Sorting through boxes in the garage recently, I unearthed a stash of old Amazing Stories magazines dating back to the 1970s. Amazing Stories, for any youngsters reading this, was/is a magazine devoted to science fiction stories. Much of the inside front cover was ripped off from those attempting to preserve their brittle pages from further degradation from finger burns, but there they were – nearly fifty years old and in reasonable condition despite four decades of life and three cross-country moves. Reading old articles on explorations of Venus or trips to the asteroid belt reminded me of how science fiction heroes have changed over the years.
Growing up, my first exposure to science-fiction came in the form of Flash Gordon reruns on our old Zenith television set. Wow. What a nostalgia trip that was. Flash Gordon, for better or worse, was about as deep as a two-by-four. Seriously. He was just plain one-dimensional. Wide chin, perfect hair, always knows the right thing to say or do. Strong jawline, weak suntan-line. Save the princess, punch the bad guy. Repeat as necessary.
That’s not a knock, by the way. Folks who lived through the Depression needed a hero they could count on more than President Hoover and Flash fit the bill. Flash Gordon didn’t whine about earning hero points or question whether Ming the Merciless might have had a point about blowing up Earth. He got to Mongo and punched some guys, rescued Dale Arden and was home in time for dinner.
In fact, that sense of escapism was a big part of fun of those early serials. Oh, you could see the guy wires holding up those rocket ships and the mountainous “alien planet” clearly looked like the Mojave Desert during an endless hot air balloon ride with someone farting newspapers instead of sand for scale. Who cared? Escape from reality was the whole point!
Flash evolved (or devolved, depending on how you look at it) into other heroes of that era: Buck Rogers, Captain Video, the Atom. These heroes shared a common thread of 1950s Americana utopianism. Space was just there to explore like many living in that era felt we should explore our own country. They zoomed around the galaxy like it was Interstate 70, ignoring radiation poisoning, space madness from decades of weightlessness, orbital mechanics or how the heck you cooled your space ship down after flying around a ball of molten gas like our sun. Why? Because when you’re flying in a magical rocket ship, physics don’t apply. I worked on real spacecraft for forty years and trust me, space travel is a lot less glamorous and a lot more physics.
Somewhere in the late ’70s/early ’80s heroes got more… human. Society was changing and I guess our heroes had to change with it. I remember going to see Star Wars when it premiered in 1977. I drove to the Century Theatre in San Jose, waited in line for about two hours and walked out of the theatre dazzled. No, it wasn’t the fantastic space battles (though let me just say those John Thornton models were incredible) or Harrison Ford’s charming rascally wit. It was Luke Skywalker.
He was our first space-age hero who struggled. He whined about power converters, cursed impatiently with Yoda, nearly got his skull bashed in by Darth Vader because he just couldn’t wait to fight. He was flawed and he earned his victories. Sometimes he screwed up royally. When Vader chopped off his hand and yelled at him about his father… yeah, that movie had a lot of wheels spinning in my head.
The next logical step, in my opinion, came in 1979 with Alien. I saw it at a midnight showing in some filthy little theatre in Palo Alto. About half the seats were broken and the sound system buzzed like crazy but none of that mattered once that little girl walked onto the screen and we met Ripley.
Wow. Here was someone who didn’t wake up every day feeling like a hero. Hell, she didn’t even know she was going to have to be one until it happened. Ripley was smart, resourceful, capable. Everything a woman should be in a sci-fi movie… and nobody makes a big deal about it. She’s not there to be glamorous or rescued. She’s there to use her head and kick some ass. The Nostromo wasn’t some gleaming fantasy star cruiser full of sexual cartoons drawn by Harold Van Ness.
It was a workplace. Ordinary working men and women doing their jobs with skill and professionalism. As an engineer who worked in manufacturing, I loved the production design of that film. Those factories actually looked like real factories where things were made. Everything had weight to it. Alien, Blade Runner, these weren’t superheroes defending the world. These were truckers in space that somehow ran across a monster.
Blade Runner took it even farther down the road of moral ambiguity. Is Deckard really saving the world by hunting down near-literal slaves looking for a better life? I watched that movie probably twenty times before I could articulate what I thought about it. Were the replicants the good guys? Was Deckard even human? Heroes in those days had grey areas, but they never made you question their basic heroic nature.
