Death From Above (Hugo cinema 1979)

This blog post is the 22th in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.

As the 1970s drew to a close, science fiction cinema was in transition. The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1979 reflects this; socially conscious environmental parables of the waning decade were making way for a new era of popcorn cinema.

Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz presents the 1979
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation to
Superman star Christopher Reeve at Seacon.
(Image via Supermania78)

For the first time, there were two animated movies nominated in the same year (something that would not happen again until 2002): Watership Down and Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy became the first (and to date only) commercially broadcast radio show to earn a Hugo nod. This left Superman and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the only live-action movies up for the award. From the start of organized fandom, fanzines had always provided reviews of movies, but in the late 1970s, more column inches were spent on cinema than ever before. Fans debated whether movies like The Wiz, The Cat From Outer Space, or Coma deserved recognition for the Hugo, and wisely decided that they did not.

In the wake of Star Wars, Hollywood had begun to recognize the commercial viability of big-budget science fiction. The floodgates were opening.

There had also been an uptick in televised science fiction. In Britain, Blake’s 7 was drawing in up to 10 million viewers an episode. In the United States, Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica became the most expensive television series ever made up to that point. Although it received mixed reviews from fandom, the original pilot Saga of a Star World holds up surprisingly well today. One of the show’s few defenders in fandom, Mike Glyer noted that “Battlestar Galactica has been panned in every review I've read — must be something wrong with me, I enjoyed it.”

In the days leading up to the Worldcon in Brighton, UK, the original radio production of The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy seemed to have the edge. Indisputably fannish, and replete with genre references, it was an immediate hit in the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the Douglas Adams’ comedy would not be broadcast in the United States until three years later, SFF fans all over the world were alerted to its existence by their British friends. It was broadcast on the BBC Worldwide shortwave service, and some North American fans were able to receive it via shortwave radio (and bootleg audio cassettes). File 770 took the unusual step of publishing the schedule of shortwave broadcasts for the show.

How many Hugo finalists have
inspired songs by Radiohead
and Perfect Circle?
(Image via Wikipedia)

Though it’s broadly recognized as a classic today, Richard Donner’s Superman did not seem destined to win the Hugo Award in 1979. When the movie first came out, critics were less than charitable in their assessment of the film. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael excoriated it as smarmy and cynical with “a sour, scared undertone.” The New York Times’ review is even more dismissive, opining that, “It's as if somebody had constructed a building as tall as the World Trade Center in the color and shape of a carrot. Rabbits might admire it. They might even write learned critiques about it and find it both an inspiration and a reward, while the rest of us would see nothing but an alarmingly large, imitation carrot.”

Even within fandom, there was a sense that comic books weren’t ‘real science fiction,’ and consequently a comic book movie wasn’t a ‘real science fiction’ movie. In the fanzine SF Review, editor Richard E. Geis wrote that “We hated Superman cordially (and hated Invasion of the Body Snatchers not so cordially).”

Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings is arguably the weakest work on the shortlist. Some of the viewers in our group would have considered ranking it below no award if we were voting today. Although the first half of the movie hews closely to JRR Tolkein’s original novel, the second half rushes through major plot points without pause before ending abruptly. Praising the faithfulness of the adaptation, but excoriating the jumpy rotoscoping and off-putting visuals, fan Bill Warren dismissed Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings as “Middling Earth.”

More than in previous years, there was debate about the shortlist, and various works had their proponents. Harlan Ellison had endorsed Watership Down, writing that, “It is intelligent, elegant, true to the splendid book from which it was adapted, and as uplifting for adults as it will be for kids.” A reimagining of the Biblical story of Exodus told with rabbits, the movie had its world premiere at the 1978 Worldcon in Arizona. It may have received a boost by being seen by likely Hugo voters, and the enthusiastic lobbying of Ellison. The naturalism of the animal depictions resonate, and the painterly backdrops are striking, but there’s a tonal disconnect between the seriousness of the violence and juvenile elements like the wacky seagull sidekick Kehaar.

