Tag Archives: Science Fiction Theatre

Pixel Scroll 4/8/25 Our Scroll Is A Very, Very, Very Fine Scroll, With Two Credentials In The Meter, Life Used To Be In-Feet-ers, Now Everything Is Metric Because Of You

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(1) 2025 HWA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS. The Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Awards honorees for 2025 are Del Howison, Sue Howison, Dame Susan Hill, and David Cronenberg. The full citations are at the link.

(2) 2025 COMPTON CROOK AWARD. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) announced today that The Wings Upon Her Back (Tachyon Publications) by Samantha Mills won the 2025 Compton Crook Award for best debut SF/Fantasy/horror novel, a prize worth $1,000. “Samantha Mills Wins 2025 Compton Crook Award” at File 770.

(3) WHO HAS READ THESE BOOKS? Nicholas Whyte’s post about the “Nebula and BSFA shortlists and the Goodreads and LibraryThing stats” at From the Heart of Europe are one way to test how widely known books were before they became award finalist.

It’s shortlist time again! Just to remind you, the GR and LT stats are a guide to how well a book has permeated the general market, but may not have much congruence with the respective voter bases of the two awards.

He’s done another for “2025 Hugo final ballot: Goodreads / LibraryThing stats”. One of his observations is:

A clear lead for The Ministry of Time in market penetration, though The Tainted Cup has the most enthusiastic readers.

(4) BLOCK THAT OUT! Who knew Minecraft would bring out filmgoers’ rowdy side? “Witney cinema issues Minecraft warning after online trend” reports BBC.

A cinema has told customers to behave during showings of A Minecraft Movie after rowdy behaviour at other screenings went viral on social media.

A sign displayed at Cineworld in Witney, Oxfordshire, has warned people any form of anti-social behaviour would see them removed without a refund.

The film, which received underwhelming reviews from critics, made an estimated $300m (£233m) globally at the box office on its opening weekend.

Its popularity has spread online, with videos of young audience members shouting responses and celebrating the appearance of different characters made famous by the video game – which is one of the world’s best selling.

The film tells the story of four misfits pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld – the place where all players start in Minecraft.

A number of lines from star Jack Black – in particular his introductory “I… am Steve” – have been met with cheering, shouting and applause.

One moment showing the arrival of the character Chicken Jockey – alongside Black’s accompanying dialogue – has also been the focal point for much of the furore….

(5) ROBOTS RETURN. Netflix has dropped a trailer for “LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS VOLUME 4”. And at the link you can see five first-look images.

The fearless anthology series Love, Death + Robots is returning for a fourth volume of mechanical madness. You can always expect this anthology series to serve up some wild stuff, and Volume 4 is definitely no exception.

“I try to get a mix of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy,” creator Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) tells Tudum about the new lineup of shorts. “And we work with some really fucking fantastic writers and artists.”

(6) WHO TRIES TO BAN BOOKS? “Majority of attempts to ban books in US come from organised groups, not parents” reports the Guardian.

A large majority of attempts to ban books in the US last year came from organised groups rather than parents.

72% of demands to censor books were initiated by pressure groups, government entities and elected officials, board members and administrators, reported the American Library Association (ALA). Just 16% of ban attempts were made by parents, while 5% were brought forward by individual library users.

“These demands to remove and restrict books and other library materials are not the result of any grassroots or popular sentiment,” read the ALA’s 2025 State of America’s Libraries report, published on Monday. “The majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from well-funded, organised groups and movements long dedicated to curbing access to information and ideas.”

(7) DIAMOND’S IN THE ROUGH. Publishers Weekly is there when “Fight Breaks Out for Ownership of Diamond Comic Distributors”.

Days before a court hearing was set to take place April 7 to move ahead with the sale of most of Diamond Comic Distributors assets to Alliance Entertainment (AENT), Diamond owners had a change of heart and are now favoring a new, smaller joint bid by Canadian comics distributor Universal Entertainment and pop culture manufacturer and licensor Ad Populum. Attorneys for Alliance immediately filed a lawsuit to block the change and a hearing was held yesterday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Maryland to try to sort things out.

