When Sci-Fi was about Ideas, Not Visual Effects

After Lucas kicked off the visual effects arms race with the original Star Wars trilogy in 1977, there was an era where science fiction was all about spectacle. No story required. The theatrical release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture comes to mind. It was visually stunning, but the story was recycled from an episode of the original series. You could have told the entire thing in under an hour. This got worse when 3D first came in.

Then Hollywood seemed to come to its senses, and realized that story was important. Star Trek: The Next Generation (and its siblings) was either the cause or the result, I'm not really sure. TNG dealt with everything from religious conflicts, to the nature of consciousness, to political witch hunts, and drug addiction. And they still managed to make it look good. Babylon 5 was another example from that time. Less episodic than TNG, it told a unified story over 4 years, even if it struggled for budget the whole time.

But somewhere along the way the idea that story matters in genre was lost again. Witness the result. Trilogies that don't hang together as a unified whole. Science Fiction stories written by people who have no idea about science. (Fire in the vacuum of space?) Stories written by people who hate science fiction and/or fantasy. You wonder why they want to work on something they clearly hate.

Back in that not-quite golden age, though maybe it will turn out to be just that, one of the things we got was Firefly. I'll let Drinker describe it to you.

This is Critical Drinker's video Firefly - We Didn't Know How Good We Had It

I'd take a Rough and Ready show like this over some visually spectacular, piece of soulless corporatized trash any day of the F*cking week.

The video is just over 10 minutes long.

That era when we got story and writing before visual effects gave us Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. So maybe it was a golden age of cinema.