Includes bibliographical references (pages 139-143) and index
Chapter 1: Introduction: Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination -- Chapter 2: Flights of Fantasy -- Chapter 3: Of Robots and Artificial Beings -- Chapter 4: Alien Visions -- Chapter 5: Inventions, Modern Marvels, and Mad Scientists -- Postscript: New SF Images for a Postwar World
"Long before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded our movie screens in the 1950s, there was already a significant but overlooked body of cinematic science fiction. Through analyses of early twentieth-century animations, comic strips, and advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name. In this book, author J.P. Telotte argues that these films helped sediment the genre's attitudes and motifs into a popular culture that found many of those ideas unsettling, even threatening. By binding those ideas into funny and entertaining narratives, these cartoons also made them both familiar and non-threatening, clearing a space for visions of the future, of other worlds, and of change that could be readily embraced in the post-war period."-- Provided by publisher
