It’s hard to imagine a time before science fiction became the ubitiquous genre it is now. Even a decade like the now-distant 1990s has more in common with TV and movie sci-fi today than say, the 1970s. While most pop culture enthusiasts are aware that Star Trek brought sci-fi into the mainstream in the 1960s — and that those reruns codified a fandom phenomenon in the 1970s, what tends to be overlooked is the ways in which the genre evolved in the years between Trek and the debut of the first Star Wars film in 1977. While science fiction had been primarily a literary fandom phenomenon prior to the 1960s, both Star Trek and Doctor Who helped usher in the first wave of what we think of as modern filmed sci-fi today.