The April 7 hearing was focused on the appropriateness of the Alliance bid and was adjourned before the hearing was completed. The parties were due back in court April 8 and a decision is due May 28. That timeline however, is now thrown into serious question following the filing of Alliance’s April 6 lawsuit challenging the legality of Diamond’s owners’ decision to back the offer from Universal and Ad Populum.

The suit accuses Diamond of acting in bad faith by conducting an auction “in a manner that was unfair to any party other than their preferred purchaser, and—despite having designated AENT as the Successful Bidder—acted with extreme bad faith in the period following the Auction.” According to the filing, AENT’s bid of $72.2 million was deemed the highest offer and that Universal/Ad Populum were the underbidders.

According to the lawsuit, despite the offer from AENT, Diamond secretly solicited other bids with an eye toward favoring Universal (who had placed a $39 million stalking horse offer at the time of the bankruptcy filing in January) and Ad Populum. After more negotiations between AENT and Diamond, the lawsuit says, Diamond “abruptly terminated” its agreement saying that it “would proceed with the backup bidder.” To facilitate the switch, Diamond filed a motion last week asking the court to approve the sale of the company’s assets to the joint back-up bidder.

In its filing, AENT argued that its offer, which had been raised to $85.37 million, was much higher that the $69.1 million combined bid from Universal Distribution and Ad Populum, which included $49.6 million from Universal for Diamond UK and Alliance Games Distributions, and $19.5 million from Ad Populum for Diamond Comic Distributors, Collectible Grading Authority, and Diamond Select Toys….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Science Fiction Theatre (1954)

Again tonight, I’m reaching back into early days of the genre in broadcast terms by talking about the television premiere of Science Fiction Theatre which seventy years ago started off in syndication. It would end rather quickly two years later on the sixth of April with a total of seventy-eight episodes over the course of just two seasons. 

The first season was in color but to save money the second was not. I know this reverses the usual manner of going from black and white to color, but I confirmed that they actually did this. 

It was the product of Hungarian born Iván Tors who had earlier done the Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy of SF films (The Magnetic Monster which recycled footage from a German horror film, Riders to the Stars and Gog which average twenty percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes). He’s also responsible for Flipper and Flipper’s New Adventure which surely are genre adjacent, aren’t they?

Hosted by Truman Bradley, a radio and television announcer and a Forties film actor, its schtick, and I use that Yiddish word in its fullest sense, was that they were doing a quasi-documentary series that what Ifs of modern science. Now mind they were to a great extent re-using the stories that had been earlier on Dimension X, so they were recycling existing stories. Or so say several sources.

The program never aired over a network. All seventy-eight twenty-six minute episodes were syndicated across the country in package deals of thirty-nine episodes each, with Bradley doing custom commercials for each market. 

If you watched it later on PBS, you got the entire episode, but when the Sci-fi channel broadcast them they were cut by five minutes to cram in more blipverts, errr, I mean advertisements. Sci-fi that does with everything.

It’s streaming on Roku offers on its Movie Classics channel. 

Science Fiction Theatre

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 51.

By Paul Weimer: Nnedi Okorafor has written some of (to my perspective, and a moment to explain that) genre-bending speculative fiction that I’ve read.  Let me explicate.  There is science fiction, and there is fantasy, and then there is the peanut butter and chocolate of books that take elements of both. Or, specifically, books that feel like they partake of both.  Okorafor herself I think might disagree, but much of the work I’ve read of hers does do that in my own mind and limited perception.

Take Lagoon, the first of her works I read. Near future, Nigeria, First Contact. Straight-up science fiction, right? Sure, it’s a first contact novel, but several of the protagonists have what are really just straight up superpowers. Adaora can breathe underwater, after all.  And then there are actual folklore and mythic beings just living their lives in Lagos, too. I mean having a trickster deity as a phone scammer is genius, I tell you. It makes perfect sense, and instead of being in an urban fantasy, the character exists in a first contact novel, just another character with everyone else dealing with the aliens.

Inspired, to be sure.

Lagoon is my favorite of her works, but I think the Binti trilogy is probably her best work. Three novellas/short novels about the titular mathematical genius’ trip to the stars and the aliens and beings she deals with out there. Binti just wants the best education she can get, and for her trouble winds up in the middle of a war, and a relationship with an alien species under threat thereby. Fearlessly inventive, grounded in her culture and ferociously futuristic and grounded at the same time. I’ve read other authors in her vein since, but Okorafor was my first real exposure to this entire stratum and voices of emerging science fiction from Africa.

