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 […]
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Tag: 1970s United States
Rock’n’Roll Plays Itself: A Screen History by John Scanlan (2022)
When in the mid-1950s rock’n’roll as both commercial force and incarnation of teenage style invaded the charts and cinema screens, the new category was a bit too much for most common and well-aged (British and American) entertainment shows and representations on screen. In the early days, neither TV nor the film industry would grasp the […]
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950–1985 by Andrew Nette and Iain McInty
Kicking off roughly in the early 1950s, British and American science fiction authors of the new breed, labeled New Wave later, brought massive changes to the genre and changed the way the future of mankind was perceived. They spoke for a growing readership that was hungry for new visions and speculative prospects, now being prepared […]
Interpreting Star Wars: Reading a Modern Film Franchise by Miles Booy (2021)
Over the years, more than a handful of books on George Lucas’ Star Wars epic have been written that evaluated, criticized and interpreted the film franchise. When in 1977 Star Wars was first presented, several significant film critics identified a number of central aspects, roles, ideologies or an American perspective on it. The main aspects […]
Vigilantes: Private Justice in Popular Cinema by Kevin Grant (2020)
When in movies a crime is committed against a citizen and neither the police force nor judges seem able or willing to catch and punish the assailant, mostly two options are presented to the victim/protagonist: to accept that the law and its divisions can fail sometimes, or to start a crusade against the aggressor all […]
The Western Films of Robert Mitchum. Hollywood’s Cowboy Rebel by Gene Freese (2020)
Maybe one of the reasons why actor Robert Mitchum looked so comfortable and at home in western movies, was the fact that he bred horses, preferred the casual cowboy outfit off the film set, and seemingly simply played himself, whenever he took the part of the cowboy, the Sheriff, the outlaw or the weather-beaten stranger […]
Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen Since 1971. A History and Discography by Derrick Bang (2020)
In the second volume of his extensive study on crime and spy movie jazz, author Bang devotes his knowledge to the years 1971 to 2019. His strategy of presenting these scores changes a bit in the present volume, as even though in the early 1970s movies were still shown in movie theaters almost exclusively, just […]
Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and … by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nett
The latest work edited by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette has the focus on pulp fiction published in English and connected to and influenced by the Counterculture and ideas of revolution. The emphasis is on “the long sixties,” meaning the aftermath of that truly revolutionary decade that was at work long into the 1970s, in […]
Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present by Seth Bovey (2019)
The Third Bardo’s 1967 song “Five Years Ahead of My Time,” a musical gem by the psychedelic garage band from New York is the eponym for this book, as the many garage bands of the 1960s laid the foundations for American Rock music. The word “garage” in this context actually describes their foremost place of […]