Already in the 1950s, apart from science-fiction movies following aliens from outer space invasion plots, disaster films or creature horror, another genre was equally prominent in the list of sensational productions: the nuclear threat films. Those were a familiar feature of popular culture, and audiences could watch new movies of the kind until roughly the […]
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Category: B. R. PopCulture
Asian Monster and Science Fiction Poster Art. Cinema posters … 1956 – 2021 by Detlef Claus (2023)
Monster movies from Asia and the US ever since the 1950s have drawn audiences to the cinemas. With the dawn of the atomic age and space exploration, also science fiction films quickly established as a genre. To promote such films made in Asia worldwide, and to keep national movie distributors curious, lobby cards and film […]
Secondary Action Heroes of Golden Age Comics by Lou Mougin (2023)
When in the 1930s and early 1940s comic books became very popular and promised good profits for its publishers, the market was soon flooded with various sorts of adventures at the newsstands. The comic book stories would take place on far away planets, on the American frontier of colonial America, in the West, in exotic […]
White Lens on Brown Skin: The Sexualization of the Polynesian in American Film by Matthew Locey (202...
South seas fiction and later cinema as a genre, that pictures Pacific Islanders and their land, really took off as early as 1898 when the Hawaiian islands were annexed by the United States. Forerunners of the many films that would cover Polynesian culture were the magical and powerful reports of European sailors when they were […]
Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts by Michelle
The fame and the legend of the Peanuts started on October 2, 1950, and the newspaper comic strip became a success almost immediately: at its peak, it ran in more than 2,600 newspapers simultaneously and made Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Lucy household names. 1952 saw the first edition of the Peanuts in paperback editions, where […]
Marvel Comics Library. Silver Surfer. Vol.1. 1968–1970 by Stan Lee, John Buscema, Douglas Wolk (2023
Marvel invented many great and impressive superheroes. Some were allowed their own comic book series; some ran for years or even decades. Compared to other Marvel characters and exclusive series, the Silver Surfer, main actor of the XXL title at hand, archived legendary status after a very short (comic book) lifetime. He was around for […]
The Soundies: A History and Catalog of Jukebox Film Shorts of the 1940s by Mark Cantor (2023)
The small-screen world of the short musical film, a form of media presentation usually associated with coin-operated cinematic machines of the 1940s and later decades, keeps fascinating historians, media researchers, music experts and sociologists. Even if nowadays media, video clips, music in all variations and formats, and modes of presentation are easily available on a […]
The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren (eds.) (2022)
Marvel Comics, or rather, Marvel Entertainment as the corporation now has expanded into various companies responsible for diverse media enterprises, started out as one of many American comic book publishers. The many story arcs, story backgrounds, locations, family trees and so forth developed originally by Marvel‘s artists are by now complicated and span hundreds of […]
Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals by Grégoire Halbout (2023)
With the possible exception of the Western movie and Film Noir, the American screwball comedy, that hilarious, often chaotic and highly witty style of making excellent and funny entertainment, probably is the third best liked or popular genre associated with movies made in 1940s US. It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) is very likely […]