I have not yet read her metafictional Death of the Author, but I clearly need to. I’ve met her several times, including a talk she gave at my local library (she had no idea who I was, alas, and perhaps still doesn’t).

Happy birthday, Nnedi!

Nnedi Okorafor

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Oh noes! Jon Del Arroz is trying to load up the Locus Awards with his pals! Camestros Felapton is ringing the tocsin in “New Right Wing Slate Shenanigans”.

… The Locus Award is open to anybody to vote in but subscribers to Locus Magazine have votes that count for double. This extra weighting for members has discouraged slate attempts in the past. Fandom Pules has already put out a Dragon Award nomination slate but as I’ve discussed before, it is not clear whether how many people nominate a work has much of a connection to the Dragon Award finalists. The Locus Awards, on the other hand, do count their votes. Additionally, JDA has been attempting to recruit people on the abuse/harassment website Kiwi Farms to vote in the Locus (although this has been met with some scepticism among the trollish inhabitants)….

(12) THEY’RE PEEVED. “Max Removing HBO Original Series From Streaming Has Fans Crying Foul” reports CBR.com.

Damon Lindelof’s hit drama series The Leftovers is slated to be removed from HBO’s Max streaming service.

Per ComicBook.com, The Leftovers is officially going to be removed from Max as of June 3. Originally, the series was supposed to make its exit from the streaming service on April 11, though that date was pushed back by almost two months. Even with the extra time to stream the series, fans of The Leftovers have let their displeasure be known online and through social media….

…  Since the series ended in 2017, The Leftovers has maintained its status as a fan-favorite. As of the time of writing, The Leftovers holds a 91% “Fresh” rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, as averaged from 84 critics reviews. The series also boasts a 90% score via the site’s user-generated “Popcornmeter.”

(13) WE SIT, BOY, SIT CORRECTED. “No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction” insists New Scientist, which says “they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species.”

A company called Colossal Biosciences says it has revived an extinct species – the dire wolf. “On October 1, 2024, for the first time in human history, Colossal successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction. After a 10,000+ year absence, our team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.” That’s the claim made on the website of the US-based company. Here’s what we know….

… Beth Shapiro of Colossal says her team has sequenced the complete genome of the dire wolf and will soon release it to the public. Shapiro could not tell New Scientist how many differences there are but said the two species share 99.5 per cent of their DNA. Since the grey wolf genome is around 2.4 billion base pairs long, that still leaves room for millions of base-pairs of differences.

And Colossal claims it has turned grey wolves into dire wolves by making just 20 gene edits?

That is the claim. In fact, five of those 20 changes are based on mutations known to produce light coats in grey wolves, Shapiro told New Scientist. Only 15 are based on the dire wolf genome directly and are intended to alter the animals’ size, musculature and ear shape. It will be a year or so before it’s clear if those changes have had the intended effects on the genetically modified animals, says Shapiro.

So these pups aren’t really dire wolves at all, then?

It all comes down to how you define species, says Shapiro. “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”…

(14) COLD-BLOODED SMUGGLING. Chris Barkley sent the link because he grew up in the neighborhood: “Cincinnati’s unique lizards are ‘getting larger,’ Nat Geo says” in the Cincinnati

As the weather warms, you might find a few scaly friends running around Cincinnati.

For more than 70 years, thousands of common wall lizards, known as Lazarus lizards, have scurried across sidewalks and lurked in your garden. They’re all over Cincinnati, but the reptiles aren’t from here. They’re an invasive species and native to Europe.

So how did they end up in the Midwest? It’s all thanks to a 10-year-old boy from Walnut Hills and a sock full of lizards.

In 1951, George Rau Jr. and his stepfather, Fred Lazarus Jr. (who founded the retail chain Lazarus, which would later become Macy’s), smuggled 10 Italian lizards home from a family trip in Lake Garda and set them loose in his backyard.

