The history of the Science Fiction Genre

The history of the Science Fiction Genre

The science fiction genre has become one of the most popular genres in the past few decades; this is partly because of the Star Wars franchise and the Star Trek franchise. The first science fiction film was first released as a silent film in the 1920’s but was still not popular at this point. In the 1930’s it did start to become popular because of films like Frankenstein and the invisible man. In the next few decades to follow it started to become even more popular because of comics starting to come out like superman, flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. These comics then got adapted into both movies and television series, which in turn advanced the popularity of the genre.

Once it turned the 1950’s the genre got a major boost and gave people an insight of what it could be like in the future with films like ‘War of the World’, a film where technologically advanced aliens invaded earth and the movie ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, where aliens were kidnapping people and replacing them with aliens who could change their appearance. Most of the Science Fiction films of these decades were mostly based on the either the idea of technologically advanced aliens invades the earth or animals that were mutated due to the exposure to nuclear radiation.

However in the 1960’s the few only a few Science Fiction movies because the popularity of them had died down because they are mostly all the same. This all changed when the movies ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Planet of the Apes’. 2001: ‘A space Odyssey’ was popular and ground breaking for the genre because it has amazing special effects for the time and it depicted the idea of realistic space travel, this went on to inspire other Science Fiction writers and directors to make similar. ‘Planet of the Apes’ was based in 2006, even though it was created in 1968, and 3 astronauts were on a flight when they crashed in a lake on a unknown planet but they later found out that they had crashed on a post-apocalyptic earth where Apes had evolved to the point of speech and the ability to wield weapons and ride horses; the astronauts then found out that the apes had taken control of the earth. It was popular because it gave people an insight of what could possibly happen if animals could evolve at a rapid pace and what would happen if there were nuclear war.

The Science fiction genre boomed in the late 1970’s because films like Star Wars, Star Trek, close encounters of the third kind and because of this the amount and quality of Science Fiction movies and shows ski-rocketed. There are some sci-fi movie that are considered some of the best movies created and because of this they have earned billions of dollars in the box office and on DVD and Blu-Ray. An example of this would be Avatar or The Avengers, which they both earned over $1 billion in the box office worldwide and had earned a lot more when they were released in home media.