Category Archives: Skiffy Flix

Tyson & Walker, TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

Posted on Saturday 8 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker Subtitled “A Journey of Cosmic Discovery” (National Geographic, Sep. 2023, 319pp, including 16pp acknowledgements, further reading, illustrations credits, and index.) This is literally a heavier-than-usual book that is nevertheless a light-weight read (even … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: The Day the Earth Stood Still

Posted on Wednesday 9 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Of all the 1950s science fiction films, this one is arguably the most profound, the least typical, and the most liberal. It involves an alien arriving on Earth, but he is not hostile, despite the knee-jerk fears of the military … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: When Worlds Collide

Posted on Wednesday 2 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Next of up my intermittent revisiting of 1950s science fiction movies is this one, one of the more popular and well-regarded of its era. It was produced by George Pal, who also did Destination Moon the previous year, and his … Continue reading →

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Some Sciency Bits

Posted on Tuesday 11 July 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Richard Dawkins on the ancestral language of DNA; How humans have interpreted fossils throughout history; Recalling the scientifically inaccurate and intellectually hostile movie Armageddon, from 1998; How an article about a refinement to our understanding of human evolution overstates its … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: Flight to Mars

Posted on Sunday 30 April 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s been a while since I’ve watched and posted about a “skiffy flick,” that is, a science fiction movie from the 1950s, plus or minus a decade, when science fiction movies were very popular — or at least, a lot … Continue reading →

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Link and Comments: From McCarthyism to the Assault on the Capitol, via 1951 SF movies

Posted on Saturday 27 February 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: What UFOs and Joe McCarthy Have to Do With the Assault on the Capitol. Who knew?

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Skiffy Flix: Destination Moon

Posted on Saturday 8 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This 1951 film was the first prestigious science fiction film, its script inspired or perhaps partially written, by Robert A. Heinlein. The credits say “from a novel by” Heinlein but that’s not accurate. Heinlein had written a juvenile novel about … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: Rocketship X-M

Posted on Thursday 23 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Now the fun starts. Having dutifully watched the precursors of science fiction films in the mostly horror films of the 1930s and ‘40s (with just two SF films from before 1950, Metropolis from 1927 and Things to Come from 1936), … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: Things to Come

Posted on Friday 17 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This is an ambitious film from 1936, based on a treatment by H.G. Wells depicting future history from 1950 to 2036. Again, Wikipedia has a fairly detailed plot at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come. I’ve read that for decades after, Things to Come was … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: King Kong

Posted on Thursday 16 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This very famous and popular film, from 1933, isn’t exactly science fiction, but somewhat adjacent to SF: a variation of the “lost world” story popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when there were still unexplored areas of the … Continue reading →

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