Many pass off the origin story as local lore, but in 1989, when Rau Jr. was an adult, he wrote to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History explaining his role in the eventual lizard population boom. That same year, he also told The Enquirer he smuggled the lizards through customs and brought them back to his East Side home.

Last month, the Queen City’s long and unique history with Lazarus lizards was highlighted by National Geographic. In the article, National Geographic stated Cincinnati has the “perfect lizard habitat,” adding the city’s hilly geography and weather as a contributing factor for the lizards becoming “permanent residents,” as declared by the Ohio Division of Wildlife.

(15) PREDATOR. On June 6, Predator: Killer of Killers arrives on Hulu.

(16) REMEMBERING A BREAKTHROUGH. “The Day Anime Changed” at Mother’s Basement.

Let’s talk about the most important, influential anime of all time, and why now’s best time to watch it!

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Lis Carey, Teddy Harvia, N., Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel CSN&Y Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 1/22/25 Like Pixels Through A Scroll, So Are The Comments Of Filers

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(1) BRAM STOKER AWARDS. The Horror Writers Association (HWA) today dropped the 2024 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot. See what’s on the list at File 770’s post “2024 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot Announced”.

This is not the list of finalists, nor are they called nominees: it is the list which HWA members will choose from when they vote to determine the finalists.

The Final Ballot will be announced on or around February 23, 2025.

(2) EDGAR AWARDS NOMINEES. Mystery Writers of America today announced the nominees for the Edgar Allan Poe Awards. The 79th Annual Edgar® Awards will be celebrated on May 1, 2025. The complete list of nominees is in File 770’s post “2025 Edgar Award Nominations”.

(3) AUDIE AWARDS FINALISTS. Finalists in 28 competitive categories for the 2025 Audie Awards were announced by the Audio Publishers Association (APA) on January 22. File 770 picks out the works of genre interest followed by the complete list of “Audie Awards 2025 Finalists”.

(4) CLARKESWORLD READERS’ POLL. The flash nomination phase for the 2024 Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll began today and continues until January 24 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern. Editor Neil Clarke invites readers to celebrate their favorite Clarkesworld cover art and stories, all of which can be found in his January editorial column: “2024 In Review”.

The link to the survey is: 2024 Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll – Nomination Phase Survey (surveymonkey.com)

The top five go onto the final round in February when a winner will be determined by a second round of voting.

(5) DID YOU EVER ADJUST YOUR RABBIT EARS? Lee Weinstein helps File 770 readers remember the Fifties TV series “Science Fiction Theatre” in a post today.

…. Science Fiction Theatre was something different. It was aimed at adults. In addition, unlike earlier genre shows, it was shot on film and remained in syndication for decades. Its 78 episodes had no rocket ships or ray guns, and if some of the characters hinted at being of extraterrestrial origin, they appeared to be human. The series was, or at least pretended to be, well-based in real science. The credits at the end of the first season episodes list one Maxwell Smith as “scientific adviser on electronics and radar operation.” Several episodes did deal with such paranormal phenomena as telepathy, but at the time this was the subject of legitimate scientific inquiry…

(6) BUCKS FOR THE BUCK ROGERS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Two of the four American Innovation dollar coins to be released by the US Mint this year will have space themes. The Florida coin will feature the Space Shuttle. The Texas coin will feature the International Space Station.

Three previous coins in the series have also had space themes, including Alabama (Saturn V takeoff, issued 2024), Delaware (Annie Jump Cannon who worked on classifying stars, issued 2019), and Maryland (Hubble Space Telescope, issued 2020).  Future designs have not been announced. The series will continue with four coins a year through 2032. “First look at space shuttle, Mission Control 2025 dollar coins from US Mint” at Space.com.

…Texas’ coin is set to go on sale this summer. Release dates for both coins have yet to be announced.

Both states’ dollars will be struck at the mint’s Philadelphia and Denver facilities. They will initially be sold as uncirculated coins in rolls of 25 and bags of 100 for $36.95 and $123.50, respectively….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Caprica series (2010)

Fifteen years ago, the Caprica series, a prequel for the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, aired on Syfy. It came out right after the original Battlestar Galactica finished up and was followed by the Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome film. 

