Animating the Science Fiction Imagination ii Animating the Science Fiction Imagination J. P. Telotte 1 iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–069527–9 (pbk.) ISBN 978–0–19–069526–2 (hbk.) 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction: Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination 1 23 2. Flights of Fantasy 43 3. Of Robots and Artificial Beings 65 4. Alien Visions 85 5. Inventions, Modern Marvels, and Mad Scientists Postscript: New SF Images for a Postwar World 105 A Prewar and Early War Animated Science Fiction Filmography 127 Notes 133 A Science Fiction Animation Bibliography 139 Index 145 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As is usually the case, this book would not be possible without the contribu- tions of a great many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Over several years, various members of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts sat patiently through papers that formed the basis for several chapters, asking the usual good questions and helping to sharpen my focus. My respected colleague in film studies, Murray Pomerance, provided early encouragement on the project and even offered a possible path to pub- lication. Fellow faculty members and the students at Georgia Tech (GT) kindly— or dutifully— listened as I recounted, far too many times, why I thought a body of largely forgotten animation was important to our think- ing about science fiction as a genre; since GT frames intellectual inquiry as a rather exciting activity, they were always supportive and even enthusiastic. Among the faculty, let me especially offer my thanks to Lisa Yaszek, Carol Senf, and Krystina Madej, and from among the typically bright students in my Animation and Science Fiction Film and Television courses, I would especially note Kyle Jenkins, Emily King, Andrew Lippens, and Fletcher Maffett. The Chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Richard Utz, was as ever unfailingly encouraging, while Jacqueline Royster, Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at GT, provided crucial sup- port by giving me the Distinguished Research Professor award, the funds from which allowed me to finish this project in a timely manner. Other colleagues outside of GT, especially those who know the field of anima- tion much better than I do— Donald Crafton, Richard Neupert, Tommy Stathes, Jerry Beck—all kindly responded to out-of- the- blue inquiries, readily sharing their knowledge and advice. Special mention is also due to the editors at Science Fiction Studies, especially Carol McGuirk who, after proofing my article on the subject, reinforced my efforts by noting that the topic “really could (should) be a book.” Finally, I am especially grateful to the editorial group at Oxford University Press—Norman Hirschy for his viii immediate encouragement and enthusiasm for the project, Lauralee Yeary for carefully shepherding me through the many details of the publication process, and the skilled reviewers who helped reshape my thinking and in the process shaped this volume in a great many helpful ways. Finally, the production team at OUP deserves mention, especially Alphonsa James who was most efficient. I very much enjoyed working on this project, and part of the pleasure was in my dealings with these many colleagues and publishing professionals. [ viii ] Acknowledgments CHAPTER 1 Introduction Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination ong before the 24½ century when Warner Brothers’ Duck Dodgers Lpatrolled the universe amid a relative explosion of live- action science fiction (SF) films and television programs, an established if little-observed tradition of SF animation was already flourishing. In fact, decades before Daffy Duck’s first appearance as Dodgers in 1953, and while SF was strug- gling to find even a scant place in live-action cinema— a place mostly defined by serials like The Phantom Empire (1935), Undersea Kingdom (1936), Buck Rogers (1939), and the various Flash Gordon films (1936, 1938, 1940)— many of the key animation studios of the 1910s to 1940s were regularly offering their own visions of standard genre concerns like space travel, robots, aliens, and futuristic technology. During this pre- war era, such noted figures of animation as Paul Terry, Otto Messmer, Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, and Max and Dave Fleischer ranged across a variety of SF sub- jects and themes that both reflected and, through their exaggerated and largely comic presentations, critiqued science and technology’s growing presence in and influence on modern life. This book examines that body of material to consider how early animation’s modernist links afforded the emerging genre of SF, and what we might more broadly think of as the SF imagination, a fertile if generally satiric ground for development before World War II temporarily displaced many of those scientific and techno- logical concerns from our movie screens. 2 This investigation began as a result of a rather simple observation: that even though our histories of SF have acknowledged and often discussed a great variety of texts that have helped shape the growth and our under- standing of this important genre— texts in such areas as literature, feature films and serials, comic books and comic strips, and radio programs— some other generic efforts, particularly those in animation, have largely escaped cataloguing and discussion. This omission is especially surprising and even troubling since the pre– World War II era was so crucial to the formation of the SF genre and the development of what Brooks Landon terms “science fiction thinking” (4). During this period SF was just beginning to establish an identity, a corpus of important concerns, a solid fan base, and, after much discussion, even settle upon an acceptable title, as throughout the pre- war era SF went by a variety of names, such as scientifiction, scientific romance, scientific stories, pseudo- scientific stories, and science fantasy.1 However, it seems that most of our efforts to write the history of and bet- ter understand this formative period of SF have overlooked a fairly signifi- cant body of animated material that treated most of the same subjects as the literature, while speaking in appealing and even meaningful ways to a wide viewership. These neglected texts, I would argue, represent a signifi- cant contribution to the development of the SF imagination, which in turn helped shape our sense of the SF genre as it increasingly spread across a broadening media landscape. Throughout the course of its growth into one of the most popular of genres, SF has benefited greatly from this spreadable character, that is, from an ability shared by few other genres to function effectively in and across an array of media while addressing multiple audiences.2 Prior to World War II, its early development was especially marked not only by the growth of a highly speculative and serious literature, particularly in Europe, but also by an explosion of popular pulp literature; SF began to find a place in live- action cinema with both a handful of expensive and even epic- in- scope fea- tures such as Metropolis (Germany, 1927), The Mysterious Island (US, 1929), and Things to Come (UK, 1936), and with the more popularly oriented, less- ambitious but action- packed serials; it provided material for numer- ous radio dramatizations, most spectacularly with Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation of War of the Worlds, but also with broadcast versions of the exploits of various superheroes and spacemen drawn from the comic strips; and it inspired a variety of those comic strips and comic books, featuring characters such as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Superman, all of whom would, in time, provide further inspiration for movie and later for televi- sion adaptation. All of these manifestations of the SF imagination helped [ 2 ] Animating the Science Fiction Imagination fuel the genre’s early progress and set the stage for its well- chronicled post- war upsurge in popularity. And as this volume will chronicle, animation represents one more, if largely forgotten ingredient in this “spread,” one that shares some obvious relationships as a result of what John Cheng describes as the “period’s culture of popular science” (6). That kinship is rooted not just in a common fascination with science and technology, nor in their common exploitation of the science consciousness and its imagery that so marked what has generally come to be known as the Machine Age,3 but also in the modernist underpinnings of both forms. Of course, various commentators have previously linked both SF and animation to modernism, so perhaps the connection I want to build on is hardly surprising, although some of the bases for this linkage are worth spelling out.