they still hold up fairly well. Their titles are hardly
representative of their content: the original /Invasion of the Body
Snatchers/ has a very silly title, but the movie is an effective
examination of Cold War fears through an allegorical lens.
> SF didn't start to reach mass markets until the baby boom began to
> consume it in numbers in the 1960s. The so-called New Wave movement in
> SF arrived around 1968, helping to set off a huge sales boom.
>
> Fantasy had only a small presence until Tolkien's LotR opened the
> floodgates.
Tolkienesque fantasy had only a small presence on /The Twilight Zone/: to
the extent that it had fantasy elements, they had more in common with /A
Christmas Carol/ and /It's a Wonderful Life/ than /Beowulf/ and /The
Kalevala/.
> Horror was also a marginal genre until Stephen King and
> his contemporaries arrived.
There was no shortage of horror in other media, and some of it was quite
good, too. Popular radio anthology series such as /Lights Out/ and /Inner
Sanctum/ were a strong influence on the style and format of /The Twilight
Zone/.
>> Network executives would hardly have
>> given Serling the green light if they'd thought most of the potential
>> audience for /The Twilight Zone/ was unfamiliar with the genres it
>> represented.
>
> Their familiarity was much more with the hokey movies of the 1950s
> than with written SF.
Well? Those 'hokey' movies (and earlier 'hokey' anthology series)
provided the templates for most of the stories told on /The Twilight
Zone/. In their settings, style, and content, movies such as /It Came
from Outer Space/, /The Day the Earth Stood Still/, and /Invasion of the
Body Snatchers/ are strikingly similar to the 'house style' of /The
Twilight Zone/. It's not as though Serling was adapting Heinlein and
Asimov for the masses.
>> > The intro was hokum - as was some of the content - and, 56 years
>> > later, doesn't bear close examination, particularly by a highly
>> > educated group of readers, writers and usage experts such as is
>> > gathered here in aue. I'd just take with a grain or three of sea
>> > salt from those pink mountains in south Asia.
>>
>> The intro didn't bear close examination 56 years ago, either. It
>> worked, though, thanks to Serling's narration: his dry,
>> matter-of-fact vocal delivery was a wonderfully appropriate vehicle
>> for his writing, which tended to sound absurdly overblown in the
>> mouths of actors stuck with the impossible task of making it sound
>> like natural dialogue. (Fortunately for the show, Serling wrote very
>> few of the episodes.)
--
S.O.P.