The show, like many genre series such as Stargate SG-1, was shot in and around Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition, buildings from the financial district of Dubai have been digitally added to the cityscape of Vancouver to create the futuristic image of Caprica City. 

Unfortunately, the ratings were less than great by quite a bit, and it was cancelled rather quickly so there were only nineteen episodes ever made. You can find it streaming on Peacock. The original and rebooted Battlestar Galactica series are currently running over on Prime. The Blood & Chrome series film which is not streaming anywhere. There is interestingly an unrated version of the latter. 

Reception among critics was fantastic with Annalee Newitz of io9.com saying that “Caprica may be starting off a little unevenly, but it’s packed with such a wealth of great ideas that you won’t want to miss a single episode.” And Kris King of Slant magazine stating, “Caprica manages to take on some daring themes with that familiar dedication to character and plot.” 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an excellent ninety-one percent on their Popcornmeter. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) MIND PILOTING. [Item by Steven French.] “Paralysed man flies virtual drone using brain implant” in Nature.

Researchers have developed a device that let a 69-year-old man with paralysis fly a virtual drone using only his thoughts.

The brain–computer interface (BCI) decoded the man’s brain activity as he imagined moving three groups of digits in real time. By associating neural signals with the movements of multiple fingers, the work builds on previous BCI research, most of which has focused on moving a single computer cursor or whole virtual hand. The feat offers hope that BCIs could one day help people with paralysis to perform a wider range of activities, such as typing or playing complex video games.

“There’s a lot of things that we enjoy or do as humans where we use multiple individuated finger movements, so like typing, sewing, playing a musical instrument,” says study co-author Matthew Willsey, a neurosurgeon at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “That’s what this line of work is focused on, how we enable the control of multiple things at the same time.”

The study, published on 20 January in Nature Medicine, was inspired by the participant’s own request to use a BCI to fly a drone. He told the researchers that controlling the virtual object was like playing a musical instrument. “Flying it is tiny little finesses off a middle line, a little bit up, a little bit down,” he said.’…

(10) UAP DOCUMENTARY. Deadline introduces “’The Age Of Disclosure’ Trailer”.

Watch the trailer for The Age of Disclosure, the documentary directed and produced by Dan Farah that just got a prime opening weekend slot at SXSW. This comes on the heels of bi-partisan Congressional hearings on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, aka UFOs) and proposed legislation to disclose what the Government knows.  

Farah got 34 senior members of the U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community to come on camera. He says they reveal an 80 year cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life and a secret war amongst major nations to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin. The film explores the profound impact the situation has on the future of humanity, while providing a look behind-the-scenes with those at the forefront of the bi-partisan disclosure effort. The film was granted unprecedented access and support from senior members of the U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community. Everyone interviewed in the film has direct knowledge of UAP as a result of their work for the U.S. Government.

Amongst those featured in the landmark film are Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Lue Elizondo (former Department of Defense official, member of the Government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, aka AATIP), Senator Mike Rounds, Jay Stratton (former DIA official, Director of the Government’s UAP Task Force), General Jim Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence), Mike Gold (NASA UAP Study Team member), Admiral Tim Gallaudet (Former Navy Chief Oceanographer), Brett Feddersen (former Director of Aviation Security on the White House’s National Security Council), Jim Semivan (former senior CIA official), Representative Carson, Mike Gallagher (former Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party), Christopher Mellon (former Department of Defense official), senior scientist from multiple Government UAP programs such as Dr. Garry Nolan, quantum physicist Hal Puthoff Ph.D., astrophysicist Eric Davis Ph.D., military eye-witnesses of UAP events over U.S. military bases, and more. 

(11) DONATE TODAY! Ryan George produced a PDA for the charity that will be started on the Red Planet “When The Billionaires Move To Mars”.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mark Barsotti returns with a new installment of his video interview with SF Writer Paul Di Filippo: “I WAS LIKE ZONKER HARRIS IN COLLEGE”.

Legendary science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo talks about growing up in Rhode Island, Harlan Ellison, the weirdest story he ever wrote, potential stories that may or may not get written, Thomas Wolfe, and much more! Interview: 11-18-24.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Mark Barsotti, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Science Fiction Theatre

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By Lee Weinstein: Way back in the early days of television, before such classic science fiction anthology series like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, and other adult science fiction on television, there was Science Fiction Theatre.

