I'm wondering how much impact the film footage shot by astronauts had on
how Hollywood did space sequences.

I'm having trouble coming up with recent sci fi movies to make the
comparison. The 50s brought us classics like Conquest of Space and many
others that tried to project what it would be like to work in space. In the
50s they believed spacewalks would be a cake walk and all you had to do to
move from ship to ship was have a k-bottle of compressed gas and good aim.
we learned better.

But I think the real difference is 50s sci fi tried to be realiztic about
future events - present sci fi is all about noise, action, bloodshed and
trying to gross out the audience more than last year's flick. What's
important is exciting the audience not being realistic - the average hero
would have been dead tens times over halfway through the new flicks.


Val Kraut