Yes! That was a cool Starfighter design.
I’m rewatching that show at the moment and loving every minute of it. It’s silly but fun.
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I don’t know about your thoughts, but I’ve always thought that 2001 was still influencing science fiction in the 70’s. So, with TMP and Black Hole, they wanted to do something bigger, grander and cleverer than Star Wars. While missing the obvious reasons for Star Wars success, it was a relatively simple good Vs evil story with lots of action. That’s what works on the big screen. It’s what worked with Wrath of Khan. That being said, I still love TMP. It’s just taken a few years and rewatches before I got it.
Disney were certainly influenced by R2 and Threepio when they came up with Vincent, Bob and Max. Because hey, kids like robots they thought. Even one that minces a man!
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2001 was a huge influence on science fiction in the 1970s. The apex of that is probably Space: 1999.
What I find interesting is that big action science fiction mostly died out in theaters by the 1960s. I am referring to serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon from the 1930s, filled with cliffhanger moments, fights, gadgets, and weird spaceships. The science fiction version of that sort of thing continued on television but mostly disappeared on the big screen. In my opinion, the animated Flash Gordon of the early 1970s, Season 1, and Space Battleship Yamato are what paved the way to Star Wars.
Reading about The Black Hole, I was reminded that the script originated in 1974 as a disaster movie. So it went from a pure action plot to a more cerebral plot during development. Really interesting choice there.
My appreciation for Star Trek: The Motion Picture also increased over time. The plot is decent, the special effects are excellent, and the cast is mostly excellent. It was one good screen writer short of being a great movie. Also, refit Enterprise is the most beautiful science fiction spaceship created to date and refit Klingon D7 Battlecruiser is wicked cool.
Kid me definitely thought Maximilian was pretty cool.
I would like someone to do 1/6 scale Huey, Dewey, and Louie models from Silent Running.
Really, I need to pull my 3D printer out of the box and start using it. Then I could have all sorts of great science fiction stuff in my scale of choice.
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I think Gambody do them as 3D printed kits, I know I have seen them some place but I don’t know what scale they are.
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One of the more interesting classes I took in college was one on SF literature. In the literary world, SF can be divided up into a number of eras, which in many ways reflected the attitudes, hopes, & fears of the era. While film was probably a bit more superficial, it also largely followed these trends.
The late ‘60s & ‘70s was an interesting era in the evolution of SF as a literary & storytelling medium. It was a break from the past, & was more pessimistic, critical, & bleak, compared to earlier eras (the lit side of things had more nuance, but IMHO largely followed similar trends). Of course, there were exceptions (Star Trek the Original Series was more optimistic, though I would argue it still had a foot in earlier trends in SF, & Silver Age SF literature). While SW is a milestone in that it changed the dynamic from pessimism, back to something more resembling the Golden or Silver Age SF, it wasn’t the catalyst, but instead reflected the change ongoing in the medium.
SBY exists outside of this dynamic, being Japanese, but it also reflects the ongoing concerns of Japanese society of the time, with its themes of environmentalism, & destruction (recall that Japan was nuked twice, & this factor has influenced IMHO Japanese speculative fiction for decades, & still does).
A bit of a digression, but I’m a huge SF fan, & love looking at society through the lens of speculative fiction.
Damon.
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I can definitely see how it began life as a disaster movie. Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, we had a lot of those films repeated. Airport, Towering Inferno, Poseidon. Saw them all. It did seem to me that every other movie made in the 70’s was a disaster movie! No wonder they made Airplane to poke fun at them!
Didn’t Lucas try to get the rights to Flash Gordon? I have to admit that besides from the Sam Jones movie and the odd snippets from the old comic, I’ve never really seen much. Never come across the Yamato either until I started seeing models from it around the internet. I don’t think it was ever shown in the UK at the time. We seemed to have had every other cartoon series in the 80’s, but I don’t recall that one at all.
TV sci-fi in the 60’s did seem to revolve around the monster of the week. The Irwin Allen shows, Lost in Space, even the original Star Trek all did it. Dr Who as well. And arguably still does.
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That wall is composed of pretty much everything you just described except the Japanese material, as I don’t do manga/anime. And in this shot you can’t see the 300+ anthologies dating back to the late 50’s.
And I actually had a Science Fiction/Fantasy class in high school before Common Core removed a lot of electives (Like Creative Writing, Word Study, Contemporary Literature, etc.)
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Yes! When Lucus could not get the rights to Flash Gordon he started work on Star Wars.
Apocalypse stories figure in many world religions. The atomic bomb gave writers a new way to do the deed and that is about it. There are plenty of end of the world stories in the 1950s and 1960s. There are also plenty of science fiction adventure stories with happy endings in the 1970s. I am not really going anywhere with this.
Lost in Space, Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and a bunch of other stuff is The Odyssey. The formula is exactly the same including the monster of the week stuff.
I will end with the observation that science fiction needs some new robot designs. I will probably pick up VINCENT but I want something really new.
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I think the humanoid shaped droid is what we are scientifically aiming for, a sort of artificial human is seen as the ultimate goal.
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I fear we may yet have some way to go…
Cheers,
M
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Don’t get too comfortable. Things move much faster these days, especially when you factor in AI
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I want something different.
Edit: Difficult to get algorithm based art programs to go outside the box. Tried various ideas without much success. Robot dog is okay.
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You can get those with flamethrowers for relatively cheap.
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I get nervous when my dog FARTS, so…
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Sure…I can get a model of a flamethrower dog but not one of my wife’s Volvo P1800S.
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Yes, it’s surprising no-one has kitted it in 1:24, one would think Aoshima would have had a go… Plenty of die-casts in various scales, but the only thing like a kit is a resin slot car in 1:32nd. You can just buy the body components but you would have to do a lot of scratchbuilding and it’s just a straight P1800, not the “S”…
PCS Volvo P1800 ‘The Saint’ Resin Kit
Cheers,
M
P.S. Apparently Palmer Plastics did a 1:25th(ish) kit way back, but it’s rare as unicorn 
and prices reflect this…
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