Yes, it was hokey by today’s standards. Yes, it is often badly dated. But in the spring of 1955, when the show premiered, it was quite innovative. At the time, science fiction was perceived as strictly for the kids. Contemporary genre shows included such fare as Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, and Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe.

Science Fiction Theatre was something different. It was aimed at adults. In addition, unlike earlier genre shows, it was shot on film and remained in syndication for decades. Its 78 episodes had no rocket ships or ray guns, and if some of the characters hinted at being of extraterrestrial origin, they appeared to be human. The series was, or at least pretended to be, well-based in real science. The credits at the end of the first season episodes list one Maxwell Smith as “scientific adviser on electronics and radar operation.” Several episodes did deal with such paranormal phenomena as telepathy, but at the time this was the subject of legitimate scientific inquiry.

As the show opened, the camera panned across a laboratory filled with electronic equipment, accompanied by the orchestral strains of the theme music, before coming to rest on the host, Truman Bradley, seated at his desk.  He then introduced each episode by performing on-camera experiments to demonstrate the scientific principle relating to the story’s theme. At the conclusion of each show he would return to assure the audience that the story was only fiction, but that the principle involved could one day become a reality. Bradley, a radio announcer and sometime actor, lent such an authoritative touch to the show that most us grew up thinking he was actually a scientist.

Truman Bradley, host of Science Fiction Theatre

One of the earliest series to be shot in color (at least for its first season) it was the brainchild of Ivan Tors, who had written and produced science fiction films with an emphasis on science fact such as Magnetic Monster in 1953 and Gog a year later. He was later to produce such popular series as Sea Hunt, Flipper, and The Man and the Challenge.

Viewed today, one is struck by the extremely conservative approach to the subject matter. Such episodes as “The Phantom Car,” about a remote-controlled automobile, and “Signals from the Heart,” in which a policeman is given a heart monitor with a radio transmitter, have long since been bypassed by the progress of science in the real world. Other episodes anticipated robotic vacuum cleaners, space stations and infrared photography. 

The teleplays often come across as somewhat static; the cinematography is simple and direct. The show was filmed on a low budget for syndication, often on just a few sets. Special effects were almost non-existent.

Rachel Ames
Rachel Ames, Walter Kingsford. DeForest Kelley.

Nonetheless, some segments hold up better than others, and many had truly imaginative ideas.

Scanning the credits reveals a host of impressive names, both in front of and behind the camera. Some of the more well-known actors to appear in the series were Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Barry, Howard Duff, and Dane Clark. Other familiar faces included Martin Milner, June Lockhart, Don DeFore, Warren Stevens, Skip Homeier, William Schallert and Jean Byron.

Marshall Thompson

Several early episodes were directed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came From Outer Space), and many more by Herbert L. Strock (Magnetic Monster, Gog, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein). One was helmed by that king of gimmickry, William Castle (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill).

Although most of the episodes were written by screen writers, often working from treatments by Tors himself, there are adaptations of stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum and Jack Finney, as well as two original screenplays by Meyer Dolinsky, who later went on to write several classic Outer Limits episodes, a Star Trek episode, and a science fiction novel.

The series premiered in April of 1955 with “Beyond”. A test pilot bails out when he is pursued by a torpedo shaped UFO. The authorities convince him that he had somehow imagined his fountain pen to be a large object outside the craft. They have second thoughts, however, when they discover that the entire cockpit has mysteriously become magnetized.

Variety magazine said that the show had “…too much science and too little fiction…” complaining about the long Truman Bradley introduction cutting into story time, and the viewer being told rather than shown dramatically important parts of the narrative.

While the protagonist of the first episode was a test pilot, the majority of the stories featured a scientist of some sort as a major character.

The second episode, however, was an exception to this, and was one of the series’ best. “Time is Just a Place,” adapted from Jack Finney’s short story “Such Interesting Neighbors,” and directed by Jack Arnold, starred Don DeFore and Marie Windsor as a suburban couple, who discover that their new neighbors (Warren Stevens and Peggy O’Connor) are actually visitors from the future. While Finney’s story was light in tone, this rather dark adaptation, was called by Variety “…a spine tingler in the best flesh-creeping tradition.”

