PSAC: What Is It?

Postwar Steampunk Adventure Cinema: What is it?

After the Second World War, adventure cinema again returned to steampunk writers, as well as continuing to produce swashbucklers and pot-boilers in period romances. Writers like Verne, Wells, RL Stevenson, AC Doyle, Burroughs and others produced a great body of worthy subjects in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, which made great family movies, with plenty of adventure, comedy, romance and just a bit of steampunk alternative technology in each.

This era can be seen to "start" with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1954.

Elsewhere on the blog find a list in chronological order by when the film was made, and another by the apparent year in the film, based on internal evidence within the film itself.

It was a formative era of my childhood, watching these on TV.

One could include for reference Wild Wild West, which ran on TV from 1965 to 1969, and which depicts an era about 100 years before that: sometime around 1870. Kung Fu, which ran on TV from 1972 to 1975, depicts just about the same era, the "high water" mark of the Wild West era, generally depicted in similar Western-themed TV shows of the 1960s, a fascination with the 1870s.

The 1870s, one finds when one examines the history of the era, were a particularly bloody and brutal time, especially if you weren't living in one of the Major Empires of the time, like the US, UK, Russia or China. And even if you lived in one of these, you may find that life wasn't all that fabulous.

All the same, you could have lots of adventures. There were plenty of unexplored places. The poles, the depths of the sea, the skies themselves remained unexplored. The nearby planets were though to be inhabited. Strange people with interesting customs lived in all kinds of exotic locales, sure to provide hair-raising action and thrilling adventure. Crazed geniuses financed awesome advances in amazing technology, just to impress the unbelieving that war was a despicable abomination that should be eradicated.

And strange technology, steampunk, aquapunk, aeropunk, clockpunk, biopunk, was everywhere. Mad engineers were everywhere, commanding submarines, captaining airships, building monsters, discovering savages within themselves, attempting to smash the barriers of space and yes, time itself, by any means necessary, for Queen or country or God or Humanity or Nature or who-knows-what.

Into this milieu, we drop our protagonist, Victor von Frankenstein, bringing with him the entire oeuvre of Hammer horror films. But we complicate this fusion by adding elements of at least two other specific postwar genres, namely Kaiju and Wuxia films of the 1950s to 1970s era. For kaiju films the names to know are Toho and Tsuburaya, although there were a host of others. For kaiju films the place to start is with Shaw Brothers, and the films of Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-leung.

And so. China. 1870. Steampunk. Adventure. With a 1970s twist. Time travel. Space travel. Inhabited planets. Heavier-than-Airships. Hardened Paper Multi-Rotor Yacht-Class Autogyros. Submarine cities. Mysterious islands. Giant creatures. Legends of Sinbad. Kaiju. Wuxia. Swords. Blasters. Princesses. Aliens. Ant-Men. Giant men. More aliens. Amazon Aviators. Big Monsters.