Amidst this atomic explosion of cosmic operas and prehistoric mutants, filmmakers of the Space Age turned their attention back to the Steam Age. In 1953, George Pal recruited the Martian hordes of H.G. Wells into the War of the Worlds. However, this, like the 1960 adaptation of Conan Doyle's The Lost World, was also set in the modern day, where UFOs replaced stilted tripods. The real gamble was taken by Walt Disney with the 1954 release of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
With 20,000 Leagues, Disney was out to prove the mettle of his studio. Despite numerous awards for his work in short and feature animation, Disney and his company was still regarded as a maker of mere cartoons... Kiddie matinées. And in a sense, the public wouldn't have it any different. Though an artistic masterpiece, Fantasia played only to chirping crickets and wouldn't receive its due praise until latter day critics were accustomed to the fact that Disney is a cultural force that is here to stay, and therefore, its time to start taking a serious look at its productions. By the time production started on 20,000 Leagues, construction was beginning on Disneyland U.S.A. in Anaheim, California. Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier was obligating millions of American parents to buy their kids coonskin caps. This television success, along with the studio's first completely live-action feature, Treasure Island, whetted their appetite for a full live-action division.
20,000 Leagues was, first and foremost, Disney's attempt to prove that he could do more than cartoons. To seal the success of this venture, he recognized that a grand subject would be required. After all, much bigger than the Atomic Age aliens and monsters making the rounds at drive-ins were the massive-scale historical epics like Spartacus and deMille's The Ten Commandments. It may be impossible to find out what exactly prompted Walt Disney to choose to adapt a favorite boyhood author of outdated Scientific Romances, beyond the entrepreneurial genius of America's storyteller laureate. He evidently recognized that Science Fiction could be a serious genre, dealing with serious subject matter, and was worth investing millions of dollars in to move beyond cheap prosthetics to winning the 1955 Academy Awards for special effects, art direction and color. Spartacus himself, Kirk Douglas, was cast as the lead against British character actor James Mason's enigmatic mariner. Disney was, perhaps inadvertently, proving Science Fiction's mettle as well as that of his studio.
Then came the critical choice not to follow in George Pal's footsteps by updating 20,000 Leagues to the modern times. Like the preceding Mysterious Island (from which 20,000 Leagues borrows many story elements), this Vernian book was made into period piece. Another of Walt Disney's widely recognized character traits was a boundless confidence that the entertainment consuming public shared his interests and sentiments, even if they didn't know it. His success was based almost entirely on that confidence: "I just make what I like - warm and human stories, ones about historic characters and events, and about animals." and, "There is nothing wrong with good schmaltz, nothing wrong with good heart... The critics think I'm kind of corny. Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay."
Disneyland itself would be infused with Disney's nostalgia for the turn of the 20th century: upon entering the park, the visitor must travel up a recreated Victorian American main street, or load on to one of the narrow-gauge steam trains. Perhaps, in addition to recognizing the capacity of Science Fiction to be serious entertainment, he also recognized that the Victorian Era was changing from the backwards past of our fathers to the gilded fairyland of our ancestors. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea banked on this, and art director Harper Goff created a riveted Nautilus on which could unfold the drama of humanity's uncertainty over unstoppable scientific power.
The wager paid off handsomely, and Retro-Victorian Scientific Fantasies were ushered into the Atomic Age en masse. Disney, of course, milked 20,000 Leagues for everything that it was worth, advertising it over and over again on the Disneyland TV series, using its conclusion to introduce the Our Friend, The Atom documentary (including contrasting scale models of Goff’s Nautilus against the US Navy’s first atomic submarine), and creating a 20,000 Leagues exhibit of film props at his Disneyland Park. James Mason charted course on another Vernian epic in 1959’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Ray Harryhausen animated The Mysterious Island in 1961 and The First Men in the Moon in 1964, topping those off with the mighty bronze Talos in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and the cowboys and dinosaurs film The Valley of Gwangi (1969). Vincent Price strayed from horror as an aeronautic version of Nemo in 1961’s Master of the World and returned for a combined Gothic Steampunk venture in 1965’s very loosely Poe-inspired War-Gods of the Deep. George Pal visited the distant future in the original version of The Time Machine, this time keeping the initial setting of this Wells tale. Disney delved back into the genre with the again excellently received Swiss Family Robinson, and then the less well received In Search of the Castaways. This 1962 outing was joined by Five Weeks in a Balloon, but the course for extraordinary voyages was charted by 1958's Around the World in 80 Days.