Not like <a href=”https://dystopianlens.co.uk/practical-effects-vs-cgi-why-the-charm-of-old-school-special-effects-still-captivates-audiences/”><a href=”https://dystopianlens.co.uk/practical-effects-vs-cgi-why-the-charm-of-old-school-special-effects-still-captivates-audiences/”>Neo</a></a>. Okay, so maybe the <a href=”https: //dystopianlens.co.uk/practical-effects-vs-cgi-why-the-charm-of-old-school-special-effects-still-captivates-audiences/”>special effects</a> weren’t ground-breaking, but damn if they didn’t look good. Those miniatures in Blade Runner were top-notch. You could reach out and touch the cardboard squishiness of those sets in Alien. It all felt tactile. These new CGI flicks have forgotten what it looks like when something actually sits on a desk rather than exists only as digital information.
Then 1999 happened and The Matrix completely altered our perceptions of sci-fi heroes.
My son made me see that movie. I was skeptical about this “computer” movie but damn if that didn’t blow my mind. Neo was our first truly modern hero. The first hero for whom the greatest opponent he had to fight wasn’t some alien bug-eyed monster or galactic empire – it was reality.
I especially liked that Neo wasn’t born a Jedior birth-certified with a lightsaber stuck into his cradle. He was something we could all relate to – Thomas Anderson. This guy spends forty hours a week working in a cubicle hell so realistic that any tech-worker who cut their teeth in the ’90s would immediately feel at home in that office. He’s sleepwalking through life until some guys in black suits show up at his door with a couple of pills.
Becoming “the One” isn’t instantaneous for Neo. He struggles. He trains. He fails. He pushes himself to become more than The Matrix can envision. Heck, even after he knows there’s more, Thomas Anderson still spends most of his life in that cube farm. His journey resonated with tech-workers everywhere. Are we falling into blissful ignorance by viewing simulated skies on our screens? Is there more out there for us? Those were the questions you were left with at the end of that movie.
Visually, that film was groundbreaking. Seriously. Anyone who’s seen it remembers those first few minutes set to Joe Campbell’s musical wizardry. Bullet time, fight scenes with digital doubles…. Movie magic hadn’t been this innovative since I was a kid watching Flash Gordon.
But even though The Matrix opened up a Pandora’s box of digital effects it never forgot to ground the story in the very human story of Thomas/Aaron. Yes, he could bend spoons with his mind but he also struggled with self-doubt, fear and raw emotion.
Neo may have started a trend. Today’s sci-fi heroes are a far cry from our campy friend Flash Gordon thanks to him. The Mandalorian may be a ‘keeping up with the-collar’ Space Western about a former assassin learning to be a dad. Rey struggles with identity and what it means to belong in ways that would’ve made Luke look like he didn’t have anything on his screen to worry about. I like that complexity in characters that would have flummoxed movie-goers back in the Atomic Age.
Did you know that The Mandalorian is using <a href=”https://dystopianlens.co.uk/practical-effects-vs-cgi-why-the-charm-of-old-school-special-effects-still-captivates-audiences/”>practical effects</a> and puppetry? Crazy. Everything is CGI these days but they went old school so they could have that weight and tangibility I loved about the older films. I may joke about rubber-suited E.T.s but damn if they don’t look cool.
What fascinates me is how each new generation of hero reflects the way we relate technology. Flash Gordon was our can-do, can innovate mythology of the space race. Luke showed us that bravery and heroism took hard work and were rewarded. Ripley taught us that sometimes not being a hero was the best course of action and surviving was victory enough. Neo made us question what was real.
Every generation needs their heroes, though I guess. We needed simple because our lives were complicated enough. Now we live in a complicated world and our heroes reflect that I suppose. I see a lot of questions being raised in current films about identity, what’s real and what is good vs. evil.
The thing we haven’t lost is our desire to tell stories about people facing the unknown, whether it’s battling spider-monsters from outer space or questioning what’s real. From Flash blasting Rossi across the galaxy to Neo hanging in the room full of doves, we still tell stories about humans under pressure and how they cope.
I loved spaceship magazines as a kid and built countless spaceships while working on real ones as an adult. I can geek-out about the preposterous physics of Flash Gordon as much as the existential quandaries of Neo. They’re just trying to answer the same question… what does it mean to be human?
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.