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  • The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television
  • Mike Cadden (bio)
R. C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin, eds. The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

The Galaxy Is Rated G offers sixteen new essays on children’s science fiction in the visual media of film and television. The contributors come from a number of disciplines (literary studies, media studies, physics, astronomy, film, communications, popular culture studies, and more), which results in a book that examines the intersection of genre and media from different places.

This volume is divided into three subjects: the representation of deviance, structures of power, and the idea of future shock. The first section, “D Is for Deviance,” offers many approaches familiar to readers of The Lion and the Unicorn: investigations of the depiction of disability, gender, and race. The strongest thread through the five essays is that of body image and identity. Elizabeth Scherman’s investigation of how films portray “normal” body types is insightful and directly applicable to the study of children’s literature. Holly Hassel’s essay challenges the reader to consider the relationship of gender, body, and power in the film Monsters vs. Aliens and points to the complications of interpretation that attend the recognition that the film is partly a parody of films from an earlier era. Carol Bernard’s discussion of literal and symbolic gender performance reveals how the asexual, homosexual, and heterosexual are distinctly present and performed in WALL-E. Debbie Olson’s discussion of the absence of African Americans in children’s (or any) science fiction film is especially timely given the recent and unfortunate outcry against Rue’s casting in The Hunger Games.

The book’s second section, “S Is for Structures of Power,” focuses on power in large scale and usually in the political sense. Daniel O’Brien and J. P. C. Brown examine, in their respective essays, Dr. Who in terms of British nationalism and history. The former sees Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. as a representation of the “Blitz Spirit” of WWII Britain; the latter examines the good doctor’s shifting representation of Britishness. In an engaging essay on how Transformers and children share social power, Jacqueline Wiegard points out (as many of the essayists do) the metaphoric value of speculative fiction to a young audience. The editors group essays that examine the role of nostalgia and other forms of romanticism—rather adult concerns—in texts produced and aimed for children. [End Page 221]

The third and final section, “F Is for Future Shock,” focuses on representations of the future in children’s film and television. Brian Cowlishaw on The Jetsons, Patrick Enright on Flash Gordon, and Jonathan Cohn on Lost in Space effectively examine the cultural climates of the times in which these series or films were produced. Kristine Larsen makes a good case for time travel motifs as means of instilling wonder in children, whether child characters in the texts or actual viewers.

The Galaxy Is Rated G provides scholars of children’s literature a glimpse at children’s texts outside their usual purview. Because the collection’s essays largely concern the history and ideology of children’s science fiction film and television (with a special emphasis on sources, influences, and periodization), readers will be able to appreciate the development of children’s texts in new contexts and broaden their knowledge and awareness of children’s texts in the larger culture. In their introduction, Neighbors and Rankin argue that their subject is under-examined, and offer this as the volume’s primary justification: “It is unsettling that we find so little scholarly attention to the joining of children’s visual media and sf” (1).

Yet if this collection’s essays go a long way toward remedying the lack of attention to children’s science fiction film and television, the editors might have taken better advantage of this fact. The introduction gets bogged down in the trap of taxonomy: Science fiction as a category is given only moderate attention before it is given up, and sf is pitted against fantasy, an adversary (so characterized...

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