#NotMyAragorn
(Image via IMDB)

Though it initially received mixed reviews from mainstream critics, and only a modest success in its initial release, over time the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers has gained critical acclaim. Some members of SFF fandom were ahead of the curve, with frequent reviewer Bill Warren describing it as the finest movie he’d seen that year, and suggesting that it was “more than just a remake of an old classic, it's a new classic in itself.” More than four decades after its release, the movie has aged well, with multiple possible interpretations. We ended up debating whether it was a warning about the threat of communism, a meditation on societal pressures to conform, or something else. It deserved its nomination, and would have been a worthy winner. It probably lost Hugo votes because author Jack Finney — upon whose book the movie is based — had shown some disdain for the fandom community.

In the final Hugo vote, the top two finalists were surprisingly close … each of which featured a protagonist who is the last survivor of a doomed planet and each of which had an influence on broader, mainstream culture: Superman and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy is rightly regarded as a classic of science fiction comedy. Those in our cinema club who love it, do so unreservedly … but it was not to everyone’s taste. Understated and ironic, some consider it a masterpiece of timing and laconic charm, despite the dialogue feeling loose and unstructured. Following an everyday Englishman who survives the destruction of planet Earth, the series meanders between various science fiction tropes before the protagonist uncovers the galactic conspiracy behind his planet’s demolition. There’s a reason this radio show spawned four sequels, was adapted into a television series, a movie, a video game, and a novelization that sold more than 14 million copies.

The vote came down to two 
stories — each about a last
survivor of a doomed planet
who has to face off against
real estate developers.

The initial popularity of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy cannot be overstated. Within months of its first airing, fans had adapted it to a stage production, and Graham England was publishing a fanzine titled Don’t Panic, which was actively campaigning to get a Hugo Award for its author Douglas Adams. “I’m more astonished and delighted than I can say at the prospect of being put forward for a Hugo nomination — a fairly mind boggling prospect,” Adams wrote on February 14, 1979 about the campaign to have him recognized, and said he was trying to make the show available in the United States.

Despite the disdain critics had shown for it, Superman was the highest-grossing movie of the year and had connected to audiences. At the time, no movie based on a comic book superhero had been among the year’s top-20 grossing films (previous superhero movies such as the 1966 Batman were comparatively small-scale affairs). In many ways, this would be seen as the turning point in cinema history; the most dominant movies of today had their genesis in 1978, with almost every superhero movie in subsequent decades taking cues from Richard Donner’s interpretation of Superman.

When rewatching these movies with 40 years of hindsight, it’s clear that this was not only one of the more interesting Hugo shortlists, it was one of the best. After decades in which the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award had been somewhat of an afterthought, science fiction cinema seemed to be coming into its own.

Divergent Evolution of Television

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, cable television systems moved to digital delivery and expanded

(Image via Pintrest) 

beyond their original constraints of 35 channels. Technological optimists began to dream of a 500-channel universe.

In 1979 alone, ESPN, C-SPAN, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel, and the USA Network all hit the airwaves. There was to be a channel for every audience, and an audience for every channel. In 1992, American science fiction fans received their own dedicated channel, while the Canuck equivalent began operations in 1996.

Many imagined that this fabled 500-channel universe would provide a practically unlimited number of high-quality television shows. We would be able to flip channels almost endlessly until we found the content we desired. In reality, and at its peak at the turn of the millennium, there were in excess of 68 million cable subscribers in the United States, and in most parts of the country consumers could access a roughly similar platform of 60 or more channels.

There is good reason why this stretch of time saw an equivalent diversification of genre fiction; almost three times as many prime time science fiction dramas premiered on television in the 1990s as had in the 1970s. Throughout this flourishing of genre fiction, the majority of it was broadly available to middle-income American viewers who had a basic cable package that included the Sci-Fi Channel.

Even a show on the Prime Time Entertainment Network (one of the most marginal networks of the day) reached enough viewers to garner a few Hugo Award nominations for J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5.

