Journey Through Sci-Fi: Science Fiction Film History

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and its 2008 remake. The alien who comes in peace and brings a threat with him.
Journey Through Sci-Fi continues We Come in Peace, our series tracing the history of friendly aliens on screen. This time, the foundational one. A saucer lands on a Washington baseball field, a man walks out with a gift and a message, and he is shot for it inside a minute.
Klaatu is polite, patient and 78 years old in a 35 year old body. Behind him stands Gort, seven foot seven of rubber suit and near limitless force. We get into what 1951 audiences carried into the cinema with them, why a film about world peace was built from a short story that had nothing to do with world peace, and how much of the friendly alien playbook starts right here.
Then 2008. Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, a swarm of nanobots and a McDonald's. The nuclear threat becomes an environmental one, Klaatu arrives having already decided we are not worth saving, and the remake we both expected to be terrible turns out to be an admirable attempt at updating the classic sci-fi movie.
In this episode:
Flying saucer mania
Farewell to the Master: Harry Bates' 1940 story, and the twist Fox threw away
Michael Rennie's charm offensive, and the two separate times he gets gunned down
Gort's little pants, circus strongmen and the Superman connection
Who would you take an alien to today? Brian Cox or Martin Lewis
Milk, milkshakes, and the day the American dairy industry stood still
GORT as an acronym
Old Testament orbs, arks and biblical locusts
Is humanity worth saving? Asked and answered in a McDonald's car park
Also discussed: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A Message from Mars, Destination Moon, The Man from Planet X, The Twilight Zone, War of the Worlds (2005), The Happening, WALL-E, Armageddon, The Matrix, John Wick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Alien: Romulus, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Disclosure Day.
Gort or GORT? Tell us which robot you would rather meet in a field.
Next time: It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Warning from Space (1956).
Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock.
Edited by James Payne.
Bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/journeythroughscifi
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Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com
Follow the show so you never miss an episode, and if you can, a review or a share costs nothing and helps a lot.
Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH Network.

Where does the friendly alien begin? Not with E.T., but with a Martian exiled to Edwardian London to reform the most selfish man alive.
Journey Through Sci-Fi returns with a brand new series. We Come in Peace traces the history of friendly aliens on screen. In this opener we set out the stall: what makes a visitor friendly rather than hostile, why everything gets measured against E.T., and how one mistranslated Italian word put Martians in our heads.
Then we go back to 1913 and A Message from Mars, widely held to be the first British science fiction film. Ramiel, a Martian stripped of his rank and banished to Earth, has to reform a selfish London bachelor called Horace Parker. It is A Christmas Carol with a spaceman, and almost every benevolent visitor since owes it something.
In this episode:
Friendly visitor or invader? Where the line actually sits
Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), possibly the first friendly alien story ever written
Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, and how 1947 gave us the flying saucer
Schiaparelli's canali: the mistranslation that built fictional Mars
Ramiel's tough love, the zap power, and some baffling 1913 camera trickery
Lizard people or Arthurian courtiers?
Britain in 1913: picture palaces and a film industry inventing itself
Also discussed: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Cocoon, Batteries Not Included, Earth Girls Are Easy, It Came from Outer Space, Aelita: Queen of Mars, A Princess of Mars, Project Hail Mary and Armageddon.
Watch along with us. A Message from Mars is free on BFI Replay: https://replay.bfi.org.uk/video/7f470ecc-3ccd-5cde-aca0-ac97153f8ecd
Lizards or courtiers? Tell us what you saw.
Next time: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) meets its 2008 remake.
Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock. Edited by James Payne.
Bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/journeythroughscifi
Join the JTSF Logbook our free newsletter: https://journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com
Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com
Follow the show so you never miss an episode, and if you can a review or a share costs nothing and helps a lot.
Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the Evolution of Horror Network.

Some of them came to warn us. Some of them just wanted to go home.
We Come in Peace is a new series from Journey Through Sci-Fi, tracing the friendly alien across a century of film and television. We start in the earliest days of visitors from other worlds and work our way to the present, asking how and why that image kept changing.
Along the way: The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came from Outer Space, Warning from Space, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Starman, Cocoon, Alien Nation, Coneheads, Men in Black, The Iron Giant, Arrival and plenty more.
Episode one arrives (in peace) on 10 September, with new episodes every other week.
Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH network. Hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock.
Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the first episode.

New to Journey Through Sci-Fi? Start here.
Before we launch our next full series on friendly aliens, we're taking a journey back through the archive with a special starter pack episode, featuring some of our favourite clips from past series.
Across this episode, we revisit some of the biggest ideas in sci-fi cinema: the mythic storytelling of the original Star Wars trilogy, the artificial intelligence and uneasy humanity of Blade Runner, the time-loop perfection of Groundhog Day, the simulated reality of The Matrix, the collapsing world of Mad Max, and the haunted-house-in-space horror of Event Horizon.
Featuring discussions of:
Star Wars Original Trilogy
Blade Runner
Metropolis
Groundhog Day
The Matrix Trilogy
Mad Max
Event Horizon
Whether you're a longtime listener revisiting old favourites or a new listener looking for the best place to begin, this episode is a guided tour through the many worlds, subgenres and strange obsessions of Journey Through Sci-Fi.
Our new series, We Come in Peace, exploring the history of friendly aliens on screen, begins soon. Follow Journey Through Sci-Fi now so you don't miss it.

A little bonus transmission from the JTSF Patreon feed.
We've been chatting about Spielberg's Disclosure Day, and because our next main-feed series is all about the history of friendly aliens in sci-fi cinema, this felt like the perfect thing to share.
In this spoiler-light extract, we talk Spielberg returning to alien territory, why big first-contact movies feel rarer now, and how Disclosure Day turns the friendly alien story into something closer to a conspiracy thriller for the misinformation age.
The full spoiler episode is available now on Patreon, where we get into the ending, the film's bigger ideas, and whether good old Stevie has still got it when it comes to visitors from the stars.
Hear the full episode on Patreon
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