The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television (review)

As a professor of children’s literature, I had a measure of doubt about my ability to respond to Neighbors and Rankin’s edited collection about film and television. The media are dissimilar. Teachers and parents largely extol the virtue of books while, if not condemning, at least casting as “mindless entertainment” television and films produced for children. Literature is seen as the creation of a solitary mind, while film and television are productions of whole studios. Science fiction literature, because of its reliance on static text, does not have the same emphasis on technical innovation that can be found in (any, but especially science fiction) film and television. Above all, literary criticism and film criticism are two different (though related) fields, and while I am fairly confident about the former, I only have a smattering of knowledge (suitable for an undergraduate audience) about the latter.

I need not have worried.

While The Galaxy Is Rated G has a titular concern with film and television, its underlying focus is narrative. And although it is true that film and television do “tell stories,” most academic film theory concerns itself with the things that film (and television) can do that print narratives cannot. The essays in The Galaxy Is Rated G, however, focus almost exclusively on story in ways that make film and television mere substitute print narrative, with directors as substitute authors. Many essays center exclusively on traditional narrative elements such as plot, character, and dialogue. In Jacqueline Wiegard’s essay, “Inexplicable Utterances: Social Power and Pluralistic Discourse in Transformers,” the author even uses half a page of text from a print version of Transformers to demonstrate a bond between child and robot, rather than including a scene from the 2007 film. Only two chapters use film terminology in any kind of meaningful way. Carol Bernard’s chapter, “Performing Gender, Performing Romance: Pixar’s WALLE,” is essentially concerned with film as performance, and in particular film’s relationship with film (WALL-E watches a clip from Hello Dolly, essentially using an artificial version of human interaction to become an artificial human), and perhaps because of this, some film terms (montage, medium close-up) are used. Curiously, the only other article to focus on the technical innovations separating film and television from print media is Lynn Whitaker’s “‘No One’s Lazy in LazyTown’: The Making of Active Citizens in Preschool Television,” which details how the use of CGI is employed to get preschoolers to turn off the television—thus making the technology redundant. The remaining chapters treat science fiction film and television as if they were print narratives; Laura Mulvey, Slavoj Žižek, and company need not apply.

However, if one accepts the premise that science fiction film and television are more or less the same as science fiction print narratives (and I’m not sure I do), the collection as a whole makes some interesting assertions about the (sub)genre. Many of the chapters discuss science fiction, not as a literature of the future, but as literature that valorizes or is centered on the past. Nearly all the chapters in part two of the book (“S is for Structures of Power”) deal with a retrograde nostalgia in science fiction film/television, including two separate chapters that discuss Doctor Who in the context of World War II, a chapter about utopian desire in the Star Wars films, and Sandy Rankin’s terminally theoretical discussion of The Iron Giant. Patrick D. Enright’s chapter in part three about Flash Gordon is itself nostalgic rather than theoretical, as is Brian Cowlishaw’s chapter on The Jetsons, pointing out a typical problem for edited collections, the uneven quality and varying audiences for essays by different authors.

The editors allow individual essay authors to quote directors as proof of a film’s intention, something that Roland Barthes would surely decry. Theory, when it appears at...