There were, however, inequities within this distribution model. People living in some remote areas might not have had access to Star Trek: Voyager when UPN started broadcasting in 1995. People living in Canada were largely unable to access the TV show based on the Jean Claude Van Damme movie TimeCop. Among English-language entertainment, British television series remained significantly less

Only nine episodes of TimeCop
aired before Universal decided
to #DefundTheTimePolice.
(Image via YouTube.)

accessible due to differing frame rates and lack of distribution outlets across the pond. Channels were usually bundled rather than being offered à la carte. If you were interested in The Secret World of Alex Mack, you might find that it was on a channel that wasn’t in the same bundle as the channel airing Weird Science: The TV Series.

But despite these relatively small gaps, for the most part there was a common technological platform, media provider, and billing system that handled all media.

The proliferation of streaming services that media consumers are now experiencing is fundamentally different from the growth of niche-content channels in the mid-1990s. It’s worth discussing these differences, as they could be seen to encourage compartalization, and perhaps even a sort of tribalism, across science fiction fandom.

These streaming services should not be compared to individual television channels, but rather to cable packages. Thus, we have not reached the fabled 500-channel universe, but rather a balkanized media landscape made up of a variety of 30-channel universes.

These 30-channel universes are not segmenting the market in the same ways that niche cable channels did; rather they are organized around broad-based appeal, each aiming to build momentum off the strength of three items: a tentpole science fiction series, a relaunch of a 1990s sitcom, and a buzzy prestige drama.

Disney+ was launched on the strength of a new live-action Star Wars show. Apple+ was launched by

How many goodly channels are there here!
How beauteous streaming is! O what a Brave
New World that has such content in it.
(Image via PeacockTV.com)

hiring an acclaimed Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica creative force to craft a much-hyped science fiction project. Peacock was launched with a high-budget star-laden adaptation of Brave New World. Every platform has a band of content for situation comedies, high-brow dramas, reality shows, superhero shows, and cop shows. It is not segmented by interest, but rather segmented by brands that are all trying to compete for all viewers.

It is not reasonable (or for most of us economically feasible) to subscribe to every streaming service that’s offering something we might want to watch. In an average American city, the combined price of Netflix, Hulu, Apple+, Disney+, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, basic cable, HBO Max, Showtime, FX, Peacock, and STARZ will exceed $1,300 per year. It is therefore likely that most fans will pick and choose their streaming services based on which tent-pole productions they are most interested in. If The Mandalorian and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are must-haves, then Tales From The Loop and For All Mankind will likely fall by the wayside. It is a sad truth that many technologically adept fans may end up illegally downloading other shows when more moderate, collective pricing might increase both audience and corporate profits overall.

This fragmentation is compounded by the unrelenting deluge of content that is being generated every year.

Ignoring all reruns, in 2009 there were 210 scripted English-language prime-time television series on the air in the United States (a total that fails to include reality shows, daytime dramas, or children’s series). This is an enormous amount of content; it would take you 4,380 hours to watch it all. By 2019, the amount had more than doubled. (It’s worth noting that up until the Pandemic, this growth in high-budget content creation had been mirrored at the movie theatres, with the number of theatrically released movies increasing from 520 in 2009, to 792 in 2019.)

Looking just at science fiction and fantasy, the number of English-language genre shows premiering in a given decade has quadrupled since the 1980s, from 50 to more than 200. When we consider the increasing globalization of science fiction, and the need to include multicultural voices in the awards system, the numbers would be staggering.

The era of “Peak Media” presents a significant obstacle to those who wish to use the democratic forum of the Hugo Awards to celebrate the truly extraordinary storytelling achievements of this era of small-screen entertainment.

One of the great things about the Hugo Awards is the democratic nature of the institution. But access to information is a requirement of a functioning democracy … and in some Hugo categories, access is in decline.

There was a time when it was reasonable to assume that most Hugo voters would have access to a representative sampling of dramatic presentations, either by passive choice or osmosis. Today, it requires more effort, more attention, and more willingness to step outside of our comfort zones.

