1940 - Dr. Cyclops

6.8 / 6.6 6.3 6.62

Dr. Cyclops was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, who was also responsible for King Kong. Like that earlier film, it involves an expedition into the jungle in search of scientific discovery. Also like King Kong, the film features elaborate sets and special effects. The film is also the first American science fiction film made in Technicolor, and Schoedsack took care that the special effects in color were effective.

RottenTomatoes.com: Albert Dekker chews the scenery as mad scientist Dr. Thorkel, who has developed a process that will shrink human beings to doll size. His first victims include mining engineers Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley) and Steve Baker (Victor Kilian) and biologists Mary Mitchell (Janice Logan) and Dr. Bullfinch (Charles Halton).

At first willing to play-act the role of benevolent despot with his miniaturized captives, Thorkel reveals the more sinister side of his personality by abruptly murdering Bullfinch in cold blood (easily the film's most frightening sequence).

The rest of the picture details the escape efforts of the three pint-sized protagonists as they hack their way through a jungle of gigantic foliage and do battle with oversized wildlife. Though the cheery Technicolor hues tend to dilute the "scare" quotient in Dr. Cyclops, the special effects are superbly convincing throughout. The film was Oscar nominated for Best Effects.





1941 - Adventures of Captain Marvel

7.2

Adventures of Captain Marvel is a twelve-chapter film serial directed by John English and William Witney for Republic Pictures, adapted from the popular Captain Marvel comic book character then appearing in Fawcett Comics publications such as Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures. It starred Tom Tyler in the title role of Captain Marvel and Frank Coghlan, Jr. as his alter ego, Billy Batson.

This serial was the twenty-first of the sixty-six serials produced by Republic and their first comic book adaptation, not counting comic strips. The serial featured an adaptation of the Fawcett Comics superhero, placed within an original story. He fights a masked criminal mastermind called The Scorpion who is determined to gain control of a powerful weapon disguised as a scorpion figurine.

Harmon and Glut claim that Adventures of Captain Marvel is "unquestionably one of the finest movie serials ever made, possible the best with the exception of the three Flash Gordon epics." Cline describes this as one of the most outstanding of all serials and Republic's "masterpiece." He writes that Tyler's "striking performance...remains in thousands of minds as the most memorable serial hero of all time - bar none."

The flying effects were performed with a dummy. The dummy was slightly larger than life, at 7 feet tall, and made of paper m ch so that it weighed only 15 lbs. The uniform was made of thin silk and a cotton jersey. Four pulleys connected to each shoulder and calf, which were strung on two wires so the dummy moved along them by its own weight.





1942 - The Ghost of Frankenstein

6.3 / 6.2 6.0 6.17

The Ghost of Frankenstein marked the final appearance of the Monster in a solo capacity in the Universal Monsters series. Beginning with the next film, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (in which Lugosi plays the Monster with Chaney switching to his Wolf Man character), and continuing for the rest of the Universal cycle, Frankenstein's Monster would be part of an ensemble cast of creatures.

The blinding of the Monster resulted in a lasting stereotype of the creature walking with arms outstretched, even though this is the only film in which it is explicitly indicated that he is blind, such references being cut by the studio from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, sabotaging Lugosi's performance in the process, since the audience is left to wonder why the Monster is behaving so peculiarly.

The Monster's ability to speak would also be dropped after this film until Glenn Strange, playing the monster, spoke briefly in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" has Chaney make an uncredited second appearance as the Monster during the laboratory escape sequence, replacing a broken footed Glenn Strange in the Monster role.

The Ghost of Frankenstein perhaps doesn't even deserve a best sci-fi film of the year title, but the lack of choices in 1942 made it the default choice. I could have lumped this year into the next year's choice, but the sci-fi draught at the box office continued the next few years.





1943 to 1946 - The Crimson Ghost

7.1

While The Crimson Ghost was really a series of matinee serials, it was the best sci-fi this period had to offer in terms of box office features. The Crimson Ghost was directed by Fred C. Brannon and William Witney with Charles Quigley and Linda Stirling playing the leads. This was Witney's last serial, after a career that left him one of the most praised of all serial directors.

The serial was re-released as a six-episode television series in the 1950s and as a television film called Cyclotrode "X" in 1966. In the 1990s the serial was one of only two Republic serials to be colorised. The villain of the serial, the Crimson Ghost of the title, is one of the most visually striking of the medium. The Crimson Ghost was budgeted at $137,912, although the final negative cost was $161,174 (a $23,262, or 16.9%, overspend). It was the most expensive Republic serial of 1946.

In order to prevent the audience deducing the identity of the Crimson Ghost, the studio cast stunt-man Bud Geary to embody the villain while several actors supplied the voice, including I. Stanford Jolley. Jolley's role was minor but he received fourth-billing and was therefore highly suspect.

When the Crimson Ghost was unmasked in the 12th and final chapter, he proved to be yet another actor entirely, Joseph Forte, who had played a character seemingly above suspicion at that point in the serial. Television's future Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, played a rare villainous role in this serial as one of the Crimson Ghost's henchmen, a cold-hearted gangster named Ashe.





1947 & 1948 - Superman

7.1

Another series of matinee serials, Superman was a "tremendous financial success" and played in "first-run theatres that had never before booked a serial." The serial was a popular success that made Kirk Alyn famous and launched Noel Neill's career. A sequel serial, Atom Man vs. Superman, also directed by Bennet, was released in 1950.

Superman's flight sequences were animated instead of live-action or model work. Harmon and Glut consider this to be the "weakest point of the serial", explaining that the "effects created by Republic for Captain Marvel were very convincing; even the more routine ones for the Superman TV series, always showing the same pose, were better."

While there were other effective special effects, in their opinion, they were undermined by the poorness of the flying sequences. The film crew did test an alternate method of filming the flying sequences: Kirk Alyn spent an entire day painfully suspended by visible wires in front of a rear projection of moving clouds.

Displeased with the results, Katzman fired the entire flight sequence production staff and used the animated method instead. A peculiar characteristic of the mix of animated and live-action footage is that Superman's take-offs are almost always visible in the foreground, while his landings almost always occur behind objects, such as parked cars, rocks, and buildings.





1949 - Mighty Joe Young

6.4 / 6.2 6.9 X1 6.87

Mighty Joe Young is RKO Radio Pictures black and white feature film made by the same creative team responsible for King Kong (1933). Robert Armstrong appears in both films. Written and produced by Merian C. Cooper (who provided the story) and Ruth Rose (who wrote the screenplay) the film was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack.

Willis O'Brien, who created the animation for King Kong, was the supervisor of the film's stop motion animation special effects. Ray Harryhausen was hired in 1947 on his first film assignment as an assistant animator to O'Brien. But O'Brien ended up concentrating on solving the various technical problems of the production, leaving most of the actual animation to Harryhausen.

Buoyed by the enormous success of King Kong in 1933 and its profitable theatrical reissues in 1938, 1942, and 1946, RKO had great hopes for Mighty Joe Young. Upon its release in 1949, the film was honored with an Academy Award for Special Effects (a category that did not exist in 1933 for King Kong), however, it was unsuccessful at the box office and, as a result, plans to produce a sequel (tentatively titled "Joe Meets Tarzan") were quickly dropped.

The film has become a stop-motion classic and has an affectionate following. Special effects artists consider it highly influential, with the elaborate orphanage rescue sequence lauded as one of the great stop-motion sequences in film history.







SCI-FI BEST FILMS BY YEAR - 1950 to 1959 > > >




Resources: wikipedia.org, imdb.com, rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com





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