Another early episode, “No Food for Thought,” also directed by Arnold, demonstrates some of the series limitations. The story concerns a scientist experimenting with a synthetic food designed to alleviate world hunger. But the food is somehow linked to a deadly virus, and once on it, no organism can return to natural food. Arnold builds up a good deal of dramatic tension at the beginning with the mysterious death of one of the research team. The county health officer finally gains admission and meets the reclusive scientist in charge (Otto Kruger). The nature of the experiments, the problems that have ensued, and the resolution of the problems all happen in about ten minutes worth of dialog. There is enough material to make a full length movie. Robert M. Fresco, who wrote the teleplay, went on to write the screenplay for Tarantula (1958), in which he worked out some of the ideas at greater length.

In many of the episodes Bradley’s resonant voice narrates the events that transpire between scenes, “telling rather than showing” as Variety had put it.

Another memorable episode, “Beyond Return,” is based on Stanley Weinbaum’s “Adaptive Ultimate.” A young woman near death is given an experimental drug by a doctor that greatly increases her adaptability. After adapting to and overcoming terminal tuberculosis, she becomes a human chameleon capable even of murder to advance herself.

“The Hastings Secret,” has a plot line typical of many of the episodes. An older scientist who studies termites and has developed a new kind of solvent, mysteriously vanishes in Peru. His scientist-daughter (Barbara Hale) and her assistant (Bill Williams) travel to Peru to investigate. They discover that he has died, but determine to acquaint themselves with the materials of his research. It is implied at the end that they will continue with his research project. 

The pair also co-starred in the similarly-themed episode “Jupitron,” which in some ways eerily anticipates alien abductions, as a scientist and his wife relaxing on a beach suddenly find themselves transported to a laboratory on a moon of Jupiter. In a dreamlike encounter with a long-missing scientist in a sealed off room, they are given a clue on how to solve the world’s hunger problem, which they then take back to earth. Williams and Hale, who were married in real life, had a son (William Katt) who went on to star in another science fiction series many years later (The Greatest American Hero).

A common plot device was the mystery. In some episodes a murderer uses a scientific advance either to commit the crime or to frame someone else in the process. In “One Thousand Eyes” a police detective, played by Vincent Price, solves the murder of a scientist who had developed an experimental form of photography that worked in darkness. Other examples are “The Sound of Murder” with Howard Duff, involving a voice synthesizer, and “Death at 2 AM,” about a drug that increases human strength tremendously.

Extraterrestrials make appearances in a number of episodes, normally in the form of ordinary-looking humans who either benefit or threaten us with some sort of advanced and unexplained technology.

A rare humorous episode that holds up rather well features Edmund Gwenn (Miracle on 34th St.) as an enthusiastic and eccentric scientist of alien origin, who is intent on bestowing super-scientific gifts on disbelieving scientists.

“Negative Man,” about a computer technician who has his IQ and sense of hearing boosted to superhuman levels when he is blasted with 90,000 volts of electricity, is interesting for a rare TV appearance of an adult Carl (Alfalfa) Switzer, of Our Gang fame, who supports Dane Clark’s lead.

“And the Stones Began to Move” with Basil Rathbone, better known for his film portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, concerns a rare type of gem, found in Egypt, that has the property of counteracting gravity.

“Conversation with an Ape” although primarily about a zoologist (Hugh Beaumont of Leave it to Beaver) teaching a chimpanzee to communicate with him using a keyboard, also discovers that the chimp can read his thoughts. 

Hugh Beaumont, Barbara Hale

Halfway through its run, in the spring of 1956, some changes were made. While later series sometimes started out in black and white before going to color, Science Fiction Theatre did the opposite. The second season, beginning with the episode “Signals from the Heart,” was filmed in lower budget black and white. However, according to Variety, Bradley’s introductions were considerably shortened and the “scientific gobbledy-gook,” as the journal put it, was cut down as well, leading to “a considerable overall improvement.” Maxwell Smith was now listed as “scientific adviser on electronics and radiation.”   

