'70s Sci-Fi Movies Were Kind of Preachy

The 1970s were one of the most overtly political decades for science fiction filmmaking. Humor writer Tom Gerencer grew up watching movies such as Logan's Run, Silent Running, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, all of which contain clear political messages. "We were watching industrialization do what it's continued to do now, getting worse and worse and worse, and we had a lot of voices back then saying, 'No, we have to stop this,' and rightly so," Gerencer says in Episode 543 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Geek's Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was impressed by the continued relevance of many '70s science fiction movies, whether it's the idea of a deadly new virus in The Andromeda Strain or the threat of artificial intelligence in Colossus: The Forbin Project. "If you look at some of the issues they're dealing with--pandemics, AI, ecological collapse, youth culture, nuclear war--you would have to say that they did a pretty good job of honing in on some of the issues that were going to be important over the coming decades," he says.