The coordinates are set and the TIME TUNNEL is ready to take you back to the year when the Metaluna Mutant threatened Earth, Quatermass hit movies and TV and comics entered the Silver Age!

Film Focus

Although the Metaluna Mutant creature, so prominent on the posters, was an afterthought added to This Island Earth when producers felt they needed a ‘space monster’, it is the one image for which the film is still remembered today. One of many movies that followed the spate of real-life UFO sightings of the late-1940s/early-1950s, This Island Earth took a more ‘realistic’ approach to contact with aliens from another world than many of the ‘monster from space’ flicks churned out in the 1950s.

Contact with the aliens is scientific (at least to begin with), as alien big brain Exeter (Jeff Morrow) supplies scientist Rex Reason with the technology to build an ‘interocitor’, essentially a space videophone. From this small beginning things escalate as the humans take a trip into deep space and become involved in the war between the Metalunans and the Zagons: the Metalunans quite fancy Earth as their new home…

The special effects at the climax of the movie (even including the creature suit) still stand up well and This Island Earth is a key film of the 1950s science fiction movie boom that influenced the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as kids.


Other Movies

Also unspooling at your neighbourhood cinema in 1955 was Hammer’s foray into science fiction, The Quatermass Experiment, a big screen condensation of Nigel Kneale’s groundbreaking TV series; the third and final movie in Universal’s series of Creature features, Revenge of the Creature; and more undersea monster nonsense with a six-armed giant octopus (‘octo’ as in eight) in It Came From Beneath the Sea.

Ed Wood was still trying his best to make movies with Bela Lugosi in the comical low budget shocker Bride of the Monster, while a giant spider ran amuck in Tarantula and Abbot and Costello met The Mummy for some horror laffs.

Oddball Flick

The year 1955 was key for ‘King of the B-Movies’ Roger Corman. He co-produced the oddball film The Beast with a Million Eyes and directed (his fourth movie as director) The Day the World Ended.

Both were very low-budget creature features with bizarre monsters at their centre. Beast boasted an alien creature that could see through the eyes of anyone or anything it took control of, while Day is infamous for creature builder Paul Blaisdell’s mutant monster, the result of an atomic war that has destroyed civilization. Cheap and cheerful these pictures may be, but Roger Corman was only getting started.


Television

Of course, television was in its infancy in 1955, though it was the year Elvis Presley made his TV debut. Science fiction was largely (in the US anyway) seen as children’s entertainment in the form of the ‘kid vid’ shows like Adventures of Superman (with George Reeves), Captain Video and his Video Rangers, and Commando Cody.

Slightly more grown up was Science Fiction Theatre, a US anthology show, and Quatermass II, which debuted in the UK just as The Quatermass Experiment movie (or Xperiment, as Hammer had it!) was released. Science Fiction Theatre ran for two years from 1955. Each 30-minute, stand-alone episode was introduced by Truman Bradley. Against a high-tech laboratory background, he usually demonstrated some scientific breakthrough or development that would feature in the story. The show dramatically explored such 1950s concerns as space travel, robotics, telepathy and time travel. Guest stars included such future SF stars as DeForest Kelley (Star Trek), Kent Smith (The Invaders), and Ed Kemmer (Space Patrol).

Books

The world of science fiction in novels was going great guns in 1955, with major works from James Blish (Earthman, Come Home — the third of four novels in his Cities in Flight sequence), Leigh Brackett (The Long Tomorrow; Brackett later wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back) and Arthur C. Clarke (Earthlight).

Ray Bradbury mixed SF and fantasy in his story collection The October Country, while SF visionary Philip K. Dick’s debut novel Solar Lottery appeared — while this was a slight tale, his fiction would get weirder and more significant with time. Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers came out and has been adapted into several movies (some more successful than others) since. Perhaps the single best novel of 1955 is John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, a moving and haunting tale of mutant persecution.


Comics

The ‘golden age’ of comic books is generally assumed to have ended before the mid-1950s, but a good deal of great work was still being done in comics during an otherwise dull and repressed decade.

The ‘silver age’ from the mid-1950s to the early-1970s was a period of consolidation, especially in the superhero world. The backlash against comics had begun the previous year, while Western adventure comics proliferated. The major character making his debut in 1955 was the Martian Manhunter (recently featured in Smallville on TV) in DC Comics’ Detective Comics#225.

Notable 1955 Births

Among the notable births in 1955 were movie action heroes Bruce Willis and Kevin Costner, comic actor and Medium producer Kelsey Grammer, and Antichrist’s Willem Dafoe, as well as various Star Trek personnel, including Marina Sirtis, Kate Mulgrew and Ethan Phillips. Blockbuster film director Roland Emmerich was also born in 1955, as were two of the stars of J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5: Stephen Furst and Mira Fulan.


Notable 1955 Deaths

The biggest — and most surprising — star name to die in 1955 was James Dean, killed in a car crash just as he was on the cusp of true stardom. He left behind only three notable film roles in Rebel Without a Cause, Giant and East of Eden. Also checking out in this year were Three Stooges member Shemp Howard and German actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who had starred in 1927’s Metropolis (soon to be available on DVD in a newly restored version).

The Real World

Meanwhile, in the real world the US Pentagon armed its intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons, McDonald’s began its worldwide expansion, the first US ‘advisors’ arrived in South Vietnam, Anthony Eden became Prime Minister of the UK replacing Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein died in New Jersey.

By Brian J. Robb