The increasing segmentation of the television marketplace into streaming fiefdoms is making it more difficult for a worthy series on a less-popular streaming service to break through to broader audiences. No matter how great a science fiction show might be, it has next to no chance of connecting with enough Hugo Award voters to get on the shortlist if it is a Peacock Original.

There is already a significant overrepresentation of well-established franchises on the shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). By our count in the past decade, more than 70 per cent of finalists in the category have come from long-running multimedia franchises.

It appears that Hugo voters will sign up to Disney+ to ensure they keep up to date on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars Galaxy. There is reason to worry that the award could devolve into “the best show in the walled garden that most Worldcon people subscribe to.”

The evolution of television is diverging. Our collective imagination is the habitat of cultural myths, and as this habitat becomes fragmented, these myths might speciate.

Labour on screen in science fiction: Fritz to Boots

This is the third of a three-part blog post about the historical invisibility of organized labour in science fiction, as well as recent works that address this absence. In the first two parts, we examined prose works both negative and positive. An additional post includes a list of all labour unions we are aware of in science fiction works. 

Film is a medium that can help construct a tolerant, diverse, and informed society. It’s no surprise, then, that the first shots of the first movie camera were focused on workers and on work. For 45 seconds, director Louis Lumière documented the comings and goings of factory workers in his 1895 movie “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.”

Workers and labour are recurring themes
in early movies, including the 1927
Fritz Lang classic Metropolis.
(Image via IMDB.com)

Employment has been a ubiquitous subject in film — and in science fiction film — but worker organizing has again been neglected.

Some of the earliest science fiction movies feature clashes between workers and automation. From the now-lost 1895 short movie The Mechanical Butcher to Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis, filmmakers reflected the concerns of an era that was experiencing rapid industrialization as well as violent actions taken against the working class.

Possibly because of political sensitivities, many of these films made no overt mention of a labour union, but in Metropolis, the workers assert their rights through something similar to anarcho-syndicalist collective action, which may make it the IWW of labour movies.

This treatment of labour and labour unions as a source of strife continues in cinema over the next several decades, though overt union representation is rare. Workers might revolt in a chaotic manner in a science fiction film (as in Stargate, Planet of the Apes or Solo: A Star Wars Story), but they are rarely organized — or effective — in their actions.

The first unmistakable labour union in science fiction cinema that we were able to find is the Textile

The Man In The White Suit may be the
first science fiction movie to have been
nominated for an Academy Award in a
major category, earning a nod for
adapted screenplay.
(Image via Guardian.co.uk)

and Garment Workers Union depicted in the 1951 Ealing Studios comedy The Man In The White Suit. The film revolves around the invention of an indestructible fabric by a mild-mannered chemist played by Sir Alec Guinness, and the subsequent attempts by business and labour unions to suppress the invention. The depiction of unions in this movie is broad and largely inaccurate, depicting them as collaborating with management and encouraging industrial sabotage.

Despite these inaccuracies about how unions operate, we will be endorsing The Man In The White Suit for 1952 Retro Hugos, . It is in most ways a superb and thoughtful piece of science fiction about the introduction of a new technology, and is elevated by witty dialogue and star-worthy performances (Guinness was nominated for an Academy Award that year for a different comedy from the same studio).

Most other labour unions depicted on screen in science fiction up until the 1990s relegate the labour conflict to a tertiary storyline. In Robocop, the government’s decision to deploy the title character is driven by a police union strike. In the real world, in most North American jurisdictions, police officers are unable to strike because they are deemed to be ‘essential services,’ but in the dystopian future depicted in Robocop, police services have been privatized and are now run by the corporation Omni Consumer Products. Because the police are no longer public servants, they are able to (legally) walk off the job.

One aspect of Robocop that is worth noting is that the strike has been engineered by the corporation, the CEO of which deliberately withholds adequate resources (police vehicles and equipment) and acts in bad faith when it comes to pensions and wages. The strike is therefore shown as justified, but when push comes to shove, the most heroic police officers Anne Lewis, Alex Murphy, and Warren Reid all cross the picket line.

