http://cache.io9.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png http://io9.com/tag/the end of the world http://io9.com/tag/the end of the world

With Wall-E director Andrew Stanton working on a film based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1917 novel A Princess of Mars, you need a crash course in books from this seminal era in science fiction. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5098861&view=rss&microfeed=true

A French flick from 1931 called La Fin du Monde was a special effects blockbuster for its time, featuring a giant comet about to smash into the Earth, and amazing chases up and down the Eiffel Tower. So of course, an American film distributor got hold of it and decided to do the old "Raymond Burr Godzilla" hatchet job on the poor movie, editing out most of the characters and adding in a bunch of random English subtitles to "explain" the action. Plus, the Americans added a long, strange speech at the beginning from a real astronomer explaining that comets could hit the Earth, and in fact many already had. Thus the Americanized, 1934 version of "The End of the World" was born - the one you see here. This is the most action-packed part, and it's amazing how closely it resembles today's "danger from space" action sequences in movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=372070&view=rss&microfeed=true