The comedic tone of the globe trotting Around the World set the stage for a series of satirical films towards the end of Victorian fantasy's Atomic Age. Blake Edwards, of Pink Panther fame, started it out in 1965 with The Great Race, which was joined later that same year by Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes. 1967 saw a similar film in Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon and in 1969, Magnificent Men had a direct conceptual sequel in Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (also known as Monte Carlo or Bust). The humor and length of the Victorian comedies (both Great Race and Magnificent Men average three hours, with intermission) were among the inspirations for the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (the success of Disney's Victorian musical Mary Poppins was another).
Far away from the Hollywood and London film making scenes... on the other side of the Iron Curtain... was Czech auteur Karel Zeman. His distance from the engines of Walt Disney and George Pal gave him a uniquely European perspective on the writings of Jules Verne, creating what have come down as perhaps the most inspired films based on his work. Most advantageous were the visuals: while Harper Goff kept a Victorian look for his Nautilus, Zeman kept a Victorian steel engraving look for the whole of The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958). Reviewers for the Science Fiction magazine Locus described it thusly:
Zeman lets out all the stops. This is a live-action black and white movie — but it uses every camera trick and every form of animation known in 1958... Methods include stop-motion, paper cutout, drawing and painting animation, drawn foregrounds and backdrops, dissolves, miniatures and models, double exposure (probably in-camera and superimposition), still images, traveling and stationary mattes — they're all here. There were at least eight people watching; someone yelled out at one point "There are at least seven different things going on in this scene!" (I counted eight.) And all this before the invention of blue screens!... There are lines drawn on sets, and even on people, to keep the original steel-engraving feel. The scenes of ships of the water have been treated with some sort of light, striped screen (probably cloth, probably double-exposed) that makes the moving waves of real water take on the appearance of the engraved lines in a 19th century drawing of the sea. There's a scene of a train coming down a track — the train is drawn; the wheels and the tracks are animated; the (real) engineer stands on an open platform in the engine's cab and (real) people lean out of the (drawn) passenger car. (It's so simple and powerful it takes your breath away.) Actors walk through back-projected sets; at the same time they're walking behind animated full-sized paper cutouts of spinning flywheels and meshing gears, all this in front of a painted set in the middle-background. For maybe five seconds of screen time. There's a scene of an animated shark attacking a real diver in a model set with painted water.
This masterful mix of animation techniques resulted in films that not only brought Verne to modern day audiences, but looked like an original illustration from his novels come to life. Zeman has often, and rightly, been referred to as the heir of Georges Melies. Like Melies, Zeman did not create Science Fiction... He recreated genuine Scientific Romances.
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne - the magnum opus of these films - was not based on any one of Verne's novels, but to an extent was as though it were based on all of them. The combination of adventure on land, in the sea and through the sky was exactly the sort of thing that could have happened in a cosmos populated by Verne's creations. Fabulous World was followed by two proper Vernian adaptations in The Stolen Airship (1967) and On the Comet (1970). Retro-Victorian Scientific Fantasy elements also appeared in other films of his, like Baron Munchhausen (1961).
Selected Bibliography:
Bennett, Rod. VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRES ON FILM: A Survey of Fireside Science Fiction, Part One – to 1965. http://www.cornerstonemag.com/imaginarium/fest/2004/firesidesf/index.htm.
Person, Lawrence and Waldrop, Howard. "Fabulous World of Jules Verne", Locus Online. http://locusmag.com/2004/Reviews/10_WaldropPerson_Verne.html.
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