During the climactic scenes of the movie, the striking workers come to the rescue of Robocop,

To quote the CEO of OCP, "This strike
can be useful to us." Robocop may
not entirely woke to labour rights,
but it does have thoughtful satire
about privatization of public services.
(Image via Youtube.com)

showing that they are more concerned with doing their jobs than they are their own livelihoods. It is unsatisfying that workers’ rights questions remain unresolved in the movie — the strike is ended but wages, pensions, and funding are all unaddressed.

Robocop presents us with a prescient warning about the low-wage agenda that is marketed under the term ‘privatization,’ but its depiction of worker organizing and worker solidarity is sadly lacking.

There are at least two prominent portrayals of labour organizing in mid-1990s science fiction television series: Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. They offered very different — but equally unsatisfying — portrayals of labour organizing.

Babylon 5’s episode 'By Any Means Necessary' shows a labour movement that is belligerent and badly led into a violent dockworkers’ strike — only the unconventional thinking of the station’s military governor prevents the situation’s violence from escalating. 

Two years later, in Deep Space Nine’s episode 'Bar Association,' we are shown an example of solidarity organizing to address the plight of underpaid waiters and waitresses in Quark’s Bar. Once the employer has compromised on wages, however, it is suggested that a union is ‘no longer needed.’ In both of these examples, the labour movement is shown as being an unruly rabble whose actions need to be kept in check.

The low point in televised science fiction’s portrayal of labour may have been 'Dirty Hands,' a third season episode of Battlestar Galactica. The ‘villains’ of the episode are workers who conduct a work

There's a term for workers whose right
to stop working has been taken away
through state-sanctioned violence.
(Image via IMDB.com) 

slowdown in an attempt to negotiate safer working conditions. The episode’s resolution features the ‘protagonist’ Admiral Adama arresting the union leader and threatening execution of non-compliant workers. This protagonist specifically promises that the union leader's wife will be the first one to be 'put against the bulkhead and shot.'

In the labour movement, this behaviour might be described as unfair bargaining practices.

As the product of a collaborative and corporatized structure, television might be a compromised medium when it comes to offering nuanced depictions of class struggle. Published text narratives — though subject to some editorial controls — are usually credited to a single author with a greater level of intellectual freedom and interest in a personal brand. Because a single author is better able to take personal responsibility for their ideas and their words, they are less likely to be constrained in what they say.

Last year, two very different examples of labour union depictions in science fiction hit the screens, and were surprisingly positive portrayals. The last two episodes of South Park’s most recent season 'Unfulfilled / Bike Parade' features a storyline about employees at an Amazon warehouse who decide to assert their right to a safe workplace in the wake of an accident. Although South Park is as irreverent in this episode as you’d expect it to be, the plight of the workers — and the tensions between picketers and picket-line crossers — are handled surprisingly well.

A very different example — but even more satisfying — was Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry

Boots Riley's Sorry To Bother You
shows the tensions and conundrums
faced by union members and organizers
while trying to assert their workplace rights.
 (Image via WorkingClassPerspectives)

To Bother You. A surreal workplace comedy with science fictional elements, Sorry To Bother You uses a story about the unionization of a call centre to explore larger themes about worker solidarity, the erosion of middle-class incomes, and the hyper-competitiveness encouraged by corporate culture and capitalism more broadly, pitting one worker against another. This may be one of the finest examples of labour union depiction in science fiction to date.

Overall, society’s (and science fiction’s) failure to imagine new forms of economic organization reinforces the neoliberal paradigm. Given science fiction’s speculative mandate, this is even more pronounced in the genre and especially its cinema and television (which reach a wider audience than literary forms). The marginalization of unions in science fiction is significant — and symptomatic. As Mark McCutcheon and Bob Barnetson argue in their paper Resistance Is Futile, themes that are omitted from popular culture are often consigned to not merely to impossibility, but to unthinkability.