Meyer Dolinsky, who was later to write such memorable Outer Limits episodes, as “The Architects of Fear,” contributed two second season episodes. In “Bolt of Lighting” an older scientist has died in a mysterious explosion that destroyed an entire building. A young scientist is recruited by the government to determine the cause of the explosion. He manages to reconstruct the late man’s research, figure out the cause of the explosion, and at the end commits himself to carrying the work on. 

Dolinsky’s other contribution, “The Sound that Kills,” is a murder mystery. A scientist at conference is murdered by ultrasonic vibrations and his papers stolen. The killer is found by means of a camera that can see through the hotel building by using mesons, rather than light, to form the images. 

Another notable second season episode is “Operation Flypaper,” with Vincent Price again, a mystery involving missing time, the disappearance of scientific equipment, and a device that freezes people into a kind of trance.

The “Magic Suitcase,” one of the last episodes to air in January of 1957, concerns a mysterious stranger who leaves behind a suitcase capable of generating an almost infinite amount of power.

“Bulletproof,” with Christopher Dark, concerning a criminal with a metallic foil that can stop bullets, anticipates stories about the alleged Roswell UFO crash. It seems he found the metal at what appears to be a UFO landing site in the desert.

“Who is this Man?” directed by William Castle, stands out in its pacing. A psychologist treats an excessively shy and fearful college student by hypnosis. The student is regressed to a previous life as a criminal who was executed for murder in 1888. “The Unguided Missile” deals with a form of inadvertent telepathy mediated by microwaves.

Perhaps the most imaginative episode was “Living Lights,” which actually features a non-human life-form. A husband-wife team of scientists recreate the conditions on Venus in a large bell jar in their apartment, with borrowed laboratory equipment. Energy beings, in the form of the titular living lights, which resemble spotlight beams, appear in the bell jar and escape through the glass, creating problems for the experimenters. It bears some similarities to the Outer Limits episode “Wolf 359” a decade later. 

The show definitely left its mark on later genre television. The one earlier adult science fiction anthology, Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), was done live, was not rerun in syndication and had no host to introduce the stories. The introductions and epilogues by Bradley became a template for later anthologies like The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, and others. The series likely had a larger audience than Tales of Tomorrow, because it was on film and endlessly rerun. Although not aired very often today, it did show that science fiction could appeal to a mass adult audience, and paved the way not only for anthologies like Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Amazing Stories, but also for adult series fare such as Star Trek and Babylon 5.

This article appeared originally at TheThunderchild.com in September, 2020.

Science Fiction Theater

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By Carl Slaughter: Mike Resnick, in his latest column for Galaxy’s Edge, reminisces about the 1950s science fiction television series Science Fiction Theater.  This is significant since Resnick is famous for giving up on television when he started writing award-winning speculative fiction and hasn’t watched an hour of television in 35 years.

Finally, for her birthday, I got Carol a complete set of bootleg DVDs of the fondly-remembered but never-released two-year, seventy-eight episode run of Science Fiction Theater from 1955 to 1957, a time when most purported science fiction movies were actually anti-science and usually ended with lines such as “There are some things man was not meant to know.”

Science Fiction Theater was like a breath of fresh air, because it was clearly of the opinion that there is nothing man wasn’t meant to know or learn. Each of these shows was introduced by Truman Bradley in a state-of-the-art lab (circa 1955) that I would kill to play in. He’d show a couple of related cutting-edge experiments, and then explain that the episode you were about to see extrapolated from the experiments he’d just demonstrated. No stars at all.

Well, there were a few stars.  The second episode of the first season of Science Fiction Theater, “Time Is Just a Place,” starred Warren Stevens of Forbidden Planet fame.  It was an adaptation of a short story, “Such Interesting Neighbors,” by Jack Finney of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame and Of Missing Persons fame.

The main character, played superbly by Stevens, pretends to be an inventor to explain his amazing gadgets.  He is from the future and shares with his neighbor a proposed science fiction story.  This science fiction story within a science fiction story is the main character’s life story in coded form.  The neighbor realizes the implications and plays along, asking questions about the proposed science fiction story to surreptitiously gather information about the future.

I also recall an episode entitled “Operation Flypaper” starring the late great speculative fiction actor Vincent Price.

Most of these episodes are available on YouTube — here’s a playlist.